Archive for category Linux

Replace Gnome-Panel with Tint2

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on April 7, 2009

Hey guys, Today we’re going to get rid of gnome-panel and replace it with something much better looking…

Tint2 is a a fully customizable taskbar that can add some more eyecandy to your linux desktop. It features custom color and transparency on fonts, icons, borders and background. It also has a clock you can setup.

To get it, download it from this link. Save it to your desktop and open up a terminal. Type in the following commands to extract and install tint2 (your folders may be different if you downloaded a different version)

cd Desktop/
tar -xvf tint2-0.7-beta1.tar.gz
cd tint2-0.7-beta1.tar.gz/
cd src/
make
sudo make install

After the install, I tried to run it in my terminal and got this error…

tint2: error while loading shared libraries: libImlib2.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This can be fixed by installing the libimlib2 library. You can look for it in synaptic or type

sudo apt-get install libimlib2

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , ,

No Comments

Have Conky Check Your Email!

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on March 5, 2009

So I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t like doing things in my browser that a script can do for me. Woot.com, Stock Quotes and NHL Scores have all been taken care of. Now if only conky could tell me if I have new mail. This would save me from logging in and checking manually…

Thanks to python’s easy to use IMAP library this is a piece of cake. The script should work with any IMAP mail server. I have tested it with my Gmail and Drexel University accounts. Your mail server info should be publicly available. Google has theirs under the gmail settings >> imap/pop3 tab (You may have to enable imap under this tab). Best bet is to search google.

The script shows you the total number of messages in your inbox and the number that are unread.

To get it working edit your .conkyrc file. Add the following line under the TEXT section. Change the path to where your script is

${execi 60 python /path/to/script/imap.py}

This’ll make obsessive email checking much easier…no need to login manually :)

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , ,

7 Comments

Woot.com Item of the Day on your Desktop

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 27, 2009

The first thing I check in my browser everyday is what’s for sale on woot.com. Its a site that features one deal per day and charges 5 bucks for shipping no matter what the product is.

This morning I decided to write a script to stick the deal in my conky. Having it sit on my desktop means one less thing to manually check in my browser :)

If you don’t know what conky is here’s my conky tutorial
I used the same method as I do in the rest of my scripts…set flags around our data, extract the info between the flags and shoot it out to conky.
Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , ,

No Comments

Stock Quotes on your Desktop with Conky

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 27, 2009

I wrote another script today to save me from needing to open up a browser.
The old process for stock quotes was, go to yahoo, type in each stock, get the price.
The new process involves only directing my attention to the bottom right corner of my desktop. All stocks of interest are lined up inside my conky. They auto refresh every 2 minutes for me. I can see the current value, what it opened at, and the change.

If you don’t know what conky is click here for my conky tutorial.

To get it working, download the script and add the following line to your .conkyrc
Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , ,

25 Comments

NHL Scoreboard Right On Your Desktop!

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 10, 2009

I LOVE the Philadelphia Flyers. Any time they play, I need to know the score at least every two minutes. If I’m somewhere without a TV, clicking the refresh button for the scoreboard every two minutes is just too much work. So I made python do the work for me.

The script goes to the Flyers (or any other NHL team) website, pulls out the scoreboard and prints it to the screen. Once you add it to conky you’ll have a scoreboard on your desktop. No need for a browser or clicking that refresh button. When the game is in progress the script will update the score automatically, when it’s not in progress it’ll show the date and time of the next game.

The basic idea of the script is:
Set two flags (one before the scoreboard and one after)
Store the substring between the flags into a variable
Break this substring into tokens (Team name, date, time, etc…)
Each token is displayed as the scoreboard

Side Note:
The bad thing about this script is it’ll break anytime the NHL changes their scoreboards HTML. I’ll try to keep it as updated as possible. If they change the HTML i’ll fix it and upload another version. I doubt they’ll be changing it often though. Also, Im using Python version 2.5.2. I havent tested with any other version

If you don’t know what conky is check out my Conky Tutorial

Theres two things you need to add to your .conkyrc file after you download this script.
1. This should go into the TEXT section of the .conkyrc
120 is the interval in seconds for it to update (so every 2 minutes)
Call python and then your scripts location and your teams name as an argument

${execi 120 python /path/to/your/script.py flyers}

2. This needs to go in the parameter section before TEXT.
If you leave this out the script output will look cut off in conky.

text_buffer_size 512

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , ,

No Comments