Re: Integrate VMware and Gnome - continued

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

Hello, Regis,

>  I have figured out most of the stuff, and I'm going to write a
>  document about it that I will post here, so that other people from
>  other companies will also be able to integrate to make sure that their 
>  product is well integrated with Gnome.

This is excellent!  It would be very nice to have this document in the
main set of GNOME documentation papers.  If you choose to make it
available there, I will be happy to assist you in formatting it
properly for GNOME use (using DocBook, integrating it in the build
system, etc.).

Many of the GNOME configuration files are documented in the
gnome-docu/white-papers/SystemConfig paper.  This is in the
"gnome-docu" module on CVS.  It includes information on desktop
entries (used to define menu items for the panel), the MC hooks that
can be used to populate the desktop, the help system, and MIME types.

>  Then, each time a user opens a Gnome session, the hook is called. The
>  hook then executes, and typically displays a nice Window promting the
>  user if he wants the Vmware icons and startup menu entries. And the
>  hooks writes a "job done" flag in ~/.vmware/foo for example. Then, the
>  user is never prompted again (i.e. at the next Gnome session of the
>  user, the hook is called but it sees that the "job done" flag is here
>  and it exits)
>  
>  The question is: does this hook exist?

You can do this with the MC mechanism for automatically populating the
desktop with icons.  Please read the section titled "Configuring the
desktop" in the SystemConfig document.  Basically, you can set up a
configuration file that will tell MC which program to run to populate
the desktop with your program's icons.

This is the mechanism used by the g-print program, for example.  Its
hook program gets run by MC and it creates the appropriate icon.

As for hooks to access internal MC functions, such as rescanning the
desktop, you have two options.  You can directly use the MC CORBA
interface, as defined in the mc/idl/FileManager.idl.  Or you can use
the gmc-client program, shipped with the MC distribution[1], to access
some of these functions from the command line (gmc-client is a little
program that uses CORBA to talk to MC).

[1] I think the latest RPMS do not contain this program, due to an
omission in the .spec file.  It does come with the source tarball,
though.

  Federico