Notices

I guess, that's not the sense of actman as it 'only' changes your desktop layout.
Maybe you could try the following: using DCEW or queenbeecon you could create a script that first does connection to wifi or 3g or what else, enables BT and then calls actman to switch layout. You could then trigger that script with one click on your desktop. Having the 'enable' button on one activity and the opponent 'disable' button on the other activity you could easily switch between them.

wow... thanks for idea, but i do not know the linux command for creating this scripts I'll write this question in the QBW thread..

thanks for this very usefull app.
just wanted to know if work is still going on to improve its speed to switch from one activity to another.
also just a suggestion the window which tells us that you are now in activity xyz and we need to press OK can be avoided which will help in speeding the switch.

thanks

FWIW, I'll try to add an option to run external scripts when an activity is changed. This will allow you to add custom scripts to start/stop bluetooth, etc..

I believe that the speed cannot be improved (but I'm really open to suggestions). The app itself is quite fast but it adds delays in order to let hildon-home to settle. If you look at the 'activity' script you'll see that after each step it sleeps for some seconds. If you remove those sleeps there will be weird results.

After the script is ran, hildon-home needs some time to load the new widgets which also cannot be sped up.

The window you mention does delay the overall progress and I believe that that improves the overall perception of speed. If you remove the message then you'll be left at the desktop to wait for icons to appear. I find that the message helps the way you perceive the overall time of change and that's why I added it (to give some extra time for the desktop to settle before showing it to the user).

I often out of the blue loose all widgets on desktops.
Anyone else having this problem and why it happens?

This happens whenever the hildon-home crashes. Most probably because of a buggy widget.

If that happens you have 3 options:

• Live life as-is and re-add the widgets
• Reboot the device
• Use actman to restore the desktop

For #3 you can open a terminal and run (as user):
which will show you the name of the current activity (let's say "main"). And then:

where "main" is the name of the current activity.

This will reload all widgets and icons just like they were stored at the "main" activity.

Note that actman only stores the widgets etc when you change activity.

I'm actually having a strange behaviour when using actman. I'm using modified-hildon-home and -desktop with 5 resp. 8 desktops activated and am using d-iivils fabulous theme customizer, of course running PR1.3.

Since some days (I guess since one specific update of one specific app, but I really don't have a clue what and when) I can't set background images for desktops 5+ anymore after having switched desktop activity. I used to set them by selecting an image series consisting of 9 entries. Having 5 desktops enabled it fits on them 5 and having 8 desktops enabled it also fits on all of them. But now when I switch activity and select that series the images are only set for desktops 1-4 and the rest gets some old cached images. It works again if I reinstall hildon-home and hildon-desktop but this only lasts until I switch activity again.

Now I'm in first place seeking for a solution on how to reenable old behaviour without having to always reinstall these packages. The other point I don't really get is where those images are cached. It's not in ~/.activities and the images in ~/backgrounds are exactly the ones displayed.

Regarding loss of widgets and re-enabling them: could you add an option to actman (gui) to do exactly that, e.g. to reload the current theme? I guess only few users will remember those shell commands when looking at an empty desktop again. Would be much easier to just open actman and tap on 'reload'. I also missed that option often and helped myself by doing a 'backup' of my most important activities (save as <current>-bkp) and when something breaks my widgets I switch to that backup and save that back to original name.

Yeah, I've noticed this a hard way. I didn't save old actman profiles when I re-flashed the device. The default profile was OK which came from the N900-backup-application. Well, then all widgets crashed and went away. I went to appman to restore the default-profile, but of course it wouldn't work because it hadn't saved anything yet. Neither reboot after that will fix the issue, because you visited appman, blah.

I guess I have to manually add those widgets again, or re-configure from N900-backup in which case I go to earlier state in some other issues also.
Or, I create a new backup, restore from old backup, save appman profile with all those widgets visible again, restore from the new backup just recently made, restore profile from appman. (this could work)

A new version (1.1-1) of actman will be soon available in extras-devel. This version:

• Supports reloading the current activity.
• Supports saving the current activity without switching.
• Allows for execution of user scripts uppon change of the activity.
• Uses dsmetool instead of killall to restart hildon-home.
• Added a backup configuration file to backup activities.

Please check it and report back success or problems.

In order to run your own scripts you can put them under ~/.activities/scripts/<activity name> or under ~/.activities/scripts/always

The scripts in "always" are always executed while the scripts in "activity name" are executed only when entering or leaving that activity. Each script in there should be executable and should accept one parameter which will be either 'start' or 'stop'. When an activity is activated, all scripts of that activity (and in "always") will be ran with the parameter "start".

When another activity is activated, first the scripts of the former activity will be ran with the parameter "stop" and then the scripts of the new activity will be ran with the parameter "start".

This will allow you to extend it in any way you want in order to start/stop daemons, services, internet connects, or extend it for your own desktop widgets. The current activity name is also passed as an environment variable named "ACTMAN_ACTIVITY".

So go ahead. Use it, abuse it and report back