Tag Archives: dbus

As part of my work on Arkose, trying to make desktop application containing easy, I’ve been working over the last month or so on a protocol aware DBUS proxy.

I based my work on Alban’s DBUS proxy for N900, made the proxy work with multiple connections and added support for logging and filtering of the connections.

The result is profiles like this one:
outgoing;org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties;/com/canonical/menu/*;PropertiesChanged
outgoing;com.canonical.AppMenu.Registrar;/com/canonical/AppMenu/Registrar;RegisterWindow
outgoing;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;LayoutUpdated
outgoing;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;ItemsPropertiesUpdated

incoming;org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetAll
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetLayout
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;Event
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;AboutToShow
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetGroupProperties

Which in this case will allow the applications using the proxy to access the global menu DBUS API and receive events from the Global menu, but not for example dump your gnome keyring.

Here’s the output you’d get when running gedit using the above profile:
http://www.stgraber.org/download/gedit-dbus-arkose.log

Now that the proxy works as expected, I’ll work on integrating it into Arkose itself and expose it in the wrapper GUI.

To try the proxy, you can grab Arkose’s trunk branch at:
bzr branch lp:~arkose-devel/arkose/trunk/

Build the proxy (you’ll need glib and dbus) and then run it with:
./proxy /tmp/arkose_dbus profiles/dbusmenu.conf

Starting clients like this:
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/arkose_dbus gedit