OpenSolaris: Installing gnome-launch-box
Mark your calendars, for 12 August 2009 deserves to be remembered for all eternity. At least it was an important day for me. Because one thing that I was missing on OpenSolaris and in the GNOME desktop environment was GNOME-DO. This application was one of many that truly made me efficient in a GNU/Linux environment. It is unfortunate though that a package of it does not exist in OpenSolaris. Even when installing Mono (pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib) and all the necessary components, I still had problems building the package. One day I may revisit that but in the meantime I decided to concentrate on building and installing the gnome-launch-box. For the most part, gnome-launch-box will do all that I really need it to do.
Going through the build process was no easy task as I was constantly bombarded with errors. It took almost a couple of hours of troubleshooting and research to finally get it to work. Below is a rough guide of the steps I took to install gnome-launch-box.
First and foremost I downloaded the latest build (version 0.4) and extracted its contents. In order to build and install the application, please verify that the following packages have been installed (verified in build 111b/2009.06 and build 118/2010.02):
- sunstudio12u1
- SUNWgnu-gettext
- SUNWgnome-common-devel
- SUNWxorg-headers
- SUNWgmake
Navigate to the directory where the extracted contents exist and type the following lines. If you don’t the make process will invoke unresolved symbol errors.
petros@opensolaris:~/Downloads/gnome-launch-box-0.4$ LIBS="-lsocket -lnsl" |
All the installed application need to be accessible in your current PATH. Run the configure script, gmake and the pfexec gmake install so that it can install the binary into /usr/local/bin/. Verify that the install path is set to your current path (~/.profile) and from the command line you can initiate the binary by its name:
petros@opensolaris:~/Downloads/gnome-launch-box-0.4$ gnome-launch-box |
No matter how many times you call on the binary, it utilizes one and the same PID. If I do not need it I hit ESC or when I launch an application, it closes (into the background). This is a great feature and makes it easier on the system when I configure various hotkeys to launch application. For example, you can install the SUNWgnome-config-editor package so that you can use the gconf-editor to enable hotkey functions in /apps/metacity/global_keybindings and /apps/metacity/keybinding commands (in my case, <Control><Shift>q invokes the application). Here are some images of gnome-launch-box running on my desktop:
