stick's corner

From time to time I use Mac OS X and I really like the application management with its dock. I came across several different implementations for KDE 4, but they were usually too immature and not very pretty. I was very surprised when I finally found a decent implementation called Daisy. I immediately dropped the default KDE taskbar and started to use Daisy in conjunction with desktop effects “Box Switch” and “Present Windows” a.k.a Exposé. You can look at my setup here (only bottom 64 pixels are shown, the rest is usually occupied with maximized application):

Daisy detects running instances of applications by Window Class, so it doesn’t try to start another instance, it rather activates the already running one. The experience is very similar to the Mac OS X one, but still, there are three problems:

• I still have to use the panel for Battery Monitor and Device Notifier widgets
  • Daisy could act as a host for other widgets and show them as icons
• Applications started manually (e.g. with KRunner) do not appear in the dock
  • Daisy could act as a taskbar and show icons of all running windows
• Applications like instant messengers or IRC clients use tray for notifications
  • Daisy could act as a tray and replace the launcher icon with the one added to tray by application after its start (so it will flash in the dock)

Once these three points are met, Daisy will become a complete counterpart of Mac OS X dock. I’ve already written these suggestions to Lechio (upstream developer), but I’m not sure if this is the direction he wants to go and whether it is possible to do without any extra hacks at the KDE/Plasma side. (I’m sure that Lechio will accept any help ) Anyway, have a look at the project page, KDE-Look page or try the plasmoid from the Build Service. The package is called plasmoid-daisy and is present in KDE:KDE4:Community project.

Few months ago I tried to use OSC – our command-line client to BuildService under Windows. I failed because of the hard-coded dependency on python-rpm module, which is (of course) not present in Python package for Windows.

Today I saw Feature #306354, so I decided to give it a try again. Fortunately, the recent code changes made this task a lot easier! I still had to create some fixes and hacks, but they are now commited to OSC subversion and shouldn’t cause problems anymore.

There are two ways how to use OSC in Windows:

• download this archive (or click on the openSUSE/Windows icon above),
  unpack it and use osc.exe binary without installing the whole python distribution
  (this does not need administrator rights) (Obsolete! see Update #3 below)
• install python and use osc directly from its sources
  (this needs administrator rights if the python is not installed)

Most of the features like checkouts, checkins, editing metadata should work, but there are some osc features that are unusuable (yet) under Windows:

• osc build – local building of the packages
• osc vc – automated editing of changes file – you have to change the changelogs manually

If you plan to use the binary package (option 1) you don’t need to read further. However, if you are interested in how I created the package or you want to use osc directly from its sources, keep reading!

Follow these steps if you want to build your own Windows build of osc:

1. install the latest python (I used python-2.6.2.msi installer and kept the default path
   C:\Python26)
2. install the latest py2exe (I used py2exe-0.6.9.win32-py2.6.exe, it should find your python distribution installed in previous step)
3. install the latest subversion client (I used the build from sliksvn.com: Slik-Subversion-1.6.2-win32.msi)
4. change into your working directory and checkout the latest osc from subversion:

   svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/buildservice/src/clientlib/python/osc

5. change into osc directory
6. run py2exe:

   C:\Python26\python.exe setup.py py2exe

7. compress all files in directory dist into osc.zip and you are done! enjoy!

If you want to use osc directly from its sources, just follow the steps 1, 3, 4, 5 and run:

C:\Python26\python.exe osc-wrapper.py

(You can save typing if you add path C:\Python26 into your %PATH% variable.

That’s it!

Update #1: I found out that something very similar could be acheived on Mac OS X using py2app and by calling python setup.py py2app. However, this is usually not needed, because Mac OS X already ships with python (2.4.2 in Tiger and 2.5.1 in Leopard if I recall correctly – these are older, but running osc with them should be just fine).

Update #2: Michael E. Brown and Shalonda Matthews from Dell reported two bugs in my build. They were caused by different behaviour of mmap.mmap function under Unix and Windows and the fact that function os.path.sametime isn’t available under Windows at all. Both problems are fixed in SVN now and I have also rebuild the osc.zip archive.

Update #3: The zip archive is not maintained. Build Service requires quite new build of osc, therefore I recommend creating your own executable by following the steps described above.

Update #4: The code has moved from Subversion to Gitorious. You need to install Git and run git clone git://gitorious.org/opensuse/osc.git instead of points #3 and #4.