In the previous article we fixed gdesklets so that it would work on a 64 bit install. However most of the better eye candy widgets in my honest opinion are screenlets. Although installation of screenlets are pretty easy getting them to run on your machine might not be as easy. The usual error that many get is “Unable to connect or launch daemon. Some values may be displayed incorrectly.” Let try some methods of correcting this.
An easy way to describe a screenlet is basically a gdesklet with much more appealing eye candy. Although the back end/coding might be vastly different, that is way beyond my understanding at this point. Anyway below I have posted a screenshot of a couple of screenlets I have installed on my system.
These two screenlets do not come by default with the screenlet package but can be downloaded from www.gnome-look.org . lets first install screenlets on our system. To do that, enter the command below in a terminal.
sudo apt-get install screenlets
Once you have that done you can access the Screenlet Manager by going to System > Preferences > Screenlets. This should open the Screenlet Manager and most likely if you have a similar setup to mine you will get the error “Unable to connect or launch daemon. Some values may be displayed incorrectly”. There are several options you can try at this point. First you could go to System > Preferences > Screenlets and then add the following startup program /usr/local/share/screenlets-manager/screenlets-daemon.py . What we do is basically point to the program for the screenlet daemon here. Restart your computer and try again and it should be working. If you still get the error message close screenlet-manager and open it again and you will see that it doesn’t come up after that for some weird reason.
Another problem some might face is getting their Screenlets to start. Although I haven’t found an elegant solution towards this problem. I found that you can work around this by adding each Screenlet you use in the Sessions screen like we did before. To do this you would basically go to System > Preferences > Sessions . Now click on Add and then browse to the folder /usr/local/share/screenlets and then select the screenlet you run.
If the screenlet was a screenlet that you downloaded from one of the other sites like the one mentioned above then you would go to System > Preferences > Sessions and right click on the Window that comes up and select View hidden files. Now go to the folder “.screenlets” and into the screenlet folder that you want and select the program you need to use. This should add the Screenlet you run when starting up.
Furthermore if you use the Widget Layer option in Compiz then you can set your Screenlets to Toggle your view in such a way that you can see the Widgets while holding down a key. First of all for this to work you need to have compiz active. Then you need to install the compizconfig-settings-manager. You can install the package by running the command.
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
After you have installed that, go to the System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effect Settings option and Select the Widget Layer Option and then Click on Widget Layer which is shown in the screenshot below.
Now go to the behavior tab and then enter “name=Screenlet.py” (without the quotes) in the box that says “Widget Windows” . Now press the key F9 and you should see that it toggles between your desktop and Widgets when you hold down the key.
Here is the thread that I referenced for fixing my problems.
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