A while back I had written up a post (Brazilian Portuguese only) explaining how I managed to get PyPanel running on my old Ubuntu Feisty Herd 3 installation. The reason for the write up was to explain about how I circunvented two issues that came up during the process of getting PyPanel to actually run. Anyhow, ever since I started writing up about OpenBox, more and more people tried to use PyPanel and seem to have gotten bitten by the same problems. So, without much further ado, here is what I did:

Out of all the task bars out there, PyPanel is the one that pleases me the most. However, getting it to run on Ubuntu is not the most straight forward thing to do, and requires some serious “tweaking/hacking”. Searching the net, you’ll see a great deal of conflicting information, some telling you to compile dependencies and what not from the source code, and some telling you to “trust” the package manager. Back then I decided to give aptitude the benefit of the doubt and tried to do a more thorough investigation.

As soon as I logged into my Openbox session and opened up a console, I started PyPanel by running pypanel in the command line. Boy, was I surprised when I was presented the following traceback:

omaciel@gorgonzola:~$ pypanel Traceback (most recent call last): File “/usr/bin/pypanel”, line 893, in <module> from Xlib import X, display, error, Xatom, Xutil File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/display.py”, line 30, in <module> import protocol.display File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/protocol/display.py”, line 751 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘xf6’ in file /var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/protocol/display.py on line 750, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

The keyword here is the phrase “Non-ASCII character in line 750. Opening the file /var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/protocol/display.py as root and browsing that specific line showed me:

# Bug reported by Ilpo Nyyssönen

The problem was the letter ö. Since I was in a hurry, I simply changed that specific character to a “normal” letter o, saved it and tried pypanel again from the command line. This time around I was presented the following nasty-gram:

omaciel@gorgonzola:~$ Traceback (most recent call last): File “/usr/bin/pypanel”, line 957, in <module> PyPanel(display.Display()) File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/display.py”, line 80, in __init__ self.display = _BaseDisplay(display) File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/display.py”, line 67, in __init__ apply(protocol.display.Display.__init__, (self, ) + args, keys) File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/protocol/display.py”, line 123, in __init__ self.default_screen = min(self.default_screen, len(self.info.roots) - 1) File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/Xlib/protocol/rq.py”, line 1371, in __getattr__ raise AttributeError(attr) AttributeError: roots

Damn it! That’s when I remembered reading a message somewhere in the net about a problem with the buffer size in the same exact file, but for Python 2.5. I remembered that the reserved buffer size was 2048, and the work around called for changing it to 4096. Once again I opened the file and modified the line below:

recv = self.socket.recv(2048)

It was only after performing this “operation” that I was able to finally run PyPanel.

Well, hope this will be of help to anyone out there experiencing the same problems… and if anyone thinks this is a serious bug/limitation, I’ll be glad to take it to the next level!