• Adding your own web applet to Avant Window Manager in Debian/Ubuntu

    Date: 2011.04.09 | Tags: ,,

    It’s surprisingly simple. No coding knowledge needed, though some image authoring program may come in handy..

    The easy to use and handy Avant Window Manager(AWN) includes a web applet that initially gives you the option to add various websites so you can easily access them through your toolbar.

    Here’s how to add your own. The applet takes in a configuration file with a list of websites and options. All you need to do is add another website and create or find an svg and a png icon for your button.

    In Debian linux, you will find it at /usr/share/avant-window-navigator/applets/webapplet/webapplet-websites.ini. If it’s not there, make sure you have the awn-applets-c-extras package (otherwise do “apt-get install awn-applets-c-extras”) and if still not there you can try to search with this:

    dpkg -L awn-applets-c-extras | grep webapplet.websites.ini

    Once you identify the config file, you will need an icon for your button, both a svg version and a png version. the png version should preferebly be 22 pixels. Copy both of these to the icons folder that exists in the same location as the configuration file.

    Note you’ll need root access for the above and next action. Next add the following to the webapplet.websites.ini, specifiying the names of the icons (don’t include folder “icons”). Note also that it is preferable to use the URL of the mobile view of the website, if it has one. Also, you can specify the height and width in pixels of your web applet.

    [FooBar]
Name=FooBar
Comment=Foo bar is a bogus app
URL=http://foo-bar.com/mobile
Icon-22=foobar-22.png
Icon-svg=foobar.svg
Width=1000
Height=500

    That’s it enjoy!