Note: An updated version of these instructions can be found on the Ubuntu page.

Can we get rid of ROX-Session? It should be possible to integrate ROX with your existing session manager. In this experiment, I configure a fresh Ubuntu installation to run ROX, without using ROX-Session.

Following on from the work to allow adding ROX applications to the Xfce panel, I've created Zero2Desktop. This adds a launcher for any Zero Install application to the GNOME or KDE Applications menu. To run it:

Having Zero Install check for updates once a month or so is handy, as it keeps you up-to-date, but it's pretty annoying that you have to wait for the check just when you're trying to start a program. Especially if there aren't any updates available anyway! I've just committed some new code to do the checking in the background, using the D-BUS notification daemon to let you know if there are updates. This screenshot shows what happens when I run Inkscape:

I've made the first release of 0publish-gui today. This is a GTK utility for creating and editing Zero Install feeds. This should make it a lot easier to get started. Here's a tutorial with lots of screenshots. Have fun!

I've been doing some work on the GUI for 0compile, used to build programs from source. Here are some screen-shots showing how we can download and compile ROX-CLib.

Summary:
A utility for checking dependencies of other ROX utilities.

Current stable version:
0.0.2

Home page:
http://www.kerofin.demon.co.uk/rox/depend.html

Primary author(s):
Stephen Watson

ROX-Session can automatically start certain applications or daemons for you (e.g. xscreensaver, gkrellm, deskmenu, etc.).

Bring up the menu over ROX-Session's icon (the EXIT sign) and choose Auto Start... to open the AutoStart directory.

You can either create a small shell script directly in this location or create a link to the executable file.

For example:

#!/bin/sh
exec gkrellm2

If the application does not automatically run in the background it may stop ROX-Session from loading. In this case be sure to force it to run as a background task thus:

I've tried installing Klik twice in the past, but the site was down both times. A osnews.com article prompted me to try it again and this time I got it installed.

Klik's main advantage over Zero Install is the large number of packages available for it. Its main disadvantage is that it's totally insecure. However, I've written klik2zero, a little Python script that creates Zero Install packages automatically from Klik ones.

I spent a bit of time this weekend hacking on the Xfce panel. The result is that you can now install programs by dragging a URL from a web-browser into the Xfce panel's launcher dialog (much as ROX users do with AddApp). This makes it easy to put ROX applications into your panel; just drag the links from the Zero Install software index to the dialog, as in this screenshot:

When you run a launcher from the ROX-All package, or a launcher created by AddApp, you are just executing a small script of the form (for ROX-Filer, in this example):

0launch http://rox.sourceforge.net/2005/interfaces/ROX-Filer

What does this do?