therning.org/ magnus

The upgrade to Gnome3 in ArchLinux a few days ago broke my previous setup that combined xmonad with Gnome. Gnome 3 has a fallback mode, but I found that the instructions for replacing metacity under Gnome 2 no longer worked. With some help from the xmonad mailing list (in particular Jens Petersen and his efforts of providing a working setup on Fedora) I now finally have a working setup again. Here’s how I did it.

Add a session file for use by Gnome Session (/usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/xmonad.session):

[GNOME Session]
Name=Xmonad session
RequiredComponents=gnome-panel;gnome-settings-daemon;
RequiredProviders=windowmanager;notifications;
DefaultProvider-windowmanager=xmonad
DefaultProvider-notifications=notification-daemon

And a desktop file for GDM (/usr/share/xsessions/xmonad-gnome-session.desktop):

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Xmonad GNOME
Comment=Tiling window manager
TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-session
Exec=gnome-session --session=xmonad
Type=XSession

That’s all it takes. Of course I’ve raised a ticket against the Arch package.

Since no one on the Gnome mailing list seems to be able to answer these questions I thought I’d try some other venues for getting them answered. The audience for my blog isn’t that big, but just maybe there’s someone out there who knows the answers to these questions related to Gnome configuration. Mail one and mail two.

1: Running GUI tool after NM has brought up network

I run dropbox on my laptop, but their software is crap at handling that the network comes up only after the dropbox service has startedⁱ

I know of the possibility of dropping a file in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/, but that doesn’t work in this case since I need the program to run “in my desktop”. Well, at least I haven’t managed to get the dropbox server to throw up an icon in my Gnome tool bar like it should, unless I run it from inside the desktop environment.

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?

2: Changing background of the Gnome screensaver

I think Gnome comes with quite possibly the ugliest background for a screensaver I’ve ever seen. It’s a close-up on a green leaf or something. Absolutely hideous. I want to change it. To something nice, like a solid black. Actually just about anything else would do. But how?

GDM came with the same ugly background. Luckily I managed to find instructions on the Arch wiki to change GDM background. I’ve tried and failed to use a similar trick on the screensaver.

Please, help me escape the ugly background of the Gnome screensaver!

1. I’ve noticed no problem when network goes away and then comes back, dropbox picks that up just fine. But if the network isn’t there to start with, that it can’t handle. I’m somehow at a loss how to write a program that handles the former but not the latter. [back]

Since the Python extensions to Epiphany have been removed from the repository I thought it was high time to start playing with what seems to be the replacement to Python extensions: Seed extensions. The first step is of course to get a version of Epiphany that supports Seed extensions. After a few emails on the mailing list I’ve come to a recipe (I’ve done this twice now on different machines to I’m fairly confident it works). I should probably preface this by saying that I run an up-to-date Arch system, if you run something else you might need to do a bit more, or less if you’re lucky

1. Make sure the following packages are installedⁱ: libsoup, libwebkit, gnome-common, intltool, libffi
2. Clone the following Git repositories from git.gnome.org: epiphany-extensions, epiphany, seed, gobject-inspection, gnome-js-common, gir-repository

3. Decide on a $prefix, i.e. where you want it all installed (I use ~/opt/gnome-trunk). Then export the following environment variables:

   export PATH=$prefix/bin:$PATH
   export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$prefix/lib/pkgconfig
   

4. Then configure, build and install everything. Use the autogen.sh script to create the configuration, and make sure to pass it prefix=$prefix each time. Some of the modules need extra arguments as well. This is the order and extra arguments I used:

   1. gnome-js-common (--disable-seed --disable-gjs)
   2. seed
   3. gnome-js-common (--disable-gjs)
   4. gobject-introspection
   5. gir-repository
   6. epiphany (--enable-introspection --enable-seed)
   7. epiphany-extensions

After that you can put your extensions in ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions/. I have two instances of Epiphany installed, a stable from my distro, and the dev version I built myself. I haven’t managed to run them both side by side, but beyond that there seems to be no bad interaction between them.

1. You might need a few more packages depending on what desktop environment you use. Those were the packages I needed to add to my machine where I run Gnome and do regular non-Gnome development[back]

I’ll soon continue documenting my experience with installing and configuring my desktop, but first a note on fixing an irritating issue in Gnome 2.26. Soon after installing Gnome I noticed that I couldn’t reboot or shutdown from inside my Gnome session, I had to log out and use GDM’s action menu instead. Rather irritating, but something I could live with until the weekend. It took a while to find the solution so to safe myself time in the future I’ll document it here. It might even help someone else, who knows?

Whenever I tried to reboot or shutdown I saw the following message appear in ~/.xsession-errors:

gnome-session[4134]: WARNING: Unable to list sessions: Rejected send message, 2 matched rules;
type="method_call", sender=":1.50" (uid=1000 pid=4134 comm="gnome-session ")
interface="org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager" member="GetSessions" error name="(unset)"
requested_reply=0 destination="org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit" (uid=0 pid=2838
comm="/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon "))

After giving up on finding a solution with Google I turned to #archlinux and was pointed to a forum post. That discussion doesn’t mention the warning message at all, so it wasn’t obvious to me at first that it was the same issue. However, about half-way down the page I found a post by justusjonas that looked relevant. I tried that change, or rather something very similar, and a manual reboot later I could confirm that the change indeed fixed the issue. This is the change I applied:

--- /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ConsoleKit.conf_org    2009-05-02 15:59:40.235077390 +0100
+++ /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ConsoleKit.conf    2009-05-02 16:00:10.108231150 +0100
@@ -32,6 +32,8 @@
     <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager"
            send_member="GetSeats"/>
     <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager"
+           send_member="GetSessions"/>
+    <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager"
            send_member="GetSessionForCookie"/>
     <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager"
            send_member="GetSessionForUnixProcess"/>

After installing a basic Arch system and adding X.org it still isn’t very usable. My desktop of choice is Gnome, so that’s what I installed next, with a few extra packages to make it prettier and more useful.

I found out the hard way a few weeks ago that if you install gnome without gnome-extras then it’s a bad idea to install gdm and configure your system to boot to X. That way you’ll end up in a situation where your desktop doesn’t have an X terminal. I made sure to avoid that situation this time around. After installing gnome,gnome-extras and gdm I noticed that both gdm and policykit created users with uid 120 and 102, respectively. Just like exptected from services they have low uids. What surprised me was that they ended up having gid 1001 and 1002. That looks like bugs to me I decided to fix that up manually myself by editing the group file (using vigr of course) and then searching for all file with the offending gids (using find / -gid 1001 for the first, with obvious changes to find the second).

After configuring gdm I realised I also needed gdm-themes And I also added a few pretty fonts, and removed a few of the unpretty ones:

# pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts ttf-cheapskate artwiz-fonts ttf-bitstream-vera
# pacman -Rns xorg-fonts-75dpi xorg-fonts-100dpi

Then of course I needed to install xmonad:

# pacman -S xmonad-contrib

Co-ercing Gnome to actually use it was interesting though. I followed the instructions for running Xmonad in Jaunty, but that wasn’t enough. I also needed to place a file named xmonad.desktop in /usr/share/applications/ with the following contents (greatly inspired by the metacity.desktop found in the same location):

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xmonad
Exec=xmonad
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-WMName=Xmonad
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager

After that it was time to install stuff that is useful First off was Thunderbird, which I immidiately had to equip with a few plug-ins of course. When setting up my mail account again I noticed that my Gnome session wasn’t quite the way I wanted—there was no gpg-agent running. After a quick check with the people on arch-general, without receiving any definitive resolution, I wrote my own little hack to address it. Of course I posted it in the thread I had started, but I might as well include it here too:

--- /etc/gdm/Xsession_orig  2009-04-27 17:13:50.346834448 +0100
+++ /etc/gdm/Xsession   2009-04-27 17:16:25.310151728 +0100
@@ -213,6 +213,14 @@
   fi
 fi

+# add seahorse if found
+seahorse="`gdmwhich seahorse-agent`"
+if [ -n "${seahorse}" ] && [ -x "${seahorse}" ]; then
+    command="seahorse-agent --execute $command"
+elif [ -z "${seahorse}" ]; then
+    echo "$0: seahorse not found!"
+fi
+
 # add ssh-agent if found
 sshagent="`gdmwhich ssh-agent`"
 if [ -n "$sshagent" ] && [ -x "$sshagent" ] && [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then

There’s one more tool I can’t live without, parcellite, which is also available pre-built on Arch.

I stumbled on this email thread on starting Xmonad in Fedora 10. In anticipation of Gnome 2.24 being installable from Debian Experimental I dropped the following into /usr/share/applications/xmonad.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xmonad
Exec=xmonad
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-WMName=Xmonad
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager
X-GNOME-Autostart-Notify=true

and modified the GConf key /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current to hold the value /usr/bin/xmonad. Last but not least I removed my ~/.gnomerc. Log out, log in. Enjoy!

Yes, this is mentioned on the Xmonad wiki, though with slightly less details. I’ll hold off updating the page until I have Gnome 2.24 on my desktop.

I’ve just finished pushing support for diigo as a backed for epilicious. For the impatient there is the epilicious darcs repo. The patient will wait for the next version of Gnome to be released.

I just had a blast from the past!

Being somewhat spoiled by the current state of Linux-on-the-desktop (Gnome in my case) I have become used to inserting a blank CD, point Nautilus to burn:///, dragging and dropping a few files into it, and finally clicking the “Burn to CD” button. Works beautifully. Of course I thought that Nautilus’ CD-burning would know about audio CDs. So I dragged a few WAV files into Nautilus and clicked the button. Voilà, a data CD containing a few Wav files! Not really what I wanted.

So, to avoid this in the future here is the command line to use:

wodim -v dev=0,0,0 speed=40 -audio -pad *.wav

I was getting too many reports of problems on using epilicious together with del.icio.us. What finally did it was Gnome bug #491977. The patch provided was applied in the 2.20 tree. In the current development tree I simply removed support for del.icio.us alltogether. It’s just not worth the hassle!

It’s just somewhat unfortunate that the name of the plugin doesn’t fit that well anymore.

Just can’t help wanting to point people to this description of abject oriented programming, a little-known but widely used programming paradigm.

Over to something more serious. I want a zooming desktop that uses the power of language. Something for GNOME 3 maybe?