HOWTO: Thinklight Notification for Evolution

[uljanow]

This article describes how to enable Thinklight notification for Evolution. The package thinklight-notification is an Evolution plugin to notify the user with a blinking light whenever a new message has arrived.

Installation (Intrepid)
Create a new file (as root) in /etc/apt/sources.list.d named iplist.list with the following content depending on your current distribution:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ssakar/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ssakar/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ssakar/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ssakar/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ssakar/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ssakar/ubuntu intrepid main

The key of the signed packages can be imported like this:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com C6E3D905C8BCD56BB02E6E0B39456311108B243F

After an update of the Software sources thinklight-notification can be installed with any package manager. E.g.:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install thinklight-notification

Testing
Start Evolution, go to Edit -> Plugins and make sure it is enabled. The following command should indicate that the module is already loaded:

lsmod | grep thinkpad_acpi

Troubleshooting
On Ubuntu desktop installation the thinkpad_acpi module is loaded automatically. But if that's not the case it should be added to /etc/modules.

[lunatico]

Thanks for the tutorial!
It installs alright but update keeps complaining.

W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net intrepid Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 39456311108B243F

A key signature problem?

Thanks!

[uljanow]

PPA finally allows signing of packages. The key must be imported. I've updated the instructions.

[lunatico]

I've updated the instructions.

Thanks for that!

One other thing, have you noticed that the mail-notification deamon is also picked up by this thinklight notification plugin? And I don't have mail-notification configured to notify about my evolution emails, just my gmail ones.
This is good in one way (two birds with one stone) but bad if you only want to 'thinklight notify' your evolution emails as there is no way of disabling for mail-notification (I think...).

[binbash]

It works great

[andresmh]

This looks great but it doesn't seem to be a PPA for Karmic. I tried using the Jaunty PPA and it succeeds in installing the package but it doesn't show up in the Evolution plugins.

[uljanow]

I will upload packages for karmic next week.

[chancekang]

Thanks for the post.

I was following this how-to on Karmic with t61p. In the last step, when I tried to install the package, it told me

Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "thinklight-notification"

I have followed the tutorial step-by-step with no error exception. Any suggestions? Thanks a lot.

Here is the output of running "lsmod | grep thinkpad_acpi"

thinkpad_acpi          67108  0 
led_class               4096  3 iwlcore,thinkpad_acpi,sdhci
nvram                   7528  1 thinkpad_acpi

And my file content in /etc/modules

  1 # /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
  2 #
  3 # This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
  4 # at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.
  5 
  6 lp
  7 thinkpad_acpi

Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks a lot.

[uljanow]

There are some build issues with karmic which I haven't resolved yet. Currently there are no packages for karmic.