I’ve packaged a bunch of indicators and some of the dependencies for Ubuntu’s Unity Desktop. The saga goes on with 3 more accomplishments today…

1. dee –  http://launchpad.net/dee (packaged and submitted)
2. bamf – http://launchpad.net/bamf (packaged and submitted)
3. nux – on the forge… currently breaks due to being built with libpng14 (Ubuntu using libpng12) and some deprecated syntax.

A lot of support libraries like dbusmenu had already been packaged before for the Indicators. One step closer…

Finally… the last of the indicators builds and works properly… fun thing… works out of the box with Banshee!

Two pics… one from the indicator-sound and another from the messaging indicator with empathy and evolution support.

Ayatana’s battery indicator is known as ‘battery-status’… it’s also currently packaged and semi-tested. This indicator required a tiny patch to use cpufreq-set. It does appear working to me, but I need some more debugging for it.

There’s also a small testing repository for the indicators on my home project on OBS for Factory only, which can be found here. So if you are a openSUSE Factory user… feel free to check it out and if you find any issues, please report them to me.

Currently I’ve only uploaded the Session Menu, ME Menu and Battery Indicators. I need to check a couple of things with the messages indicator before uploading it. As said before, feedback is welcomed.

Another concern that poped out is the Summary’s and information on the spec’s which doesn’t seem consistent… I’m the one to blame, so that’s also for the next days in my TODO list… to provide this packages with a uniform way so that during updates they somehow seem related. Indicators need to be searchable by the term ‘Indicator’ or ‘Ayatana’.

As the indicator saga continues… some new indicators were built… Indicator-messages is a small indicator that pics up messages and stuff from applications to display them on a nice all-around indicator. It works fine with evolution (plugin also built and doesn’t require patching for what I’ve seen).

This indicator support more applications, though they require some patching. As being discussed on the opensuse-GNOME mailing list as as proposed by Vincent Untz, this indicators are moving to GNOME:Apps and there _might_ an effort to support some features in applications like empathy. Keep in mind this is not a priority, but if it’s possible to support some more feature, it might happen.

Additionally, I’ve also tried some other indicators… indicator-application for what I can tell is an indicator that removes the menu’s from the GTK applications and places them on the panel (MAC style). I’ve built this indicator, but I have no means to test yet because further patching is required at least in GTK and eventually on glib. I don’t think there’s actually any need to have this indicator, specially when it will bring additional efforts on GTK maintenance, and this feature is somehow supported by software like gnome-globalmenu (which I’ve also packaged for myself and works dearly with supported apps).

I’ve done some hammering on indicator-sound as well… Ubuntu’s sound widget… I’m stuck with some error and I have 2 possibilities… downgrade to the last version of the previous branch which should built, or work the current branch (more dependency demanding). I’m working on it… it will happen one way or another during the next days. I guess this one is actually one of the most wanted 🙂

There are few other indicators… for time and date, calendar and so on… Those will be last ones. After indicator-sound is done, I’m starting to clean up the packaging and make sure it’s compliant to the GNOME team methodology and submit them to GNOME:Apps and the support libraries that are required as dependencies forwarded to projects where they might be useful (need to check out with the people which ones those will be).

A special thanks to Ken Vandine from Canonical for some guidance with libindicate. I’ve seen around some ‘hate’ waves towards Canonical, and I would like to say that so far in the few times I’ve interacted with them, either on bug submission or asking help, they have been awesome and caring. It’s really something I would like to point… they are pretty cool, and their devs are very helpful (but hey… so are our devs 😉 ).

Also a very special thanks to Vincent Untz, Dimstar and mrdocs which have been a great help and from whom I’ve learned already a lot.

So picking up the useful stuff… and placing it up together in a single Indicator: