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Opaco is a highly lightweight desktop panel developed on GTK+ and thought for minimalist window managers or desktop environments with isolated components, such as Openbox, Fluxbox, etcetera. The idea is quite similar to the one found in fbpanel, however, the code is arranged in a different manner, making it more easy and accessible to any programmer.
Opaco was initially thought for GNU/Linux environments, although the source code was moving towards portability in every area. Furthermore, Opaco is able to include different applets, which give a richer experience to the end user, such as battery metter, clock, launchers, pager, taskbar, system tray, volume manager and wireless link indicator.
Opaco requires a NETWM (see http://www.freedesktop.org) compliant window manager, and it can be run in many instances as wanted, using different configurations for each separate panel.
Opaco can be downloaded in Debian package form (compiled for both i386 and amd64 architectures) or in source code form, from where you may compile it by yourself.
Please note that Opaco has been developed and tested only under GNU/Linux distributions running on the top of a v2.6 Linux kernel, which does not guarantee that it will work under your specific distribution running on a specific kernel.
In order to be able to run Opaco, you need a set of packages which are a mandatory requisite:
Furthermore, in order to have full advantage of the applets included by default in the Opaco package, you may want to install the packages wireless-tools (for using the WLAN applet) and the librsvg2-common (for using SVG icons in the panel).
In order to compile Opaco you need two major packages, which can be installed in Debian-like distributions the following way:
After that, you just need to go the the directory of Opaco (when decompressed) and do the following:
Alternatively, you may want to build your own Debian package and then install using dpkg. In such a case, you need to install a couple of build tools and then compile the Debian package. You can do all this the following way:
Where {$ARCH} is one of the architectures, for instance i386 or amd64.
Opaco locates its default settings under the home directory (following the XDG_DIRS schema, according to the freedesktop.org standard), at the ~/.config subdirectory. This file is written in plain XML, which makes it readable and easy to modify. In this file there has to be, at least, one option, which is:
<!-- Opaco Configuration File --> <config> </config>
Once this option is present, the panel will load but nothing will be displayed on it. However, a typicall configuration file could be the following one:
<!-- Opaco Configuration File -->
<config>
<panel>
<height>26</height>
<position>top</position>
<spacing>5</spacing>
</panel>
<launcher>
<name>Opera Web Browser</name>
<command>opera</command>
<icon>/usr/share/icons/opera.png</icon>
</launcher>
<taskbar>
<expand>yes</expand>
</taskbar>
<separator />
<pager />
<systray />
<wlan />
<battery />
<clock>
<format>%A, %d/%m/%Y</format>
</clock>
</config>
This is free software. The authors of this software are Claudio M. Camacho and Isaac Jurado. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/license/gpl.html>. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
For more information please refer to the project's README file and the official TODO list.
