MindlessCode.net

I’m writing this from pico because a) uninstalling Dropline totally broke my system, and b) links/lynx doesn’t let me log into WordPress.

I read a great article in the Linux Journal a few days ago about hardware under Linux by Robert Love. Everyone knows that getting hardware to work under Linux is not fun. I know myself because I have a very hard time getting my PCMCIA Belkin Wireless card to work every time I recompile my kernel–it drives me nuts!

In the article, Robert talks about a “Hardware Utopia” in which you plug in your digital camera and you’re asked if you want to download photos, you put a DVD into your CD/DVD drive, and it starts playing, or you plug in a USB Memory stick and it is automatically mounted and opened in Nautilus/Konqueror.

Now, doesn’t that sound great? It would be even better if it was true, right? That’s the best part? It is! Now, you’re going to say “No, it’s not–my Linux box doesn’t do that!” You’re probably right, it doesn’t. You need a 2.6 Kernel, HAL, DBUS, and Gnome 2.10. It’s too bad that I’m on a 2.4 kernel with KDE 3.4.

But still, it was pretty cool the way it works. You plug in a USB device, HAL uses DBUS to notify everyone that a device of a certain type was plugged in, and gnome-volume-manager then picks up the message and interacts with the user (e.g., starts playing a CD, downloads photos from your digital camera, etc).

After Dropline gets removed from my computer (and after I get some more spare time), I plan to try and port gnome-volume-manager to KDE. I realized that if I wasn’t going to fork the code base and create an independent “kde-volume-manager” I would need to be some easy and clean way to start the proper program based on what Desktop Environment was running.

My idea was to create a library that would return the proper application to run to handle using a device. For example, when a DVD is inserted, the program would call get_application_handler(”play-dvd”). If Gnome was running, the library would return “/usr/bin/totem dvd:/”. If KDE was running, it would return “/opt/kde/bin/okle /dev/dvd”.

The only problem with what I described there is that it isn’t very flexable. You can’t set your own favorite handlers. The solution: Have users define their own profiles. You create your profile by dragging-and-dropping .desktop files to a GUI or by editing a XML file. The library then uses your profile when a) it is selected to be the default, or b) when a shell command returns true. For example, in the KDE profile, the command would be `ps ax | grep -cs “[ ]kwin”` (returns true if KDE is running).

The advantage of having a library like this is that suddenly GNOME and KDE applications will standardize their configuration on preferred application handlers. The important thing to remember is that this is not a replacement for the MIME-type database! It is, however, a replacement for `gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command` (replacement: get_application_handler(”http”)) and the like.

Any comments on this? It might be a pipe dream, never to come true–but if anyone is interested in helping implement this please drop me a line and we can discuss it more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.