I started using LXDE last night, and I’m really liking it. It seems to take a whole ton less memory than Gnome did, and as a result my Intel Atom box runs a lot smoother because it doesn’t have to continuously swap. Anyway, I’ve been customizing some things, and I eventually found myself in plugin development land.
LXPanel is the gnome-panel equivalent for LXDE. There doesn’t seem to be a Trash can plugin for it, and I think that’s just sad. So, I decided to learn how these plugins are coded and make one of my own. I’m not sure if I’ll end up succeeding, but at least it will be a learning experience either way.
I found this page, which outlines a simple plugin that doesn’t do anything. It seems to be a good starting point. I followed the directions and ended up looking at an autoconf project that required a lot of work to get running in Ubuntu. Even though I finally got it to compile, I decided it took way to long to do so. I converted it to a scons project, and now it’s just one directory with a simple build script:
The shared object that’s output is exactly the same size as the one created by autoconf, so that’s good enough for me at the moment. Time to keep hammering away. The code for the example is available here for reuse.
