Installing

Hamster is now part of GNOME, and most probably available in your distribution – go ahead and search for “hamster” in your package manager! Distribution version will match GNOME stable, whichever that is at the moment and is suggested for everyday use.

If, however, you would like to see the best we have at the time – read on how to install from source.

From the source

Running development version gives you access to most recent changes and is recommended if you would like to contribute.

Project hamster depends on several development packages, so before getting to hamster, we should solve dependencies. Ubuntu’s apt-get line looks something like this:

sudo apt-get install gnome-common python-gtk2 \
python-gtk2-dev python-gobject python-gobject-dev libgconf2-dev \
python-gnome2-dev git-core python-gnomeapplet

After that hamster is good to go – let’s checkout! Fire up a terminal and execute following line:

git clone git://git.gnome.org/hamster-applet
cd hamster-applet

Next let’s do that autotool thing – nothing to be affraid of – just copy/paste!

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/ --with-gconf-schema-file-dir=/usr/share/gconf/schemas/
make
sudo make install

Now you should be able to add hamster to your panel!

The “–prefix” thing tells to install Hamster to /usr instead of /usr/local. That’s necessary, because normally the bonobo thing is not configured to look under /usr/local and thus you won’t see the applet.

“–with-gconf-schema-file-dir”  tells where to put the gconf schema