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GNOME GUI Announcements

gDesklets - Gnome2's Karamba 287

Posted by Hemos from the fuel-for-the-fire dept.
Deusy writes "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba. I've heard a lot of noise with regards to Karamba (and Super Karamba) and a lot of moans from Gnome users about the lack of a Gnome equivalent. Hopefully this should fill that void and more, as one of the developers comments that gDesklets is the product of "months of planning" and describes Karamba as an "ugly hack"."
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gDesklets - Gnome2's Karamba More

gDesklets - Gnome2's Karamba

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  • Before it gets /.ed (Score:4, Informative)

    by Suhas ( 232056 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:30AM (#6664220)

    gDesklets provides an advanced architecture for desktop applets - tiny displays sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness.
    Populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather sensors, news tickers... whatever you can imagine! Virtually anything is possible and maybe even available some day.

    The system consists of three parts: the gDesklets core (a daemon running in the background), the Sensors (providing data and processing user actions), and the Displays (what you will see on the screen).
    New Displays can be put together by simply composing widgets and Sensors in a XML file. Advanced users may also create new Sensors easily.

    As of now, Sensors are restricted to Python modules, but we are planning to extend this to scripting languages like Perl and Ruby, and to C as well.

    You can get gDesklets from: www.pycage.de/software_gdesklets.html

    Have fun!

    Martin Grimme
    Christian Meyer
    Jesse Andrews

    • Re:Before it gets /.ed (Score:2, Informative)

      by mirko ( 198274 )
      Did you notice this screenshot [pycage.de] ?
      As a picture is usually worth thousands of posts, there are some running "desklets" on it...

      (BTW, it's funny there's something on the bottom right of this screen shot which looks like an Airport base station.)

    • Re:Before it gets /.ed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Azghoul ( 25786 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:17AM (#6664428) Homepage
      I'm honestly curious what the attraction is. I guess eye candy is always nice, but when I'm sitting at my machine, I'm /using/ it. And I have windows open doing things... I don't even see my background wallpaper all that often.

      Do people really sit around looking at their eye candy?

      I guess I can imagine it, but only among the 21 and under crowd (nothing personal guys, I used to be one ;)).
      • Now you know why you need a "Show Desktop" shortcut and/or button in the panel. :-)
        • LOL

          True, I didn't think of that, I guess you can hide all your windows to show off when your boys come over.

          But I don't like panels either. I have to confess, I do use windowmaker and use dockapps... but 64x64 on a 1600x1200 doesn't take up much space. Ok ok ok, I could get the same using these desk things but someone's already done all the work with the dockapps...

      • Re:Before it gets /.ed (Score:5, Funny)

        by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @09:14AM (#6664766) Homepage Journal
        Without a doubt. When the new young chicks walk buy at work, you like to have the nice rig with the smooth desktop displaying your full coolness.

        Something like this could get one of them to actually stop.

        "You like my desklets baby!?" "I can hook you up."

        Yea, I'm feeling it already.

      • Re:Before it gets /.ed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Zebbers ( 134389 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @09:53AM (#6665012)
        I have a newstick always up top below my taskbar that rips news from all my fav sites, bbc, cnn, etc. That way I dont have to go crawling through to read the headlines. A site like slashdot that I hit constantly during the day, I dont bother pulling headlines from.

        I have an xmms applet so that I can keep control of my music right on the bar. I have a run applet so i can click right in it and type a command and run it. I also have a dictionary applet for when Im writing..clickity click and off it goes.

        Applets are useful.
        • Oh, I'm not saying they're not useful (I have... 10 of them in a windowmaker dock right now). I'm looking at the eye candy on the desklet guy's website that shows the candy taking up a good 50% of the screen real estate...

          I just don't see the desktop enough to make use of it.

          Diff'rent strokes, and all that....

        • As one who recently went from GNOME 2 to plain-ol' Sawfish, I have to say that applets are overrated. For newstickers, I just keep Opera running on a spare workspace. For xmms control, keyboard bindings are the way for me...

      • Do people really sit around looking at their eye candy?

        Yes. it's called "screen saver". That's why I think it's the last missed part of deklets: to be deployed to the screensaver. It wuld be usefull especially for people like you (and in fact me too) who typically hates using CPU for any eye candy.

        Speaking about CPU, in case of sitting on a desktop those desklets may still get your memory, CPU and even network bandwidth. In case of starting from a screensaver, they will do their job and use your PC reso

      • If it really is a SuperKaramba clone, the attraction is watching your Dual 2GHz machine slow to a crawl while updating a god damn clock.
      • Do people really sit around looking at their eye candy?

        I'll brave an honest answer to this. Do you ever find your computing environment boring ? I would go crazy if my workspace looked exactly the same day after day, month after month. I occassionally change the background or the colour scheme, etc, but sometimes you just need to see something new. The purpose of eye-candy is that when you get bored you can go into the settings and piddle around, find something you like, and go back to work. It's sim
    • Thanks, I was wondering why so much fuss was being talked about a "MySQL error: too many connections" page...

      I have something similar to this for Mac OS X, called Konfabulator [konfabulator.com]. It's very neat, but suffers a bit from a problem already mentioned several times here: pretty widgets are usually big widgets, because it takes more icons to be pretty and functional than it does to just be functional. And big widgets are much more likely to be covered by open windows.

      Mind you, I could hook my spare 17" monitor up

  • If you have a Mac check out... (Score:4, Informative)

    by cheeseflan ( 462270 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:36AM (#6664247) Homepage
    Try konfabulator [konfabulator.com] which does the same for Apples. I've bought it and love the way I have so much eye candy on the screen that I end up only using about two thirds for productive work!

    • Re:If you have a Mac check out... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Squareball ( 523165 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:48AM (#6664305)
      And if you are on windows checkout the new version of DesktopX by Stardock [stardock.com] It provides an easy means to do the same kind of stuff in Windows AND unlike version 1.0.. it doesn't hijack your desktop and hog all the resources.
    • One of the nice benefits of using OSS is not having to pay for every little small utility or eyecandy software you want to use permanently. Maybe a friendly mac hacker will write up a konfab compatible oss widget project.

      I'm glad the good old days are gone, where in order to get a decent level of functionality with an OS such as windows 3.1, I had to get winzip, winrar vueprint, etc.

    • I was about to name-check konfabulator, which is a pretty nifty little app.

      The problem I have with it (and by extension, with every app like it), is that I like actually having a desktop - a sort of "zero area" of the screen where things aren't competing for my attention. That's why, after a week or two of messing around with various konfabulator widgets, I realized that the mostly the appplication was just irritating me. I uninstalled it, thankfully prior to having shelled out the shareware fee.

  • Um, honesty in reporting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:40AM (#6664260) Homepage
    A developer calls it "an ugly hack". Well, not quite. It was pretty clearly marked as tongue-in-cheek, and not to be taken seriously.

    Looks to me like the submitter deliberately wants to fan any remaining flames between the projects; who knows why.

    Instead, we have some pretty good illustrations as to why having two projects is a really good idea. KDE gets Karamba (and SuperKaramba) which takes off like wildfire. Undaunted, some Gnome people sit down and look at what Karamba does and learns from it (what the devels envisioned versus how it is actually being used; awkwardness and mistakes in teh design) and develop something similar, but with the benefir of hindsight from the other project. No doubt will the Karamba people look at gDesklets and in turn learn from it's strengths and weaknesses. THe end result is a set of tools that become far better, faster, than either would have become on its own.

    • I only quoted the guy, there was no intention to start a flame war.

      It wasn't obvious that it was tongue-in-cheek. A smiley... that could mean a hundred different things.

      Perhaps the developer who made the comment should have been a little more careful about making comments that could be construed as flames on the tone-deaf medium such as the internet.

      Hell, it's not like I could hear the sarcasm in his voice.
      • the tone-deaf medium such as the internet.

        Ok, I haven't slept for 24 hours. That's partly the reason I missed the 'tongue-in-cheek'iness of the developer comment and the reason my language skills are diving into the realms of Engrish.

  • Nice, but lets talk details.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Visceral Monkey ( 583103 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:40AM (#6664262)
    Good to know Gnome is going to have something along the same line as KDE. Having said that however, I'm wondering if the Gnome community can match the number of Karamba plug-ins out there, some of which really do look good (www.kde-look.org) Also, before slamming Karamba for being "an ugly hack", I'd love for them to explain A.) Why they think this is so and B.) Why their version is going to be so much better. I mean, a good explanation might go a long way in converting people over who use KDE just for Karamba (and they are out there).

    • Re:Nice, but lets talk details.. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why their version is going to be so much better

      Woah, woah, woah, they work for the GNOME project. They don't need to explain why their version is going to be better. It's better becauyse it's GNOME. And GNOME is always better than KDE. Didn't you get the royal decree?

    • Re:Nice, but lets talk details.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:48AM (#6664307) Homepage
      As I stated in another comment, that "ugly hack" type comment was entered in jest, and the story submitter chose to interpret it differently.

      One reason Gnome people haven't been in any real hurry, I think, is that a lot use gkrellm, which sort of does the same thing. The Karamba people decided something better was needed and implemented their thing. Now some Gnome people find that Karamba is sweet, and does something similar in turn for Gnome (but with the great benefit of hindsight from how Karamba is used). No doubt some KDE people will learn from gDesklets and make something even better.

    • GNOME is not slamming Karamba (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:54AM (#6664657)
      "Also, before slamming Karamba for being "an ugly hack", I'd love for them to explain A.) Why they think this is so and B.) Why their version is going to be so much better."

      There is no "they". There is only "he". This is the comment of one individual, not the entire project.
      Slashdot is just trying to start another flamewar. This whole story could be considered a troll just because it mentions that single comment.
      • "Slashdot is just trying to start another flamewar. This whole story could be considered a troll just because it mentions that single comment."

        There is no "Slashdot". There are only individuals. This was the post of one submission to Slashdot, not the entire website. You are just trying to make Slashdot look bad. Quit trying to start flamewars about Slashdot.

  • Something's missing... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sherloqq ( 577391 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:43AM (#6664280)
    For something being touted as eye candy for the desktop, there's amazingly few screenshots available in the links provided.

  • Why to duplicate everything? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hkroger ( 666340 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:46AM (#6664292)
    I guess smarter developer would have ported karamba to gnome. I've had enough of this duplication of every goddamn app in world for both of the systems. What's the use of making everything twice? Waste of talented programming resources, IMHO.
    • I totally agree. They could merge so plugins could be shared for the two desktops.

      BTW, wouldn't karamba run on a Gnome desktop like other KDE apps?

    • Re:Why to duplicate everything? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:03AM (#6664360)
      Probably more effort than writing from scratch, given the differences in the two projects (Qt vs GTK, C vs C++).

      Why should there only be one of every app? Is there only one type of car. Writing portably where possible is great, yes, but not in every case.
    • The mechanism for providing the desktop background pixmap for transparency effects are not compatible between GNOME and KDE.

    • Re:Why to duplicate everything? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:15AM (#6664418) Journal
      yeah who'd have thought it

      if that annoys you don't look here :

      NeXTStep
      http://www120.pair.com/mccarthy/nextst ep/intro.htm ld/

      or here
      Afterstep
      http://www.afterstep.org/Applicat ions.php

      or here
      Enligtenment
      http://freshmeat.net/browse/87 7/?topic_id=877

    • Why should Karamba be any different? The whole point of the GNOME project is to deliver a C language version of KDE functionality about a year later.
    • Stop a second, let's think about this... the commies used to say capitalism was bad because competition is destructive and wasteful and leads to duplication of effort. They were going to "bury" us by all working together. Need I say more?

    • Re:Why to duplicate everything? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That wouldn't have been possible. Karamba is very much written for KDE using the KDE/qt libs.

      Work that is needed to port karamba to gnome:

      * write a qt/glib wrapper (kde/gnome)
      * use C instead of C++

      The amount of work is much higher than a complete new architecture. And you might have read that we're sit down about 2 months to create a very flexible architecture.
      Please check the class diagram: UML [sourceforge.net]

      I have had a look at karmaba's source code and before assuming that i don't know C++ ;-) there's

  • The Karamba team should do a Mac port (Score:5, Funny)

    by BabyDave ( 575083 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:47AM (#6664296)

    ... and call it iKaramba.

    [Tumbleweed rolls past]

    I'll see myself out ...

    • ... and call it iKaramba.
      [Tumbleweed rolls past]
      I'll see myself out ...

      I believe I had a hat!

      [ hat is thrown into the street ]

      He he. SUCKERS!

      [ runs off with hat ]

  • Cant compile (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    $ tar xjf gdesklets.tar.gz
    $ cd gdesklets-0.1
    $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnome2/
    Bach blah...
    $ make
    blah blah...
    $ make install
    blah blah
    Error : /doc/html/index.sgml
    No such file or directory

    Help! I cant rtfm because this IS the FM!
    • mkdir /usr/local/share/doc/gdesklets *
      mkdir /usr/local/share/doc/gdesklets/html
      ln -s /usr/local/share/doc/gdesklets /doc **
      make install

      rm /doc

      * or something appropriate to your locale. That's a FreeBSDism

      ** although you'll probably need to be root to write to /

  • Borrowing from BeOS again? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mabhatter654 ( 561290 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:05AM (#6664366)
    These look strangely like BeOS replicants. Small programs that can sit on a desktop. Only the BeOS versions could "front" as monitors for larger programs and pass information between eachother without extra programming.

  • Here are just some examples of the things that can be done:

    Display system information such as CPU Usage, MP3 playing, etc.

    Create cool custom toolbars that work any way imaginable

    Create little games or virtual pets that live on your desktop

    Display information from the internet, such as weather and headlines


    The possibilities really are endless!

    In other words, more proprietary gui and more useless stuff on the desktop. I am not trolling, but why would anybody want little games or virtual pets on

  • I've long waited for this (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TuringTest ( 533084 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:28AM (#6664489) Journal
    I've been waiting long for something to equal the power of the command line + Unix philosophy in a graphical environment. I think this technology has that power. I think we soon will see a set of graphic small tools which do one thing, and do it well.

    Why "classic" frameworks as Gnome and KDE failed to provide this tools? Well, they follow the "component model", which basically means that there are BIG modular reusable tools intended to have everything but the kitchen sink. Those components are great to assemble stand alone applications, because they provide a great chunk of related functionallity. But that's not the Unix way.

    The Unix way is to have small and versatile commands, to know what they do and to combine them in new ways to solve problems as they appear. I think most GNU hackers (and some intermediate users) benefit from that approach, and I think that a text command line is not a requirement for that.

    You only need a common API to communicate those small tools, something that Unix carry out with pipes. But now we have two new environments, Karamba and gDesklets, which could be the base for a graphic API. I believe it's time to move from the Command Line Interface to the Command Graphical User Interface.

    • I share your desire for a "UNIX Philosopy meets GUI" future. However, I lack your enthusiasm for these particular projects.

      There are already some small and versitile commands for X11. For example, I use:
      XLoadtime [speakeasy.org]
      XLassie [speakeasy.org]
      dclock [jhu.edu]

      All that you really need to integrate these small tools into your desktop is a panel widget that supports swallowing other X11 apps [tjw.org]. Sadly, support for that has been dropped from GNOME and KDE long ago in favor of their own proprietary "Applet" extensions.

  • Slashdot trying to keep the desktop flamewar alive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:46AM (#6664598)
    Really, was it really necessary to mention that "karamba is an ugly hack" comment? The project's homepage is very objective and doesn't slam KDE at all. That comment was the opinion of one single person!
    Why was it mentioned? Are you trying to slam KDE again? Or are you trying to make it look like as if the GNOME guys are slamming KDE, and start yet another flamewar on Slashdot?

    I'm sure I will get modded down for this, but hell, it's the truth! Slashdot should not encourage more pointless desktop flamewars or trying to make either GNOME or KDE look bad.
    • Really, was it really necessary to mention that Slashdot comment? Slashdot is full of articles and very objective and doesn't start all that many flame wars at all. That comment was the work of one single poster!

      Why did you have to mention it and blame all of Slashdot? Are you trying to slam Slashdot again? Or are you trying to make it look as if the Slashdot guys are trying to start a flamewar?

      I'm sure I will get blah blah blah. You shouldn't encourage more gratuitous slams of Slashdot. Quit tryin

  • gkrellm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cr@ckwhore ( 165454 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:50AM (#6664629) Homepage
    Obligatory mention of gkrellm ... www.gkrellm.net. IMHO, its smaller, more lightweight... can be extended with hundreds of plugins and doesn't clutter the desktop. I think it's been around a bit longer too, but I could be wrong.

    • My thought exactly. I've been reading all these comments and been wondering what they can do that you can't already do with GkRellm.

      I've been using it for years. I use it to change radio stations, monitor CPU, disks and network activity, get my local weather, use it as a mixer, watch the phase of the moon, and as a clock. Needless to say, there are tons of other plugins, I just use the ones that I like.

  • The Circle is Ended (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ur@eus ( 148802 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:52AM (#6664641) Homepage
    Ok, so gDesklets is a clone of Karamba that is a clone of Konfabulator that is a clone of the old hack Andy Hertzfeldt and Arlo worked on in Nautilus. Nice so see how things work in circles ;)

  • Techno-babble (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Apostata ( 390629 ) <apostataNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Monday August 11, 2003 @09:19AM (#6664792) Homepage Journal
    Quote: "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba."

    What's the point of summarizing a story, if - by the end of the summary - the reader still has no clue as to what it's even about.

    What the hell is Karamba, and why should people care enough to click-through?
    • They're software project names, not techo-babble. If you don't know what they are by their names you probably don't care enough to click through, but why waste time posting about it?

  • Konfabulator? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by mbbac ( 568880 )
    So this is kind of like Konfabulator [konfabulator.com]?

  • WOW (Score:2)

    by AvitarX ( 172628 )
    It gives me joy like when I figured out I could drag applications out of their windows in BeOS.

  • Call me dense. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enahs ( 1606 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @09:43AM (#6664937) Journal
    Though I appreciate good eyecandy, I sometimes have trouble figuring out why certain trends are popular. I had no trouble figuring out Enlightenment. That was easy. The popularity of Winam...*cough*XMMS skins was easy enough. Heck, GTK+ and KDE toolkit themes were easy enough to figure out.

    Pretty shiny things to clutter your desktop, though? That's just evil. There's no there there. It's just pretty graphics pretending to be useful!

    Am I totally missing the point, or am I spot-on?

    I tried to like Karamba when it came about; I was never able to find a good use for it, though. About the best use anyone ever came up with was as a half-assed OSX-style Dock. Weather applets? Stuck to my desktop? Until I stop using my computer for anything other than staring at my desktop, no thanks.

    • "Am I totally missing the point"

      Pretty much. I don't really see how you can question if there is a demand for stuff like this. There are sh*tloads of websites dedicated to wallpapers, icons, desktop widgets, screensavers, news feeds, etc. Obviously people care very much what's on their desktops background.

      Most people think of their pc as more than just a place to do work. People like to customize their desktop and have all sorts of cool stuff(to them) going on in the background.

      So while you thinks it's b
  • Not that it's not a good language, but isn't Guile the official scripting language?

    The extra dependencies ....argh!!

  • The "utility check". It's a close cousin of the reality check. Let's do one. I honestly have no idea what a gDesklet or a Karamba is. What does it do? Will it help me do word-processing, development, web-browsing, or email any faster or more securely?

    If not, it fails my personal utility check.

  • Ok, (Score:2, Interesting)

    by agentk ( 74906 )
    So basically they're all just knock-offs of Konfabulator [konfabulator.com]...

    Here is a Gnome desktop widget that is actually quite a bit more interesting: Dashboard [nat.org], software that gets fed "clues" from other applications, and searches some databases for related information.
  • Why?......... it tells you what it does.

    If you pointed me at Karamba's home page [sourceforge.net] I wouldn't have a clue what it was. "information using various sensors and display types" could mean pretty much anything. gDesklets mentions status meters and news tickers so you know WTF it is.

    Simple really.

  • Desktop? Where? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by avdi ( 66548 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @12:03PM (#6666252) Homepage
    I've never understood the popularity of "active desktop" style embedded desktop widgets. I for one see my computer desktop about as often as I see my physical desktop, which is maybe once a month when I get one of my rare cleaning urges or have to find some document I printed out awhile back. What the hell do these people do at work, that they actually spend a signifigant amount of time without their deskop completely obscured by other windows?
    • Have you heard of multiple desktops? Lots of X window managers implement this. You could dedicate a separate desktop to gdesklets with weather, hd space, etc etc. and switch to it when needed, then when you're done looking, switch back to your main desktop and continue on with your work.
      • That's irrellevant. I can keep Gkrellm, gtop, a weather app, etc. running on a seperate desktop if I want to have a "system stats" desktop. There's no advantage to having them embedded in the root window.
  • You can read it here with links to the images and their comments section.

    Mirror of Story [warcry.com]

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