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