GLJohn's Blog A blog containing the odd howto & commentary and analysis of the FOSS legal world, and cliche it may be, My opinion

Ubuntu’s Notify-OSD in Fedora 11

Ok there have been a few posts on compiling notify-osd from source and running it, the methods are usually quick and dirty. This method is completed by installing RPMs and will provide a working notify-osd setup for already compliant programs, such as x-chat. It will also give the ability to use notify-osd for pidgin and for volume osd events. Just to show you on the right is an example of what we are going to achieve. This involves four steps.

Step 1: Be sure that your current pidgin-libnotify plugin is removed

• $ su -c "yum erase pidgin-libnotify"

Step 2: Install Notify-OSD

• Download one of the following (depending on your architecture)
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/notify-osd/notify-osd-0.9.20-1.i586.rpm
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/notify-osd/notify-osd-0.9.20-1.x86_64.rpm
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/notify-osd/notify-osd-0.9.20-1.ppc.rpm
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/notify-osd/notify-osd-0.9.20-1.ppc64.rpm
• Install the rpm with the following command
  • $  su -c "rpm -Uvh [INSERT DOWNLOADED FILENAME HERE]"
• $  cp /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.bak
• Make the new Notify-OSD default service
  • $  su -c "gedit /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service"
  • Change the third line to Exec=/usr/libexec/notify-osd
• Restart X or just reboot.

Step 3: Pidgin Notifications

You should have already uninstalled pidgin-libnotify from step 1. Now it is time to reinstall the patched version that will play nicely with Notify-OSD.

• Download one of the following (depending on your architecture)
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/pidgin-libnotify/pidgin-libnotify-0.14-41.fc11.i586.rpm
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/pidgin-libnotify/pidgin-libnotify-0.14-41.fc11.x86_64.rpm
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/pidgin-libnotify/pidgin-libnotify-0.14-41.fc11.ppc.rpm
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/pidgin-libnotify/pidgin-libnotify-0.14-41.fc11.ppc64.rpm

• Install the rpm with the following command
  • $  su -c "rpm -Uvh [INSERT DOWNLOADED FILENAME HERE]"
• Now open Pidgin and navigate to Tools>Plugins (or hit CTRL + U) and locate the libnotify popups plugin as shown in the screen shot and select it with a tick.



• Now test it out and talk to a friend.

Step 4: Volume

• Download the following
  • http://gljohn.fedorapeople.org/volume-osd/volume-osd-1-1.fc11.noarch.rpm
• Install with $  su -c "rpm -Uvh volume-osd-1-1.fc11.noarch.rpm"
• After navigate to System>Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts
• Add the following custom commands and assign them to the keys you want
  • volume-osd up
  • volume-osd down
  • volume-osd mute
• Please note the three points above are COMMANDS the name field can be anything you wish
• Finally you must click on the right column and assign the specified key by pressing it.

If you have any comments or queries or improvements to either this guide or the spec then please leave a comment!