Experimental GNOME desktop integration

[probono]

Experimental GNOME desktop integration is available at http://portablelinuxapps.org/packages/

This *should* ask the user whether he wants to mark an AppImage as executable when downloaded, and put it in the menu.

Like demonstrated here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoe7l-LF0jg

The deb *should* work on recent versions of

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• Linux Mint

The rpm *should* work on recent versions of

• Fedora (tested: 13 and 14)
• MeeGo (tested: 1.1 Netbook)
• openSUSE (tested: 12.4)

Prerequisites:

• FUSE installed and working for the user (modprobe fuse, have libfuse* and fusermount installed)
• GNOME or other environment that honors $HOME/.local/share/applications and $HOME/.thumbnails
• pyinotify installed and working (maybe we should bundle our own - MeeGo seems to lack it)

Notes:
This is very new and hardly tested, so things marked as "should" might not work properly yet without manual fine tuning. Please make suggestions here how the packages could be improved so that no manual intervention is needed anymore.

[probono]

The following has been tested on MeeGo Netbook 1.1 (Chromium edition, NOT Google Chrome edition).

Caution: Save you work before you do this since this will restart the MeeGo GUI and all running apps.

Code: Select all

# Press Alt-F2, enter "terminal", press enter (you should get to a command line)
curl http://portablelinuxapps.org/packages/rpm/appimaged/appimaged-0.1-2.i386.rpm > appimaged-0.1-2.i386.rpm
su 
# Enter password, default is "meego"
rpm -ivh appimaged-0.1-2.i386.rpm
killall Xorg


The MeeGo GUI restarts. After that, AppImage desktop integration should be working. Try downloading e.g., Viewnior from http://portablelinuxapps.org/ - after the download has finished, you should get a dialog asking whether you want to make the app executable and put it into the menu. If you answer with "Yes", then the app will be visible in the menu (you can access it with Alt-F2).

[probono]

On Fedora 13 and 14 it works almost the same, just use gnome-terminal after pressing F2.

Or you can just use the GUI tool to install the package. Don't forget to log out of the GNOME session for the changes to take effect.

[probono]

It looks like the same desktop integration works also for KDE4 with minor changes: under KDE4, one needs to run kbuildsycoca4 for the menu to be updated.

We can know that we run KDE4 by checking for the KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4 environment variable. So I guess we should have AppImageKit run kbuildsycoca4 whenever a desktop file is installed if the KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4 environment variable is present and KDE_FULL_SESSION is not empty.

[Tomonomonous]

would it be a good idea to have it move the file to /Applications, also?

[probono]

Here's my current thinking:
Depending on what rights /Applications gets (as decided by the system administrator), the normal user will not be allowed to store things there. Since the appimaged daemon runs as normal user (without root rights), it might not be able to move apps to that location.

I'm open for feedback and suggestions on this.

[Tomonomonous]

perhaps when the dialogue comes up it could say something like:
"it appears you've downloaded [application name], would you like to make it executable and move it to the applications folder?"
then it would request a password for moving to /Applications. meanwhile the daemon should just add any applications that are in /Applications to the menu.