Kubuntu Notification Helper 0.4.85 (0.5 beta1)

I’m glad to be able to announce the release of Kubuntu Notification Helper 0.4.85, the first beta release for the 0.5 release! We would very much appreciate testing, though I must admit we don’t have anywhere for bug reports to go yet. It should enter Ubuntu soon enough, though, so we’ll be able to track bugs there in the quite near future.

For a general overview on what Kubuntu Notification Helper is, see my previous blog post. There have been new developments since then, though, which I will touch upon in this blog post. But first, let’s get to the release stuff.

Getting it

I have packages available for both Kubuntu 9.10 and Kubuntu 10.04 at my PPA. To get them, go to the “Settings” view of KPackageKit and hit “Edit Software Sources”. Go to the “Other Software” tab and click “Add”. Paste the following into the dialog:

ppa:echidnaman/ppa

Once you close the dialog, it will offer to update your package lists. Allow it to do so, and install the kubuntu-notification-helper package.

Using it

After installing it, you have two options to start using it. You can:

• Just reboot the computer

Or:

• kquitapp kded; sleep 2; kded4
• kquitapp knotify; sleep 2; knotify
• kbuildsycoca4
• kcmshell4 kcmkded
• On the bottom list of KDED modules, click “Notification Helper” and hit the “start” button.

It should now function just as Update Notifier KDE did, only better! (More efficient, more integrated with Plasma)

What’s new

Since my last blog, quite a bit has gone on development-wise. Primarily, Kubuntu Notification Helper now notifies of restricted package availability:

Clicking “Details” will bring up a dialog identical to the one in Kubuntu 9.04 and 9.10. With Kubuntu Notification Helper you can finally permanently ignore all restricted package notifications if you so choose. Oh, and before anybody asks, that’s the Oxywin Plasma theme, which I quite like. 🙂

On the subject of permanently ignoring things, we realized that, aside from editing configuration files, there was no way to get Kubuntu Notification Helper to watch/notify for permanently ignored things. To remedy this we added a child module to the “Notification” configuration module in System Settings:

Other than those two features, we have spent a fair amount of time making the code is as clean as it can be. We have all the features that we want for 0.5 done, so all we need now is a bunch of bug testing between now and April. Enjoy!