1 GNOME Applet Installation
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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].
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.
59 Additional applet notes
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
71 [1] See <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/66004> for details.
75 This document was last updated 2007-05-02, reflecting release 0.4 of