Day: March 15, 2008

We recently bought a new laptop. The old one was starting to show signs of age and it was time to put it out to pasture. The new shininess is a Dell Inspiron 1525. It came with Vista but since I refuse to have anything to do with that devil-spawned OS, I decided to go to the next level of geekdom and install linux.

It's been an experience.

First challenge is that this laptop is dual-core, so I decided to install the 64 bit distribution of SuSE. I have to say that, overall, I'm impressed. Linux still has a bit of work to do though because I don't see Joe User recompiling parts of the kernel to get network card drivers to work. But I did it. And I loved it :D

The shininess is now up and running and is almost as I want it. I still need to install a few more apps on it, but once that's done, I'll be in nerd heaven.

One of the things I miss in linux was the windows Gmail notifier. There is a linux version, written in Python, but it wasn't working in a 64 bit distribution. If you tried to run it out of the box, you would get the dreaded “wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32” exception, because the distributed shared object to create a tray icon was compiled in 32 bits. If you tried to grab another version compiled in 64 bits, you now got the “undefined symbol: Py_InitModule4” error, which was caused because some file headers were redefined and renamed to avoid conflicts (sic!) in 64 bits. I was going nuts at this point, because I am most certainly not a Python programmer. But I still managed to find a fix, before everybody else on the net, woohoo!

A simple cure in 3 easy steps

1. get package python-gnome2-extras
2. change a few lines in notify.py as described below:

#comment out the pytrayicon import and import egg and egg.trayicon
#import pytrayicon
import egg
import egg.trayicon

#change the way the tray object is built
#create the tray icon object
#self.tray = pytrayicon.TrayIcon(self.lang.get_string(21));
self.tray = egg.trayicon.TrayIcon(self.lang.get_string(21));

3. enjoy!

Works like a charm :D

This makes me go squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!