[Goodies-dev] Newbie wants to work on xfce4-cpugraph-plugin

[Christian Leitold]

Hi,

On 3 November 2011 08:58, Florian Rivoal <frivoal at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is already xfce4-systemload-plugin, xfce4-netload-plugin and a
> few others that can be used to track various things, event though they
> behave quite differently. I completely agree that consolidating them
> into one, combining their respective strengths would be a good thing,
> and I've been wanting to do that for quite a while, but I've just not
> had the time so far.

Thanks for your fast answer. I have seen that there is already some
request for the inclusion of additional statistics like net load or
memory usage in the bugs section.

> I think a simple way to get started is to pick a bug in bugzilla (or
> report a new one if your favorite problem isn't listed) and try to
> do something about it. If you manage to make a fix, you can turn it
> into a patch and attach that to the bug, and send a mail to the list
> asking for feedback about it.

Seems like a good plan :-). However, first off all, I have to ask some
additional newbie questions. How can I actually test my development?
Suppose, I change the code and make works fine without errors. Can I
then just use this local new version to my panel as described in [1],
i. e. via a .desktop file of the form

[Xfce Panel]
Type=X-XFCE-PanelPlugin
Encoding=UTF-8
_Name=My new plugin name
_Comment=My new plugin description
Icon=gtk-icon-name
X-XFCE-Exec=/path/to/local/plugin/binary

But, and that I was not able to find out, how to actually integrate
the plugin in a panel on my desktop? Or is there the possibility to
test it stand-alone, without integrating it in one of my normal XFCE
panels?

> If you get stuck, the mailing lists or the irc channels are good
> places to turn to to ask for advice. Just be aware that there
> are not that number of people who can answer is limited, and that
> we don't necessarily have a lot of free time.

Thanks, I will definitely make use of that advice a lot :-) ...

> Just curious. What kind of scientific programs were you working on?

Mainly statistical mechanics. More precisely, Monte Carlo and
molecular dynamics simulations of classical many-body systems, and
some low-dimensional chaotic systems. In addition to that, I did a bit
of analysis work / simulations for elementary particle collision
events like they also have at CERN, but for another project at a
smaller facility.

Regards,
Christian

[1] http://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins