Category: GNOME

For a long time now I’ve been bugged by GNOME Bug 86382.

Recent versions of GNOME have featured a window list applet which behaves badly when situated on a vertical panel (which is where I like to have mine). Older versions were ok except the buttons would expand and contract to make enough vertical space to hold the window title if written vertically, even though the window titles were written horizontally. Recent versions have much worse behaviour where once you get over about 7 windows open the window list will flicker rapidly between displaying in 1 or two columns making it almost impossible to click on the button you want.

There have been various patches attached to the bug, and today I managed to get the latest installed on my Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 machine by building custom .debs for the relevant components. I’m posting exactly what I did here in case it’s useful to anyone who wants to get this patch installed, and also as a general reference for what you need to do to apply a patch and install it using Ubuntu’s (or Debian’s) package management system as a well-behaved package.

The patches are to libwnck and gnome-panel, and they implement the behaviour I want, which is horizontal text, and buttons of fixed height in a window list which expands as needed to fill the available space. With this patch installed, I find a vertical panel is the best way to manage a large number of open windows.

I don’t recommend running this script – better to read and understand it yourself. Nevertheless (and with no guarantees whatsoever) if you do run it as is on a Hardy machine, it should install patched versions of libwnck and gnome-panel which work better with vertical panels.

# Get all the libraries and source code we need
sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev
sudo apt-get build-dep libwnck gnome-panel

# Create a directory to do all our messing about in
mkdir build-libwnck
cd build-libwnck/

# Get the source code for the 2 components we are building
apt-get source libwnck
apt-get source gnome-panel

# Do libwnck first
cd libwnck-2.22.3

# Create a changelog entry
cat <<END > new-entry.txt
libwnck (2.22.3-0ubuntu2) hardy-proposed; urgency=low

  * applied libwnck vertical window list fix from Alexey Rusakov and Vincent Untz

 -- Anon <anon@example.com>  Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:50:00 +0000

END

cat new-entry.txt debian/changelog > debian/changelog-new
rm debian/changelog
mv debian/changelog-new debian/changelog
rm new-entry.txt

# Get the libwnck patch and apply it
wget -O libwnck-fix-vertical.patch "http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=124112"
patch -p2 < libwnck-fix-vertical.patch

# Build the package
aclocal
automake
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

# Install the libwnck packages
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i libwnck*.deb

# Now do gnome-panel
cd gnome-panel-2.22.2

# Create a changelog entry
cat <<END > new-entry.txt
gnome-panel (1:2.22.2-0ubuntu1.2) hardy-proposed; urgency=low

 * applied libwnck vertical window list fix from Alexey Rusakov and Vincent Untz

 -- Anon <anon@example.com> Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:50:00 +0000

END

cat new-entry.txt debian/changelog > debian/changelog-new
rm debian/changelog
mv debian/changelog-new debian/changelog
rm new-entry.txt

# Get the gnome-panel patch and apply it
wget -O gnome-panel-fix-vertical.patch "http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=107133"
patch -p2 < gnome-panel-fix-vertical.patch

# Build the package
aclocal
automake
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

# Install the gnome-panel packages
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i *panel*.deb

Update: fixed incorrect comment – thanks Stefan.

Update: changed -p0 to -p2 in the patch commands.