Gaveen's Blog

If you know me personally, then you know that I'm a big fan of GNOME Do. As a keyboard savvy person I use Do extensively. Do is an application launcher similar to the Mac app Quicksilver. However the GNOME Do team has been putting a lot of research and development into it from the initiation. Result: probably the best application launcher out there for any platform.

Some months ago, Do included an interesting theme called Docky which made the launcher acts as a dock (a la Mac, Avant, Cairo Dock, etc.). With the integration of GNOME Do, there's no need to say that Docky was super cool. And it started gaining features in a high speed. Ultimately Docky was getting so developed that it became a separate project.

Installing GNOME Do on a Fedora system is as easy as:

There are some packages with the names starting from gnome-do-plugins*. With the addition of these GNOME Do can truly enhance your desktop experience. Give it a fair try, I'm pretty sure you'll be impressed.

However installing Docky on Fedora is a different story. So here I am having being fiddling with Mono tools for a hour or two and successfully installed Docky, to help you.

I started with the above linked guide, found some info on the Net and had to figure out a few things for myself. So I'm taking some fine information from the respective sources, as usual. :)

Note: BTW, I tried this on my Fedora 13 system. I believe for closer Fedora releases should also behave similarly. My intention was to get Docky running. So if your Mono development environment breaks, don't blame me. ;)

This step is not listed in the official guide. But since Fedora doesn't have the "gio-sharp" package in the repos, you'll need to build it from source, install and configure a few things.

For the simplicity let's assume that you are fetching the Gio# source to your home directory.

This command will fetch the source code of Gio# and place it in a directory named "gio-sharp". Alternatively you can instead use:

Change into the directory with the Gio# code and compile.

There should be a file with a name similar to autogen-X.YZ.sh. In my case it was "autogen-2.22.sh". Run it like:

Give the root password when prompted and it'll be installed.

In order to build Docky properly we need to set a couple of Environment Variables. We can do this inside a configuration file such as ~/.bash_profile. (To set proper variables system-side you can use a file like /etc/profile)

Open the ~/.bash_profile file in your favourite text editor. Mine's Vim. :)

Enter these lines in the file

If you look carefully you'll noticed that what we set as MONO_PATH is the location where the gio-sharp.dll file was installed after the compilation.

Finally we need to either log out and log in to the system or run the following command:

Now you are ready to compile and run Docky.

Go to the directory with the Docky source (i.e. docky directory from Step 4)

Then run the configure and make commands:

Now that you have Docky installed you may want to add it the startup programs. However make sure you try it first. Just run from any terminal

And enjoy your work.

As you saw we a couple of unpackaged software at our hand, namely Gio# and Docky. You might even ask me to maintain those packages for Fedora. While I'm actually working towards becoming a Fedora package maintainer, I'm not sure I want to package Gio#. Someone who knows her/his way around the Mono dev environment should be better take care of it rather than me.

Anyway, I've written this down quickly after finishing my installation. So there might be mistakes. Let me know if you bump into a mistake done by me while writing thing. You can alway use the official guide as the baseline.

The original version which came out in 2008 had already seen quite a following and so had the version 2 which was released in 2009. To be honest, I've not played any of the versions. But from what I've heard both had special competitions organized to promote giving away prizes including mobile phones.

Gihan now informs that the 3rd incarnation of the popular game named "Colombo Ride 3D" is ready to hit the shelves (I mean your phones) in July. In fact there's a competition going on to promote the new launch, which will giveaway a shiny Nokia 5230 phone for the winner plus many consolation prizes. So read the rest of the post and then head directly to the website to find out about the prizes. :)

What we hear is that the UI would be in Sinhala and there's also a voice instructor to point the player to the destination. The popular commentator and presenter Palitha Perera is to be that voice.

Players would be delighted to hear that the multi player mode is available as in the version 2 plus with the option to select the vehicle from a different choices, including the police car. This reminds me of the old PC classic GTA2 (minus the thieving, mugging and shooting). ;)

Well, I as maintain I haven't played much mobile games. But this seems to be a good time to play some. I'm guessing it'll be fun to drive (virtually) through the familiar road of Colombo and find popular locations. The setting alone must make it full of fun. So if you couldn't race by BMICH with your friend, this might be a chance for you.

So you might be wondering why I posted this article. Although I'm a bit of a gamer once in a while (big fan of Quake, Doom, Half-Life franchises) I've not posted game related stuff much. So why indeed? Simple. To applaud the efforts by a Sri Lankan company and to create a little buzz for them. It's always interesting to see us pushing the borders. I happen to know about the production, so I though to give a shoutout.

Now you can head to http://games.lk/ to find more about the promotion. And, is it's heard that a competition is planned for once the game is out in the wild.