Posts Tagged ‘widgets’

I have found Compiz to be a fun set of eye candies and generally have done very little tinkering with it other then changing the basic windows effects and making my cube look spiffy. The multitude of functionality is outstanding and a little overwhelming. I have long wanted to understand more of what Compiz can do. One function I have noticed, but not figured out how to get working is the Widget Layer. The idea is like with Mac OS X if you press a button a layer of widgets superimposes your desktop (a feature I have always liked about OS X). But out of the box, Compiz fusion only grays your screen and there are no widgets.

Today, I went to the Compiz Wiki tutorial to learn more about this function. The first thing I learned is that I needed a third party widget engine such as, Screenlets or GDesklets. I have used these engines before in the past, and found the idea appealing, but didn’t like how they would sometimes behave on a composite enabled desktop (with wierd shadows and texture problems). Since Screenlets appears to have more individual widgets developed for it, and the tutorial uses Screenlets for its example, I installed the Screenlets package using Synaptic in Debian.

First I followed the instructions found on this Ubuntu Forum. In terminal I typed:

mkdir ~/.config/screenlets
mkdir ~/.config/autostart

It was time to configure the widget layer in Compiz. I right clicked the Fusion-Icon and went to Setting Manager and found the widget layer (be sure to have compiz-fusion-extras installed via these instructions). I clicked on the behavior tag and copied the text specified from the forum and tutorial into the widget window field.

name=Screenlet.py

I found the Screenlet interface under Accessories in my XFCE menu system and found there already was an assortment of widgets available. First thing I did was select the Calender widget and clicked Lauch/Add to the left. A nice black box with the date apeared in the left hand corner of desktop. I could left click on it and drag it where I wanted to or I could right click and be given a menu list to adjust its properties and appearance. I left it where it was. I then added the meter widget and moved it in the bottom left, and added disk usage in the top right corner.

Now that I had a collection of widgets on my desktop I pressed F9 and nothing seemed to happen. But I pressed F9 again and they went away. One more press of F9 and there they where again. I had configured the widget layer correctly. Now I wanted to install some more widgets. I installed the calculator widget and pressed F9 and then adjusted the position. With another press of F9 it went away, and came back with yet another press of F9.

I began browsing the catalog of Screenlets widgets and choosing ones I liked for download. To install opened the Sceenlets manager clicked install on the left made sure install screenlets was selected and clicked OK. From there I browsed to where I had downloaded the desired widget and clicked. I know found the new widget listed to the right and added it to the widget layer like above.

To get gDesklets to work replace name=Screenlet.py with:

class=Gdesklets-daemon

I also had to edit each individual widget to display above all programs. For example I edited /usr/share/gdesklets/Displays/calendar/Calendar/Calendar.display and replaced window-flags=”sticky, below” with window-flags=”sticky, above”

To add gdesklets to autostart a added the program in XFCE’s Session and Startup as with the command gdesklets

It should be noted that I had difficulty getting Screenlets to autostart with compiz and eventually gave up on the endeavor.  I disabled the widget layer entirely after discovering the many GNOME dependencies that installed with gDesklets (I am running XFCE).