Monday, October 24, 2011

Unity on Ubuntu 11.10 and no clock / date applet


When I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 I wanted date and time on my indicator panel, without the Evolution resource hogs that are dependencies of the standard Ubuntu 11.10 clock indicator. Since the Evolution calendar has (had?) a major memory leak in 11.04 when used with Google Calendars I stopped using Evolution and uninstalled it. Unfortunately I found the clock was impossible to use without the leaky Evo data server. And worse still, I was unable to find any clock indicator that was compatible with the new appindicator standard. So I had no way of knowing how late I was working beyond how dark it was outside. 
So here is my first attempt at an appindicator (or even writing Python code). It is inspired by Mark Bokil and his "show desktop indicator' (via http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/show-desktop-indicator-for-ubuntu-quick.html#more )
You'll need to install wmctrl first, then run the display-indicator.py file below (which I chmod'ed and added to started applications)
sudo apt-get install wmctrl