I'm staying in a friend's place for few days. Nasko a friend of
mine has apple pc and showed me some nice features of the apple
MacBook's Mac OS X. One of the features I liked was the Apple
Widgets which are helpful in facilitating the work with your pc.
The same widgets are also included in Windows Vista (I always
disabled that when used Vista).
Anyways I wondered if there is a way to have the same shiny widgets
running on my Debian GNU/Linux.
I first found
Gdesklets
which basicly is a collection of Widgets for the Linux Gnome
desktop written in Python. To run the gdesklet after
installation
I had to issue the command:
$ gdesklets . Then in the tray a small tray puzzle
icon appears. I sort of wondered a bit until I figured out how to
add some gdesklet widgets.
To do that I had to select
"Manage Desklets" and through the gdesklets
shell
to click twice the widget I would like to add to the desktop and
then drag it to the exact desktop place I would like it to have it
positioned.
I have to emphasize gdesklets widgets are very, very buggy. Many of
the widgets I tried crashed the whole application.
After which I had to manually kill the gdesklets app
and delete all it's temporary files located in
~/.gdesklets directory. Many of the apps that
didn't crashed the gdesklets that required extra data from
lmsensors never worked even though I have working version of
lmsensors.
I suspect some of the widgets which failed to gather data from
lmsensors cause
My notebook is Lenovo Thinkpad R61 and uses some custom features
from the thinkpad_acpi kernel module
. Another possible reason for the crashes and misworkings of some
components of gdesklets could be because I'm currently running
Debian Unstable.
After being a bit disappointment from gdesklets experience.
I went looking further for some Linux widgets alternative.
Next widget related gnome prog I stucked on was
jackfield . This one
is said to have worked with Apple's Widgets I don't believe it does
any more since it's not actively developed anymore.
I tried the jackfield python program with no luck. The untarred
archive of it was really messy and what was even worse was it
lacked any documentation.
Hence I continued my quest for widgets just to came across a real
working Gnome widget application.
Just to find
Screenlets! .
I've red somewhere that Screenlets is based on jacfield.
The current release of Gnome Screenlets which by the way is
officially part of
gnome-look.org is 0.1.2. I was pleased
to find the application worked pretty decent.
Screenlets includes many, many widgets:
Here is a
link containg a list of all the screenlets widgets
. If you like to have a general idea of how screenlets looks like
please
check out the
screenlet in action screenshots