When Google calls, Googsystray answers

Plenty of applets will check your Gmail status and pop up a notification if you have mail. But if you use Google’s other web-based services – Calendar, Reader, and especially Voice – you could wind up keeping three additional browser tabs open all the time and checking them far too often. That’s what prompted developer Jim Duchek to create googsystray, an applet that provides system tray notifications and an easy-access interface to Google Voice, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and soon Gmail.

On top of notification, the software offers some intelligent features. For instance, googsystray’s Voice support allows you to reply to SMS messages or check voicemail without opening the browser, so it doesn’t interrupt your workflow. Reader support allows you to pick a threshold number of accumulated articles for notification, so you don’t waste all day checking it, but you can still keep items from getting out of hand.

Duchek wrote the program in Python, using no special tools beyond his favorite editor, joe. “I’m a device driver/firmware guy by trade, so my decision to write it in Python was basically just to learn something new.”

At the moment, the software is in beta, and the next releases will add “prettification and bug testing. Gmail support is on the way,” Duchek says. “And it could definitely use more testing by users.” Eventually, he says, he’ll be looking for translators to help on the project.

Given that it’s a Google-related project, why did Duchek choose SourceForge.net to host it? “I’ve been on SF.net forever (note the four-digit userid), so a lot of it is familiarity. To some extent though, I don’t like the ‘vibe’ of code.google.com. A lot of the projects seem to attempt to do the minimum by whatever ‘open source’ license they’ve chosen, and rarely attempt to make truly free software, or really involve the community in the work.”

Duchek says he hasn’t done anything to popularize the software, other than putting it on freshmeat. “Being the head guy on a very popular piece of OSS is a double-edged sword (especially one that allows people to get instantly in touch with you!). I’d much rather googsystray just be a quiet little piece of software that serves some people’s needs.”

Tweet of the Day: @jimic79:Why did sourceforge actively make it’s site into a huge hunk of crap? #sourceforge #bandwidthwhore

LXDE is no lightweight. Well, it is, but …

Developer Hong Jen Yee says GNOME is good, but it’s not lightweight or fast enough for some users. After coding several lightweight desktop utilities, Hong and his colleagues wound up building an entire desktop environment – the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). Now LXDE is getting a distro of its own – Lubuntu.

Does the world really need another desktop environment? Hong says GNOME is less responsive then it should be, especially when used with netbooks. In addition, it suffers from dependency problems; “when you only need part of the functionality provided by GNOME, most of time you’ll need to install a lot of additional dependencies. It’s a complete platform, but it just provides too many things that are not necessarily needed by many users.”

KDE, Hong says, suffers from similar problems. “Components are tightly integrated with each other and don’t work as nicely in other desktop environments. In addition, it’s just too much for some users who only want to get basic daily work done.”

What about other so-called lightweight desktops? “Xfce seems to be something in between GNOME and KDE. However, it’s getting closer to GNOME in feature sets, and now they share similar shortcomings. ROX desktop is lightweight, but some features are lacking. Also, I cannot get used to its user interface.”

If you’re a developer and you can’t find a tool you like, your alternative is to write your own, and that’s just what Hong did. “Around the end of 2006, I decided to develop a lightweight file manager, called PCManFM originally. After it was developed, I replaced the desktop panel with fbpanel, and then used IceWM as window manager rather than using a full GNOME desktop. Later, I felt that some features were lacking in fbpanel, so I forked fbpanel and added the features I wanted, and created LXPanel. Since by that time I had replaced the most crucial parts of a desktop environment, it was quite natural to build a new desktop environment on top of them. That’s how LXDE got started.”

Hong says LXDE is designed to be modular and tries to make every component work nicely in other desktop environments with minimal dependencies. However, when those components are installed together and are launched under LXDE, they exhibit slightly different behavior to make things more integrated. In addition, LXDE follows freedesktop.org standards for compatibility with other desktop environments. It also offers great i18n support; Hong says LXDE has been translated to dozens of languages.

The project tries to reuse existing solution when possible. For instance, instead of creating their own window manager and text editor, the project chose the already mature Openbox and Leafpad. But since the components are not tightly integrated, you can easily replace one with another program, if you prefer, for example, a different window manager.

LXDE is lightweight, but it doesn’t sacrifice usability. Unlike some other lightweight window managers, you generally don’t have to manually edit configuration files. You just choose “LXDE” in your gdm menu as your window manager and log in. You can configure the desktop via the GUI most of the time; you might have to manually edit configuration files only if you want further customization or if your distro maker doesn’t provide proper default configurations.

In the latest version of LXPanel the layout of panel items was redesigned by new project member Marty Jack, and many old bugs were fixed. There still seem to be some performance issues in the latest 0.5.3 release reported by Debian community, but they’re on the list to be fixed.

Also on tap for upcoming releases is a total rewrite of the PCManFM file manager based on glib/gio. Hong says, “If things go smoothly, the first public release will be in Q1 2010. The next generation of PCManFM will optionally support seamless remote filesystem access when gvfs is available. The core of the file manager is now separated from the main program; it became a library named libfm. The library provides basic facilities needed by a file manager. Other programmers can use this library to create their own file managers. For example, you could write a new file manager with a two-pane layout by using libfm.”

Hong says a new display manager named lxdm is being developed to replace gdm in LXDE-based distros, and a broken network management tool, LXNM, is undergoing a total rewrite to turn it into a new lightweight network manager.

The project uses the so-called rolling stone model for software releases. “We make constant small releases of each component rather than a big upgrade of the whole LXDE. However, since now the project is becoming more and more mature, we may consider changing the model if the community wants it.”

LXDE uses several SourceForge.net facilities to develop the software, including use SVN, Git, mailing list, and the bug trackers. When you’re coordinating the work of more than four dozen developers, a good toolset is a must.

Tweet of the day: @leastfixedpoint: the homepage of sourceforge.net looks like a spammy domain parking page

Young developer targets young users with Hannah Montana Linux

Earlier this year, 17-year-old developer Taylor (who prefers not to publish his last name) had a brainstorm. There’s a version of Linux available for almost every niche, but nothing that targets the tween demographic – young people too old for elementary school but too young for the big leagues. Who better to bring Linux to that market than Hannah Montana, Disney’s real-life pop princess? Thus was born Hannah Montana Linux.

The distribution is based on Kubuntu, the Ubuntu version that runs the KDE desktop, but Taylor says he stripped out software such as OpenOffice.org and KOffice to make the distro lightweight enough to fit on a 700MB CD. (Of course users can employ the apt-get utility to download those applications or any of thousands of others for free.) He also added a lot of themes featuring the tween idol. “Kubuntu isn’t that hard to customize,” he says. “You just have to be an artist and a hacker – hacker in the good sense, that is.”

Taylor released the software July 15. The existence of the distro began to spread by word of mouth. “I just told a few people about it,” Taylor says. Soon there was a review on Desktop Linux Reviews, another on the Linux Critic Blog, and coverage on OSNews, Linux Today, and elsewhere. Taylor says that, according to his torrent counter (which keeps getting reset), more than 2,500 people have downloaded the distribution in the last two months.

“Some people think it’s crazy,” Taylor admits, “but almost no one says it’s a bad thing.” In fact, Taylor says, Miley Cyrus personally gave him a thumbs-up for the project. Her corporate masters at Disney so far have been silent.

Taylor says he is continuing to develop the distro. He plans to include KOffice and a few new apps, including HMExec, which will allow users to run a script without opening a terminal window. He will also fix the boot screen, which currently displays a blue square that doesn’t belong there. Taylor hopes to release new versions every six months or every year.