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I upgraded to Jaunty a few days ago, and have been happy with the new version for the most part. One thing was driving me crazy though: the tooltips in the workspace switcher were staying up until I moved the mouse over them. This is way more annoying than you might think. Imagine that you’re trying to write some code, and switching frequently between your IDE on desktop 1 and the API reference in your browser window on desktop 4. After every switch, there’s a useless tooltip hovering over the panel, partially obscuring your windows, and it won’t go away until you mouse over it. It’s like trying to code while a gnat is constantly buzzing around your face.

There’s a bug filed against it, of course, but there’s no workaround. I did find two blog posts that offered a workaround of sorts by globally disabling all panel tooltips. At first I thought that was a bit extreme, but after swatting a few hundred tooltips I was ready to try anything. Unfortunately, this setting did not appear to have any effect, even after restarting the panel. I was still getting the tooltips.

*Sigh*. Well, seeing as how I do claim to be a programmer, and I can often be found extolling the virtues of open source to people who mostly don’t care, maybe I should practice what I preach, dive into the source code, and fix it myself. Right? Right.

It turns out this is really easy to fix. Assuming, of course, that your definition of “fix” is the same as mine, which is “disable all tooltips for the workspace switcher applet”. There is a global setting to do this, and it just requires changing a single line of code.

To build a fixed version of libwnck, first download the patch, and save it to the /tmp directory. Then run the following commands in a terminal:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep libwnck
$ apt-get source libwnck
$ cd libwnck-2.26.0
$ patch -p0 </tmp/libwnck-notooltip.patch
$ debchange -v 2.26.0-ubuntu1+notooltips

The debchange command will keep APT from “upgrading” your custom package. It will open the debian/changelog file in the default editor so you can enter a description. You can skip this step if the notification to upgrade libwnck doesn’t bother you.

$ debuild -rfakeroot binary
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i libwnck-common_2.26.0-ubuntu1+notooltips_all.deb libwnck22_2.26.0-ubuntu1+notooltips_i386.deb
$ killall gnome-panel

If you don’t want to build the packages yourself, you can download mine here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.