Rainlendar Desktop Calendar

When I was using Windows XP, I had Webshots manage my Wallpaper. One of the features of Webshots was to display the calendar on the Desktop. Additionally, I also displayed my to-do list (and a short phone list) on my desktop using Windows’ Active Desktop Feature. Read about it here and here

When I moved to Linux (Ubuntu specifically) I needed similar functionality.  I came across kdesktopweb, but I use gnome, so it was not an option. I also looked at conky, but doesn’t look as polished, as Windows’ equivalent. Enter Rainlendar

As the Website mentions, Rainlendar is a customizable desktop calendar. It works on Windows, Linux as well as Mac OS X.  For Linux, it supports Debian/Ubuntu natively as .deb files, other distro will need to use tar.gz files.

Installation

Installing Rainlendar is pretty straight forward  (Isn’t everything on Linux these days ? ) I downloaded the .deb file. Firefox is smart enough to determine that this is installation file, and invoked the installer. It needed two more packages (tofromdos and patch) Depending on your setup it may need more or less additional packages. On Debian based system like Ubuntu, this is least of the concern, If you have an active internet connection, the additional packages wille be downloaded and installed for you.

After the installation is complete, you will see an additional entry titled Rainlendar2 under Applications->Office.

Calendar

Rainlendar displays a monthly calendar. It also has an option to show multiple months at-a-glance, as well as an yearly calendar showing all the twelve months of current calendar year.  It is configured with a Default Calendar, but you can add more calendars like personal, business (you can name them anything). The fee version supports only iCalendar file format, that too for local files. Pro version supports more rich calendaring functionality like sharing the calendar, as well as support for Google Calendar.

Right clicking on the calendar brings up a menu. Here you can do operations like choosing which windows to display. It shows monthly calendar, an empty to do list and events list by default.Since I did not have any appointments set at the time, I turned off the Events Window.  If you have multiple calendars, you can choose which calendars to display on the desktop. Similarly you can also choose to view previous/next months or any specific month of the current calendar year.

Rainlendar To Do List

Events and To do

Adding new events and tasks was as simple as clicking on the TODO or EVENTS Window. You get a dialog box that allows you to fill in the details. One caveat, if you created an task for a future date, it won’t appear in your to-do list. e.g. I need to send status report every weekend, so I created a recurring task for this. But it did not appear in my to-do list till Friday.

Skinning

Rainlendar ships with two skins. Shadow4 which is the default skin and Chromophore.  You can change the skins by Right Click->Options->Skins tab. Shadow4 has lot of Widgets like Weather RSS, TV to name a few. It also has an option to display the contents of a text file. This could be very useful to display things like Plan of the Week, but this feature appears unstable. Rainlendar crashed several times, when Files Widget was enabled. Once I removed the Files Widget, it appears to be stable.

Other Skin Chromophore is much more simpler. Here you can choose the color of the Rainlendar displays. The Brown color gels well with default Brown theme of Ubuntu. Since I have switched to Clearlooks, and blue wallpaper, I chose the Blue theme for Chromophore.

To sum it up,  one can say that Rainlendar is  a decent replacement for Desktop Calendar, and To-Do list on the desktop.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rainlendar Features (rainlendar.com)
• Keep on track with digital reminders (macworld.com)

Image via Wikipedia

If you are not sure what is Gnome Do, read my previous post on this topic. Ubuntu 8.10 repositories has older version 0.6.0.1 of Gnome-DO. This was probably released around October 2008 time frame when Ubuntu 8.10 was released. It has been several months since then, and Gnome DO has progressed nicely.

If you want to try the latest version of Gnome DO, which now comes with Docky, then read on How to upgrade to latest version.

Remove the existing version

Although update might work after adding coorect sources, it was adviced (on various ubuntu forums) that removing exisitng version is better. Use following command.

sudo aptitude purge gnome-do gnome-do-plugins gnome-do-plugin-rhythmbox

Add new sources

You need to add what is  called PPA – Personal Package Archive. This is where newer packages, which aren’t yet approved by Ubuntu are available. In simpler terms, this are additional Software Sources.

1. Go to System->Administration->Software Sources
2. Third party software Tab, Add, copy following line one by one. (Create two entries)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Install

1. System->Administration->Synaptic package manager
2. Click on Not installed from left hand side, then type gnome do in the search box.
3. Select gnome-do (it will also add gnome-do plugins) Click Apply, and wait for the installation to complete.
4. Once done, go to Applications->accesories->Gnome Do.

Docky still not available ?

So far so good,  But I wanted to install Docky. As per the instructions, I was supposed to select Docky theme. But there was an error that I had not enabled composting.

Since I had four years old machine, I had turned off all the effects, I thought I won’t be able to use Docky, after all. But apparently one can enable composting without having latest and greatest graphics card.

Follow this link to Enable Composting in metacity

• I have already downloaded knoppix 3.9 LiveCD ISO image.
• I have got hold of the Remastering Howto , and now all ready to go ahead with my changes.

While I was doing this research, I came across an invaluable tool called qemu. This is open source CPU and system emulator. Without going into too many details about QEMU (which I’m sure you can find out from google) what I want to stress is how easy it is to use.

I downloaded qemu windows installer from here. Installation itself is very trivial, just asks for install folder, and then it copies files there. Thats it. I had couple of LiveCDs burned on CD as well as their ISO images. To boot each ISO image all I had to do was run following command from the command prompt:

qemu.exe -L bios -cdrom //./e:

Where E: is my CD ROM Drive. I had put the LiveCD in the CDROM and qemu booted from the drive. Similarly instead of using actual CD (which seems a little slower, due to I/O speed of CD drive) I can also point to ISO image directly. like:

qemu.exe -L bios -cdrom D:downloadDamnSmallLinux-1.4.iso

I tried DSL 1.4, Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD as well as OneBase NetInstaller CD using Qemu. All of them worked very well. Off course, typical to each of these distro, they took less (DSL) or more (ubuntu) time to boot.

One annoying thing I noticed during my experimentation is that when using mouse pointer in ubuntu, qemu goes into what it calls grab mode. Title of the window changes to Press Ctrl+Alt to exit grab I’m not sure if there are any side effects of this (I didn’t notice any, during short time I played with qemu) but it is annoying none the less.

Thats all for now, about qemu. I’ll continue to post about my progess with free version of DevelopGo, in coming days, and any tools like qemu, that I might encounter.

Update ( Dec 2008) : I didn’t get around to much of remastering of knopix, but I definitely found a tool that I continued to use for testing latest versions of various linux distros.

Originally Publised on : Sep 6, 2005