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gDesklets install info.

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 4:34 pm
by aehjr1
Hi all!

I wanted to get a desktop applet which showed network traffic speeds all the time, and found that gDesklets seems to fit the bill. I installed using the Package Manager and eagerly tried starting the program--which naturally failed without any indication of why. I looked at the man page ("man gdesklets") which showed me how to executed from the command line with various options which showed useful error messages. So I proceeded to go about "fixing" the "broken" application and have been successful thus far.

I wanted to share what I found in hopes it will be useful to others.

First I found a problem with /usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklet which declared executable "#!/usr/bin/python2.5"; of course, Gloria uses "python2.6". Using grep I found other scripts declaring "python2.5", so obviously the best thing to do is create a symbolic link:

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sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python2.5 /usr/bin/python2.6
Now I got messages stating "connecting to daemon" but that timed out, with additional spurious error, "Could not import tiling module!"

Running through additional "gdesklets" options, the "gdesklets check" showed this error:
ERROR:/build/buildd/pyorbit-2.24.0/src/pyorbit-utils.c:39:_pyorbit_escape_name: assertion failed: (keyword_mod != NULL)
Some googling gave me this page which was the final clue to get all working. I copied the original file for safekeeping and made the indicated edits from the URL:

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sudo cp /usr/lib/gdesklets/utils/ErrorFormatter.py /usr/lib/gdesklets/utils/ErrorFormatter.py.orig
sudo vi /usr/lib/gdesklets/utils/ErrorFormatter.py
I happen to like vi, but any text editor can be used to make the change. The Python code change is minor, but I still copied the original line to comment for posterity and of course added a comment as to what I did. The code snippet now looks like this:

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# 09/08/09:per article=http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/409465-fix-gdesklets.html
#def _new_imp(name, globs = {}, locls = {}, fromlist = []):
def _new_imp(name, globs = {}, locls = {}, fromlist = [], test = []):
Going back to the MintMenu, I was now able to start the gDesklets program without error and added the applet I desired, SideCandy Network.

HTH any who look to add gDesklets to Gloria.

Arnold

Re: gDesklets install info.

Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 6:04 pm
by markcynt
Thanks for the tip. :)

Hopefully this will help someone.

Re: gDesklets install info.

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 6:30 am
by dkjMusic
aehjr1, your instructions worked like a charm to get gDesklets up and running on Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

Thanks very much. It's refreshing to actually find a solution that works with a Linux problem. :D

Re: gDesklets install info.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 5:00 am
by DerekMessina
Nice! Thanks for the tip. kudos!