Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Using the Places module (or Gadget) in e17 or enlightenment

Apparently the new version of the enlightenment window manager (called e17 as of now) trys to use udisks instead of hal. But some of the modules, such as Places, have not been updated to use udisks yet.

So, if you load the "Places" module, and then add the Places gadget to, say, your bottom shelf in enlightenment, it may look something like this:So it just shows a blank grey area with no Gadget in it. Not to mention that if you plug a usb device in, the Places module will not detect it. So in order to fix this, I did this:

Solution

1) installed the hal daemon from here.
a) if you are using archlinux,
first install cower from the AUR, and then ...
b) cower -d -d hal-git
c) make dependencies first if needed
I only needed hal-info I think
d) cd hal-git
d) makepkg -s
e) sudo pacman -U hal-git-someDateYouBuiltIt-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
2) Then start the hal daemon
For archlinux users, probably # /etc/rc.d/hal start
3) removed the old Places gadget from my shelf
right click the Places gadget
(which is just a blank area) -> Gedget Places -> Remove
4) unloaded the Places module
left click desktop -> settings -> modules -> Places -> unload
5) restarted enlightenment
left click desktop -> enlightenment -> restart
6) reloaded the Places module
left click desktop -> settings -> modules -> Places -> load
7) added the Places gadget to my shelf
left click shelf -> settings -> gadgets -> Places -> add gadget
8) plugged in a usb camera ...
watched it appear as a new device on the shelf ...
inside the Places gadget ... Yay!
9) Right Click Places -> Gadget Places -> Move to -> Desktop

My Places gadget on the desktop now looks like this with a camera plugged into a usb port:
And when I click on it, it opens a file manager, and shows me the files on my camera ... imagine that. Hope this blog post helps get the Places module working on your desktop.

3 comments:

deahl1 said...

Hi, nice post... I am just starting with Arch and E17, and I followed your tutorial but when I get to "/etc/rc.d/hal start" my system says "Command not found"... How can I find out where hal installed?

Vernon Singleton said...

If you are using arch, this might make sense to you:

# pacman -Ql | grep /etc/rc.d/hal
hal-git /etc/rc.d/hal
#

It is a command that I just executed for you, and it shows that the /etc/rc.d/hal file came from the package called hal-git.

If that does not help, feel free email me at the address shown at the top of this blog under "contact me here". Or maybe I will find you in the #e channel on irc.freenode.net.

DJ said...

Hey Vernon,

I'm using Bodhi Linux 1.2 (ubuntu+e17), which has the latest HAL installed, but not running. It is experiencing the same behaviour as you see. When I launch the HAL daemon, and load the places module, I'm getting a segv fault. Ever see this? I'm not compiling from source, like you did. I check the version. and it is the latest one for HAL.

Cheers,