From a few months now I’ve been using Jupiter to speed up certain tasks in my laptop (usually I work with an external monitor in my home, so I’m constantly connecting and disconecting the monitor from my Acer Aspire One D250, obviously its more comfortable to work in a 15.6″ display that in the built in 10.1″ laptop display).
Jupiter is great without any doubt. But for me has some “issues”. The main one is that the GUI is developed in C#, this means that needs mono installed to work. In Ubuntu 11.10 (distribution that I’m using right now) mono came installed by default, applications like Banshee are also developed in mono. In the future nearby (with Ubuntu 12.04), this is not true any more.
Besides all this, in Ubuntu 11.10, installing Jupiter also means installing all this packages:
libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-data-tds2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-messaging2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-system-data-linq2.0-cil libmono-system-data2.0-cil libmono-system-messaging2.0-cil libmono-system-web2.0-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmono-wcf3.0-cil libmono2.0-cil
This is about 17MB of packages that I need to install just to use the Applet. Besides all these elements, the original implementation uses an icon in the notification area, in Unity the use of an indicator provides e better integration, and I really like keeping my system organize.
Keeping all this in mind, i started to rewrite the GUI part of Jupiter in something called PyJupiter, essentially I continue using all the bash scripts and just rewrote the GUI, using Python, PyGTK, and improving the integration with Unity using an indicator. After some advise from the original developer Andrew Wyatt I also included the systray icon to keep compatibility with those users that don’t use Unity. Also I included some multithread capabilities, so each submenu is rendered by a different thread increasing the ideal of a responsive interface. Some minor tweaks have also been made in the menu, using radio buttons or check boxes instead of the original asters to indicate the active element.
I’ve packaged the system into a deb package, so installation in Ubuntu 11.10 is easy, for those distributions RPM based the code is inside the deb file, so packaging for others systems should be easy.
So without anymore delay I’ll give you PyJupiter (Download).
Please share any comments/thoughts in the comments.
Jorge Luis Betancourt, my thoughts on tech 