After much work, the first version of the Activate Orbiter Plasmoid has been uploaded into SVN.
It is a plasmoid for the KDE 4 desktop present in LinuxMCE 0810, so that we finally have a clean way to get back to the orbiter from the KDE Desktop!
Here is a screenshot, placed on the workspace desktop at the lower right:
http://www.localeconcept.com/pub/new_orbiter_plasmoid.png
Since it is a Plasmoid, you can place the applet:
* on the workspace desktop
* on the widget dashboard
* on any panel
It is a pseudo DCE device, in the same category as MessageSend and the Launch Manager in that it has a template in DCE's schema, but it does not reside in the device tree of the system. It connects with DCE router, and sends KEEPALIVE packets so that the connection is maintained, and it activates the orbiter when pressed.
There are two buglets that remain:
* the device does not respawn quite right, and plasma gets a little wonky on router reloads, crashing the whole desktop when things reload, the first time. The second time, the device does not attempt to respawn itself, and plasma stops entirely.
* There needs to be a singleton pattern implemented so that if a user wants multiple versions of the update orbiter plasmoid on desktop, then any instances besides the first one will use the socket connection of the first one.
For now, DO NOT LAUNCH MORE THAN ONE. THEY WILL WORK, BUT THEY WILL INEFFICIENTLY LAUNCH A SOCKET TO THE SERVER FOR EACH ONE. MESSY. UGH.A note to Martino (massabuntu), thank you for your attempt at writing the very first version of the plugin in Ruby. I decided that since things were going to get messy and grafting the necessary automatic orbiter detection stuff onto ruby would be too difficult, I rewrote the entire plasmoid as a C++ application that links to the DCE libraries and uses them manually. This way, we could automatically get the correct device numbers of the on screen orbiters automatically, no matter if it was used on the core, or any media directors.Anyway, it's here for a first try, I hope you all enjoy using it.
-Thom
