Friday, March 9, 2007

How to install Gimmie: A new GNOME panel in Ubuntu?

Gimmie is an elegant way to think about how you use your desktop computer.Gimmie is a new concept of the panel designed to shift the direction of the desktop beyond the standard WIMP model (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointer) towards one directly representing the concepts that modern desktop users use every day. It is being considered for inclusion in Project Topaz (a.k.a. Gnome 3.0)

Gimmie Features

  • A new way to think about your desktop
  • Easy to learn
  • Relates objects to topics– Colors aide recognition
  • Quickly see what's open
  • Bookmarks are running representation
  • Simple & Obvious
  • It's a Prototype

Current Stable Version :- 0.2.4

Project Home Page :- http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie

Install Gimmie in Ubuntu

Preparing Your System

First you need to install the following packages

sudo apt-get install make gcc g++

sudo apt-get install python2.4 python2.4-dev python-gnome2-dev python-gnome2-desktop-dev libgnomecups1.0-dev

Now you need to download the Gimmie latest version from here using the following command

wget http://www.beatniksoftware.com/gimmie/releases/gimmie-0.2.4.tar.gz

Now you have gimmie-0.2.4.tar.gz file you need to extract this file using the following command

tar xzvf gimmie-0.2.4.tar.gz

You should see gimmie-0.2.4 directory you need to go in to the directory using the following command to install

cd gimmie-0.2.4

Now you need to start the compilation

./configure

make

make check

make install

This will complete the installation

Now you need to restart your gnome session or logout and login back in to your desktop.

Adding Panel Applet

Now you need to right click on the panel select add panel

Once it open you should see similar to the following screen here you need to select Gimmie under Utilities section and click on add

Once it added to the panel you should see the following screen

Gimmie Screenshots

Now we will see some screenshots

Gimmie Bar

Computer Screen Options

Applications Screen Options

Documents Screen Options

People Screen Options

Common Problems and Solutions

When I try to compile Gimmie i got the following two problems so i am giving the solutions for this

Problem

When i try to compile i got the following error

checking for GIMMIE... configure: error: Package requirements (gtk+-2.0 >= 2.6
pygtk-2.0 >= 2.6
pygobject-2.0 >= 2.6
gnome-python-2.0 >= 2.10
gnome-python-desktop-2.0 >= 2.10
libgnomecups-1.0 >= 0.2.2) were not met:

No package 'gnome-python-2.0' found
No package 'gnome-python-desktop-2.0' found
No package 'libgnomecups-1.0' found

Solution

You need to install the following packages

sudo apt-get install python-gnome2-dev python-gnome2-desktop-dev libgnomecups1.0-dev

Problem

Whe you try to add panel it doesn't show up in add to panel even after logging in and out

Solution

You can try installing gimmie into /usr by passing the “–prefix=/usr” arg to the configure script, which should place the GNOME_GimmieApplet.server file in the proper location for bonobo-activation-server to see it: usually /usr/lib/bonobo/servers.

Alternately, if you installed into the default configure location (probably /usr/local) you can just copy the .server file to /usr/lib/bonobo/servers.

sudo cp /usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers/GNOME_GimmieApplet.server /usr/lib/bonobo/servers

If all of this still doesn’t work, you may need to kill bonobo-activation-server, and/or restart gnome-panel itself.

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