Last night I worked out a way to keep kb2kskype and skype out of the way when they are launched at startup, maybe my solution will be of use to others.
Our PC at home is a MythTV box used mostly as a TV (running on gnome window manager in our case). Domestic harmony dictates that Myth should have a monopoly on screen space at startup. I couldn't find a satisfactory way to make this happen within the window manager (I looked a kdocker, but for gnome, at least, I couldn't make it work smoothly for this purpose).
In the end, I used a sledgehammer, running usbb2k_api, skype and kb2kbskype in a vnc4server virtual desktop window. The entire Skype subsystem is invisible on startup, but the telbox jumps into usb mode and
works as advertised. Magic.
There were a few bits to work out along the way, so
here are the details. The VNC server in the Ubuntu distro we use (Edgy) has a bad set of font paths installed, so needs to be started like this:
The /etc/init.d scripts are just copy and fiddle clones of normal Debian/Ubuntu startup scripts. The sleep pauses are in there to let skype catch up, so that the kb2kskype connection does not fail and generate a popup (inside the vnc4server instance, where you'll never find it unless you look for it). The amixer invocations cope with some instability in the ALSA settings on my hardware/OS combination that is cleared up by nudging the volume controls a bit.
Seems to work, anyway. It is going to be nice to, you know, go back to just using the phone.
... and thanks to Simon for writing this fantastic application!
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
just for your information you can sent a dcop command to the kb2kskype main window to tell it to minimize to the tray. See below, but thanks for shareing your knowledge.
Last night I worked out a way to keep kb2kskype and skype out of the way when they are launched at startup, maybe my solution will be of use to others.
Our PC at home is a MythTV box used mostly as a TV (running on gnome window manager in our case). Domestic harmony dictates that Myth should have a monopoly on screen space at startup. I couldn't find a satisfactory way to make this happen within the window manager (I looked a kdocker, but for gnome, at least, I couldn't make it work smoothly for this purpose).
In the end, I used a sledgehammer, running usbb2k_api, skype and kb2kbskype in a vnc4server virtual desktop window. The entire Skype subsystem is invisible on startup, but the telbox jumps into usb mode and
works as advertised. Magic.
There were a few bits to work out along the way, so
here are the details. The VNC server in the Ubuntu distro we use (Edgy) has a bad set of font paths installed, so needs to be started like this:
###
vnc4server -fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc :1
###
In the .vnc/xstartup file, I have this:
###
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
/usr/bin/amixer -c 1 cset numid=7,iface=MIXER,name='Mic Capture
Volume' 63000
/etc/init.d/usbb2kapi start
/bin/sleep 5
/etc/init.d/skype start
/bin/sleep 10
/etc/init.d/kb2kskype start
/usr/bin/amixer -c 1 cset numid=7,iface=MIXER,name='Mic Capture
Volume' 64000
blackbox &
###
The /etc/init.d scripts are just copy and fiddle clones of normal Debian/Ubuntu startup scripts. The sleep pauses are in there to let skype catch up, so that the kb2kskype connection does not fail and generate a popup (inside the vnc4server instance, where you'll never find it unless you look for it). The amixer invocations cope with some instability in the ALSA settings on my hardware/OS combination that is cleared up by nudging the volume controls a bit.
Seems to work, anyway. It is going to be nice to, you know, go back to just using the phone.
... and thanks to Simon for writing this fantastic application!
just for your information you can sent a dcop command to the kb2kskype main window to tell it to minimize to the tray. See below, but thanks for shareing your knowledge.
dcop `dcop | grep kb2kskype` kb2kskypemainwindow hide
Aha. That will teach me to ask questions later. :)