Re: Signalling when the desktop is loaded

[Neil J Patel <njpatel gmail com>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 09:49, Andrew
Cowie<andrew operationaldynamics com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 00:15 +0400, Alexey Rusakov wrote:
>
>> What if I don't run Nautilus at the start of the session (don't use it
>> to draw the desktop)?
>
> Isn't that one of the definitions of what a running GNOME Desktop is?
>
> This isn't trolling, by the way. I ran into this a few weeks ago; we
> have some unit tests that among other things rely on Nautilus running,
> because it's supposed to be running because it's what GNOME uses to draw
> it's desktop, yo.
>
> I was astonished — and not supportive in the slightest — to discover
> that Nautilus isn't compulsory just as gnome-session and gnome-panel and
> many other things are. [Apparently Canonical has pulled a stunt with
> their Netbook Remix and don't have Nautilus running full time {sigh}] So
> the tests failed for that person. Grr.

Not sure what stunt we're pulling, but UNR doesn't advertise itself as
a "GNOME Desktop". It's quite-obviously different than the GNOME
desktop, but I made the decision to try and use as many GNOME
components as possible instead of rewriting everything from scratch.

The fact that netbook-launcher resides on the desktop meant that I set
show_desktop to false in nautilus's gconf to save some time at
startup, as it would never be seen. Even so, in the initial UNR jaunty
alphas, we at least executed nautilus (we hadn't changed the default
session), but that caused an issue where the mouse pointer constantly
span as nautilus didn't mark itself as 'startup-complete' if it had no
windows to show and didn't have to draw the desktop[1].

I would love to have Nautilus running in UNR as it handles
auto-mounting much better than the launcher can, however it does not
have a 'daemon-mode' so it doesn't run until the user needs to browse
a file[2].

Regards,

Neil

[1] I believe I filed a bug for this, but can't find the number right now.
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541262
[*] I've got half-patches for both these bugs, just need time to complete them.

> ++
>
> I realize that there are lots of opinions about this, but the term
> "GNOME Desktop" should mean something. I don't particularly care what,
> but it'd be nice to be able to target it. Not "platform" (sic), and not
> even "desktop" [as in package set]. Maybe "GNOME runtime" is what I'm
> grasping to articulate.
>
> I recall that years ago Dave Neary had ideas about a certification
> saying "this is a compliant GNOME desktop application"; perhaps we
> should go further and say "this is what a compliant GNOME running
> configuration is". Which would, incidentally, give us the ability to
> probe and test for it. Yeay DBus, presumably. Not to mention restoring
> some concept of GNOME branding & identity to people in the world outside
> this list.
>
> Doesn't mean taking choice away, but jeesh I'm tired of people not
> running GNOME telling GNOME what to do.
>
> ++
>
> We left the tests in.
>
> AfC
> Sydney
>
> --
> Andrew Frederick Cowie
>
> Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy
> focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems
> review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling
> successful deployment of mission critical information technology in
> enterprises, worldwide.
>
> http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
>
> Sydney   New York   Toronto   London
>
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