I’ve been meaning to type this up for some time now. Ever since I wrote the article on Installing GNOME Shell on Ubuntu 9.10, I’ve wanted to write about some of the other features of GNOME 3.x. Finally I am able to bring to you the preview of GNOME Activity Journal (also known as Zeitgeist). In this article I will outline how to install, use, and update the GNOME Activity Journal.
Requirements
GNOME Activity Journal previews can be downloaded from Launchpad by way of bzr. You can easily checkout the latest development versions and run them, no compilation required! You will need to have the bzr utility installed, which can be done using the following command: (or click the linked package name)
sudo aptitude installbzr
Once you have bzr installed you’re ready to go! Next I will cover how to download the development previews and get started running and testing GNOME Activity Journal.
Download GNOME Activity Journal
There are two requirements for running GNOME Activity Journal. The Journal utility itself, and the Zeitgeist daemon. In the following steps we’ll checkout the latest revisions of each.
First, we’ll create a directory structure for our applications to run in.
mkdir ~/zeitgeist
cd ~/zeitgeist
Zeitgeist
Download Zeitgeist using the command:
bzr branch lp:zeitgeist
GNOME Activity Journal
Download the GNOME Activity Journal utility using the command:
bzr branch lp:gnome-activity-journal
Launching GNOME Activity Journal
Once these two utilities have downloaded we’re ready to launch them and start previewing the GNOME Activity Journal. This is done using the commands:
~/zeitgeist/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-daemon.py &
~/zeitgeist/gnome-activity-journal/gnome-activity-journal &
Keeping Updated
If you want to keep these two utilities updated, you can simply continue to track the bzr repositories and update your branches with the latest revisions. Anytime you want to check for new features or changes in either Zeitgeist or GNOME Activity Journal, simply run the following two commands:
cd ~/zeitgeist/zeitgeist && bzr pull
cd ~/zeitgeist/gnome-activity-journal && bzr pull
These two commands will move you to the directories where you have each utility checked out and pull for any new revisions in the upstream Launchpad repository. If there are no changes, you should receive the message “No revisions to pull”. Otherwise it’ll download the latest changes and you can simply re-launch as outlined above.
Preview
Check out this YouTube video of a recent build:
Conclusion
The new utilities and features in GNOME 3.x are shaping up very nicely. Between the GNOME Shell and GNOME Activity Journal we’ve got some fun and exciting new utilities to tinker with. I’d love to hear your thoughts on both of these, and what you think about the upcoming GNOME 3.x release.