Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

Well I couldn’t post anything yesterday cause I was rather busy reinstalling Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon after running a package called startup manager on it to fix my usplash. I should have known better not to try to fix something that didn’t work with the LiveCD anyway. Nonetheless after the reinstall I wanted to use gDesklets but I couldn’t get it to run after installing it. For some reason it wouldn’t connect to the daemon. Anyway with the help of some posts on the forum I found out what you could do to get them to work again.

gDesklets is a package that adds widgets to your desktop you can see a calendar desklet added to my desktop in the picture below.

Before you being let me start by saying that this is for 64 bit users only I havent confirmed this on a 32 bit install.

You can add gDesklets by installing the packages gdesklets and gdesklets-data whih cna be installed using the following code.
sudo apt-get install gdesklets
sudo apt-get install gdesklets-data

Or you could select the package gdesklets through synaptic and it should install the other one by itself. Once you have done that if you go to Applications > Accessories >gDesklets and open it. However for some people especially those who are on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 64 bit versions will see that the screen that pops up becomes non-responsive and just sits there. What is happening here at this point is that gDesklets use Python to run and the default version included with Gutsy is Python 2.5. From my understanding gDesklets doesnt work well with Python 2.5 and requires Python 2.4 to run. You can install python 2.4 using the command.
sudo apt-get install python2.4

After installing Pythong 2.4 I thought that gDesklets would work but it didn’t. It still seemed to give the same error. If you were to start it from the terminal using the command gdesklets. It would just say connecting to the gdesklets-daemon and then time out. The error message that comes up is given below.

Starting gdesklets-daemon…
Cannot establish connection to daemon: timeout!

In order to get around this I had to open up the following files.
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-shell
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-daemon
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-migration-tool

And then change the first line which says
#! /usr/bin/env python

To the following line
#! /usr/bin/env python2.4

After saving the above changes. I was now able to open gDesklets. But again I later found that as long as you use gDesklets which are not related to hardware monitoring are fine. However if you use gDesklets that monitor any hardware component like your memory or processor you get the following error when trying to add them.

No Control could be found for interface ISystem
This means that a functionality won’t be available during execution!

At this point Im pulling out the last hairs I have on my head so I keep on searching till I find out that theres a deb package created by Dizzi on the Ubuntu forums which can be found here.

You can download the package and then double click on it to open it and then install it. After installing the package I tried gDesklets and now it works like a charm. Heres a picture of one of one working on my Desktop.

Here is the main thread that I used to fix my problem on gDesklets hopefully this can help you on your install too.