| 1 | GNOME Applet Installation |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Because of how GNOME works, special care is required when installing |
| 4 | the transfer monitor applet. The problem lies in the fact that GNOME |
| 5 | only looks for applets in certain directories, which usually does not |
| 6 | /usr/local, whither Dolda Connect installs by default. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | A GNOME applet is a CORBA server, which must be found by GNOME's |
| 9 | Bonobo activation daemon. By default, the Bonobo activation daemon |
| 10 | looks in lib/bonobo/servers inside its own installation prefix. Since |
| 11 | GNOME is usually installed in /usr, that would become |
| 12 | /usr/lib/bonobo/servers on most systems, but it needs not necessarily |
| 13 | be, and some systems have GNOME installed in /opt. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | Since the default prefix for autoconf programs such as Dolda Connect |
| 16 | is /usr/local, the server description file installed by Dolda Connect |
| 17 | will not be found by the Bonobo activation daemon. There are a number |
| 18 | of ways to fix this: |
| 19 | |
| 20 | 1. Install Dolda Connect in /usr. This is ugly and not recommended, |
| 21 | since /usr is normally reserved for programs shipped by the system |
| 22 | maintainers. It does work, though, and it is easy. To do that, run |
| 23 | ./configure with a `--prefix=/usr' argument. |
| 24 | |
| 25 | 2. Move the applet files only to /usr after normal installation in |
| 26 | /usr/local. This, too, is ugly and not recommended, but it might be |
| 27 | considered slightly less ugly than #1, since the bulk of Dolda Connect |
| 28 | still resides in /usr/local. To do that, move |
| 29 | /usr/local/libexec/dolcon-trans-applet to /usr/libexec, and |
| 30 | /usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers/Dolcon_Transferapplet_Factory.server to |
| 31 | /usr/lib/bonobo/servers. Then, edit the latter file and replace every |
| 32 | instance of /usr/local with /usr. |
| 33 | |
| 34 | 3. Add /usr/local to your system's GNOME prefixes. Doing so involves |
| 35 | setting the environment variable GNOME2_PATH to include |
| 36 | /usr/local. How to do that differs from system to system, and it is |
| 37 | not possible for this document to contain information on how to do |
| 38 | that on any given system. It is probably by far the best solution, |
| 39 | however. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | 4. Add /usr/local to your user profile's GNOME prefixes. As above, |
| 42 | this involves setting GNOME2_PATH to include /usr/local, but it is |
| 43 | quite easy to do so in your own ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile instead |
| 44 | of editing the system-wide configuration. It is also the best idea if |
| 45 | you have installed Dolda Connect in your own home directory rather |
| 46 | than in /usr/local. Again, though, the exact steps to do this differs |
| 47 | from system to system and also depend on what shell you use. It is |
| 48 | extra noteworthy, however, that Ubuntu users may have rather severe |
| 49 | problems with this [1]. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | Remember, always after changing the system of user profile with |
| 52 | regards to environment variables, you would need to log out and back |
| 53 | in again to get the changes in all processes. It is of note, however, |
| 54 | that the Bonobo activation daemon sometimes linger, and therefore does |
| 55 | not get restarted when logging back in again. If this happens, just |
| 56 | kill it (with `killall bonobo-activation-server'), and it will be |
| 57 | restarted from a process having the correct environment. |
| 58 | |
| 59 | Additional applet notes |
| 60 | |
| 61 | The applet is mostly working, but it still does have a few things that |
| 62 | remain to be implemented. First of all, it only handles password-less |
| 63 | authentication, so a setup using PAM will not work. Unix socket |
| 64 | authentication, `authless' authentication and Kerberos V |
| 65 | authentication all work, however. Last, there is no preference dialog |
| 66 | to set which Dolda Connect server to connect to. If you run a local |
| 67 | server using Unix sockets, it will not be a problem. Otherwise, you |
| 68 | need to use the DCSERVER environment variable to specify which server |
| 69 | to connect to. |
| 70 | |
| 71 | [1] See <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/66004> for details. |
| 72 | |
| 73 | |
| 74 | |
| 75 | This document was last updated 2007-05-02, reflecting release 0.4 of |
| 76 | Dolda Connect. |