Pontus Östlund » Ubuntu

Roxen Application Launcher 1.1

Pontus — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:28:34 +0000

There’s a new release of Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux.

I have updated the application launcher to use GTK3 so that it builds on Ubuntu 11.10 and any other Linux distribution using GTK3. This also made it possible to drop the dependency for libunique since Gtk.Application can handle single instance applications.

I also fixed a bug which made it impossible to use the appliction launcher on sites not running on port 80 or 443.

So there’s no new features in this release.

Roxen Application Launcher 1.1

Sources is available at the Roxen Application Launcher Github repository

Notification area icons in Ubuntu 11.04

Pontus — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:46:19 +0000

If you’r an Ubuntu user and have upgraded to 11.04 and use the new desktop environment Unity, you might have noticed that some applications that implement the GTK status icon doesn’t show up in the notification area – or tray or systray as it also may be called.

The reason for this is that Ubuntu now utilise a “whitelist” for which applications can be displayed in the notification area. You can (maybe not that) easily add any application to the whitelist by invoking the command gsettings in the following way:


gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist ['app-1', 'app-2', 'app-3']

Now, this can be quite a difficult command to remember and since you will need to first grab the whitelist, alter it, and then put it back. Since I’m lame at Bash I thought it would be a nice misson to create a Bash script that makes this interference simpler, just to pick up some more Bash knowledge. So I did!

The script can be used like this:


# Add MyApplication to whitelist
systray-whitelist add MyApplication

# Remove MyApplication from whitelist
systray-whitelist remove MyApplication

# Show applications in whitelist
systray-whitelist show

And that’s that.

Download systray-whitelist

Back from vacation

Pontus — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:02:47 +0000

So after five weeks of vacation I’m back at work. The most sensational thing must be that I didn’t write a single line of code in these five weeks! It was a much needed break from computers and the longest one I’ve had for the nine years or so I’ve been programming. The vacation it self isn’t much to talk about. I visited friends and family and spent a lot of time in the sofa watching the olympics – and playing some Play Station 3 as well

I also just bought an Asus EEE which I think is quite cool. I’m actually writing this blog post on it. I threw out the Xandros operating system and installed Ubuntu EEE instead which feels a great deal better. I’ve installed a lot of developer tools and they actually run rather smoothly.

Screen shot Ubuntu EEE

Roxen user conference

Next week, Thursday and Friday, I will attend the Roxen user conference which I’m really looking forward to. I’ll give a report from there when it happens.

My first GIMP job, Gnomealicious!

Pontus — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:37:16 +0000

Although I’ve been using Linux for eight years I have never really used GIMP since I’m brought up with Photoshop. But lately I’ve started using it to make a few layout elements for various web projects and although It’s quite frustrating when you all the time hit Photoshop shortcuts and end up with the wrong tools and what not, GIMP really isn’t that awful when you start to get grip of it.

Anyway, I did a re-install of Ubuntu the other day and found a theme for Gnome that I really liked but I had no desktop wallpaper that fitted so I though I’d better make my own. And so I did!

Screenshot

The wallpaper, 1680×1050

So I’m about to become better friends with GIMP!

Peace out!