Anyway, sometime ago the HAL was introduced in Xorg. This allow you to hotplug mouse / keyboard … But if for a reason, your HAL is buggy .. you can’t use a keyboard or a mice in Xorg. That’s a bullshit ! I discover a bug in RAID + HAL, and HAL is now segfaulting on my computer .. so I need to get ride of this Xorg / HAL …

First you must modify /etc/X11/Xorg.conf with something like this :

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
    Option "AllowEmptyInput" "False"
EndSection

This disable the hal support, but if you want to have the keyboard and mice, you must install the following packages :

• xserver-xorg-input-kbd
• xserver-xorg-input-mouse

That’s it… no HAL support Xorg anymore, that works fine …

I’m using Gkrellm for a long time now (perhaps 5 or more years). The main issue with Gkrellm is that theme aren’t really fresh anymore. So I tweaked some to feet with my needs.

As you can see on the screen-shot this theme is a transparent one, with a blue and violet krells

You can download it here : gkrellm-themes-invisible-jkx

/ Enjoy the dark side of the desktop :)

Here a little tips to switch easily:

First uninstall the previous version

sudo apt-get remove --purge kdebase-bin-kde3
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

Install KDE4

sudo apt-get install kde4

As you can see, this is not really hard. The trick is to remove the old version cleanly.

Enjoy ?

Fine, except that I’m unable to get hardware openGL working and Google Earth is
really slow, so I decided to fix that. (done on two computers..)

agpgart: Detected 892K stolen memory.
agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @ 0xf0000000
[drm] Initialized drm 1.0.1 20051102
...
[drm] Initialized i915 1.4.0 20060119 on minor 0
[drm] Initialized i915 1.4.0 20060119 on minor 1

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg

(II) I810(0): [drm] created "i915" driver at busid "pci:0000:00:02.0"
(II) I810(0): [drm] added 8192 byte SAREA at 0xe0b2f000

display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2

It looks like pyxfce meet my needs, so I decided to give it a try. The first thing to do is to build the latest svn of xfce. Next step play with the python wrapper.

Update: You don’t need the latest version (svn) of xfce. pyxfce works w/ xfce 4.2.1. The debian package is broken, as rely on a old libxfcegui (4.1)

Update 2: Debian package is fixed right now :)

Here is a little example of what you can do without too much pain. This script wait for every new window, and stack it on the same workspace as previous other windows of the same app. For example, the emacs windows is launched of the workspace ’4′, all other emacs windows will be displayed on this workspace.

import sys
import xfce4
import gtk

black_list = ['xfrun4','Terminal']

def newWinHandler(screen,win):
    name =  win.get_resource_name()
    if name not in black_list:
       for w in screen.get_windows():
           if w != win and w.get_resource_name() == name:
              dest = w.get_workspace()
              win.move_to_workspace( dest )
              break

screen = xfce4.netk.screen_get_default()
screen.connect("window-opened",newWinHandler)
gtk.main()

The major issue of pyxfce is the lack of documentation, you can do a lot of stuffs with it like creating custom xfce applications, but i didn’t find anything about this.

• PyQT (using QTDesigner)
• wxPython (w/ wxGlade)
• Glade 2 + libglade

Here is my personnal feeling:

• PyQT, is really great. But I really don’t like the licence. And since I work in a school, using this kind of licence with students is bad idea
• wxPython + wxGlade is a great tool too. But but as usuall w/ wxPython the generated code isn’t cross-platform friendly. (And on Linux, the look is really bad ..)
• Glade is a simple, and effective, but using libglade (loading the .glade at startup) isn’t really my favorite approach.

In my past life, we used to build IHM w/ glade-1 and produce the python code from a little script. This is easy and efficient. (and a newbie can learn python-gtk easily). I have been looking for the same stuff in gtk2 for a while. And last day, I found the article Writing PyGTK applications in a visual way . This is exactly what I’m looking for! So big thanks Tigrux !

This litte script use Xlib python module to grab keys. If the key is special key on my laptop, i use it to change the sound level. This is a short example, not a definitive app.

from Xlib.display import Display
from Xlib import X
import oss

# custom keys from my dell D400 Laptop
vol_plus  = 176
vol_moins = 174

keys = [vol_plus,vol_moins]

def changeVolume(aValue):
	mixer = oss.open_mixer()
	symbol = oss.SOUND_DEVICE_LABELS.index('Vol  ')
	left,right  = mixer.read_channel(symbol)

	avg = (left + right) / 2
	if (avg + aValue) >= 0:
		mixer.write_channel(symbol,(left + aValue,right + aValue))
	mixer.close()

def handle_event(aEvent):
	keycode = aEvent.detail
	if aEvent.type == X.KeyPress:
		if keycode == vol_moins:
			changeVolume(-2)
		elif keycode == vol_plus:
			changeVolume(+2)

def main():
	# current display
	disp = Display()
	root = disp.screen().root

	# we tell the X server we want to catch keyPress event
	root.change_attributes(event_mask = X.KeyPressMask)

	for keycode in keys:
		root.grab_key(keycode, X.AnyModifier, 1,X.GrabModeAsync, X.GrabModeAsync)

	while 1:
		event = root.display.next_event()
		handle_event(event)

if __name__ == '__main__':
	main()

As you can see, this is really trivial, and simple to hack XFree w/ python :)
I need to send special thanks to the python-Xlib author, because he does a great job, and he help me a lot the first time I hacked this.

So now, Ion is really fine, and IBM provide a nice doc :)

For example, there is no way to place gkrellm on every workspace, or tell Kmail for stick on workspace 2. Yesterday, while surfing, i discover devilspie.

Example:

<!-- For gkrellm: place on every desktop, and hide in the tasklist -->
<flurb name="gkrellm on all Desktops">
  <matchers>
    <matcher name="DevilsPieMatcherWindowName">
      <property name="application_name" value="gkrellm"/>
    </matcher>
  </matchers>
  <actions>
    <action name="DevilsPieActionSetWorkspace">
      <property name="pinned" value="TRUE"/>
    </action>
    <action name="DevilsPieActionHide">
      <property name="skip_tasklist" value="TRUE"/>
    </action>
  </actions>
</flurb>

<!-- stick Kmail on desktop 4 -->
<flurb>
  <matchers>
    <matcher name="DevilsPieMatcherWindowName">
      <property name="application_name" value="KMail"/>
    </matcher>
  </matchers>
  <actions>
    <action name="DevilsPieActionSetWorkspace">
      <property name="workspace_index" value="4"/>
    </action>
  </actions>
</flurb>

Take a look at this article for additionnal infos. I’m pretty sure that a lot of fun applet will rise soon. I get some idea right now.

I really think that Python is the weapon key for desktop, so open you eyes .. let’s start :)