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[doldaconnect.git] / doc / INSTALL.applet

		      GNOME Applet Installation

Because of how  GNOME works, special care is  required when installing
the transfer monitor  applet. The problem lies in  the fact that GNOME
only looks for applets in  certain directories, which usually does not
/usr/local, whither Dolda Connect installs by default.

A  GNOME applet  is a  CORBA server,  which must  be found  by GNOME's
Bonobo activation  daemon.  By  default, the Bonobo  activation daemon
looks in lib/bonobo/servers inside  its own installation prefix. Since
GNOME   is   usually   installed    in   /usr,   that   would   become
/usr/lib/bonobo/servers on most systems,  but it needs not necessarily
be, and some systems have GNOME installed in /opt.

Since the default  prefix for autoconf programs such  as Dolda Connect
is /usr/local, the server  description file installed by Dolda Connect
will not be found by the  Bonobo activation daemon. There are a number
of ways to fix this:

1. Install Dolda Connect  in /usr.  This is ugly  and not recommended,
since /usr  is normally  reserved for programs  shipped by  the system
maintainers. It  does work, though,  and it is  easy. To do  that, run
./configure with a `--prefix=/usr' argument.

2. Move the  applet files  only to /usr  after normal  installation in
/usr/local. This,  too, is ugly and  not recommended, but  it might be
considered slightly less ugly than #1, since the bulk of Dolda Connect
still     resides    in    /usr/local.      To    do     that,    move
/usr/local/libexec/dolcon-trans-applet     to     /usr/libexec,    and
/usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers/Dolcon_Transferapplet_Factory.server  to
/usr/lib/bonobo/servers. Then, edit the  latter file and replace every
instance of /usr/local with /usr.

3. Add /usr/local to your  system's GNOME prefixes.  Doing so involves
setting    the   environment    variable   GNOME2_PATH    to   include
/usr/local. How  to do that differs  from system to system,  and it is
not possible  for this  document to contain  information on how  to do
that on  any given system.  It is probably  by far the  best solution,
however.

4. Add /usr/local  to your user  profile's GNOME prefixes.   As above,
this  involves setting GNOME2_PATH  to include  /usr/local, but  it is
quite easy to do so  in your own ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile instead
of editing the system-wide configuration.  It is also the best idea if
you have  installed Dolda  Connect in your  own home  directory rather
than in /usr/local. Again, though,  the exact steps to do this differs
from system  to system and  also depend on  what shell you use.  It is
extra noteworthy,  however, that Ubuntu  users may have  rather severe
problems with this [1].

Remember,  always  after changing  the  system  of  user profile  with
regards to environment  variables, you would need to  log out and back
in again to get the changes  in all processes. It is of note, however,
that the Bonobo activation daemon sometimes linger, and therefore does
not get  restarted when logging back  in again. If  this happens, just
kill  it (with  `killall  bonobo-activation-server'), and  it will  be
restarted from a process having the correct environment.

		       Additional applet notes

The applet is mostly working, but it still does have a few things that
remain to be implemented. First  of all, it only handles password-less
authentication,  so a  setup  using  PAM will  not  work. Unix  socket
authentication,    `authless'    authentication    and   Kerberos    V
authentication all work, however.  Last, there is no preference dialog
to set  which Dolda Connect server to  connect to. If you  run a local
server using  Unix sockets, it will  not be a  problem. Otherwise, you
need to use the DCSERVER  environment variable to specify which server
to connect to.

[1] See <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/66004> for details.



This document  was last updated 2007-05-02, reflecting  release 0.4 of
Dolda Connect.