Sunday, October 05, 2008

Gmail-notify on EeePC

If you download Gmail-notify from here, untar and try to start with ./notifier.py, it will error out.
However, you can get it to work following the tip in this post (this assumes the .tar.gz was downloaded to /home/user/):
1. Replacing all instances of

sys.path[0]+"

in /home/user/gmail-notify/GmailConfig.py by
"/home/user/gmail-notify

2. Make the very same replacement in /home/user/gmail-notify/notifier.py
3. Copy /home/user/gmail-notify/gmail-notify-icon.png to
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gtk-2.0/
with this command
sudo cp /home/user/gmail-notify/gmail-notify-icon.png /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gtk-2.0/

Now you can start it from the /home/user/gmail-notify directory with ./notifier.py

However, to get Gmail-notifier to start at boot requires quite a bit more work. Unfortunately, it's a lot more than symlinking the start command into ~/.kde/Autostart.
When I did this, I kept getting a "Login data incorrect" or something close to that. Aparently this is a bug although I have never seen it or heard about it in relation to any other distro.
I used this post to get over this problem. However, I had to do an awful lot more than is mentioned in this guide.
Even after fixing this however, the app fails to start at boot because the wireless internet has not yet connected (although once again I don't have this problem in any other distro). This thread outlines what to do to get an app to launch immediately the network connection is made.

Here are the steps required:

1. Replace every instance of "gmailusername" with "yourusername" in both /home/user/gmail-notify/GmailConfig.py and /home/user/gmail-notify/notifier.py
2. Create a file called /etc/network/if-up.d/mynetstart and put this in it:
#! /bin/bash

export DISPLAY=:0.0

MYNETSTART=/home/user/.network-autostart

if [ -x $MYNETSTART ]; then
su -c "$MYNETSTART" user
fi

3. Now make another file /home/user/.network-autostart and place this inside it
#! /bin/bash

if [ -z `pgrep python` ]; then
/home/user/gmail-notify/./notifier.py &
fi

4. Make both these files executable with these commands:
sudo chmod a+x /etc/network/if-up.d/mynetstart

sudo chmod a+x /home/user/.network-autostart

5. Reboot and enjoy

Note that the files /etc/network/if-up.d/mynetstart and /home/user/.network-autostart contain your Gmail password which could be a vulnerability.

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