Put Widgets/Applets on your desktop with Google Gadgets

Google has officially released Open Source version of it's popular Google Gadgets application on the Linux platform . Google Gadgets allow you to put small interactive applets/applications/widgets on your Linux desktop/sidebar providing host of functionality as well as making your desktop more attractive . A number of open source applications have been available that provide you precisely this functionality like Screenlets , SuperKramaba etc, However they have been somewhat unstable as they are still under development . Google Gadgets is also under development but i found it more stable and friendlier than Screenlets. Also a lot of widgets are available for Google Gadgets that's another plus.

Note : Installation Instructions below have been tried on Ubuntu 8.04 so you might have to change the instructions for earlier versions of Ubuntu.

Google has not released binary packages for Google Gadgets so we would need to download the packages and compile them. Since Ubuntu does not come with any developmental tools pre-installed, we have to install them before we could compile Google Gadgets . To install these developmental tools issue the following command in the terminal window :

sudo apt-get -y install libtool automake autoconf libxul-dev libghc6-mozembed-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libxml2-dev zlib1g-dev xulrunner libgtk2.0-dev libcairo2-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libqt4-dev build-essential spidermonkey-bin libmozjs-dev

Now we need to download Google Gadegts source archive :

wget http://google-gadgets-for-linux.googlecode.com/files/google-gadgets-for-linux-0.9.1.tar.gz

Now we extract the downloaded package :

tar -xvzf google-gadgets-for-linux-0.9.1.tar.gz

Now we need to compile and install Google Gadgets, we could do this with the following commands :

cd google-gadgets-for-linux-0.9.1

and

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

After compilation process is over issue the "ggl-gtk" (For GTK Version of Google Gadgets - For Gnome desktop environment ) or "ggl-qt"(For QT version of Google Gadgets - For KDE Desktop )

Note : There was some problem running the Google Gadgets GTK version dunno for some strange reason it did not show the gadgets. However QT version worked perfectly well. Also i noticed a number of Gadgets did not work :'( .

Google Gadgets Icon

Right Click on Google Gadgets icon this will show a menu , here click on "Add Gadgets " which will open a dialog box similar to one shown below allowing you to add number of Widgets/Gadgets on your desktop.

Finally this is how my desktop looks after adding Google Gadgets .

Google Gadgets Project page : http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/

Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Desktop on Linux Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2008 , Ambuj Varshney

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