HOWTO: Building Skippy RPM package for Fedora Core

by Thomas Chung on Oct 06, 2004

Skippy is best described as a full-screen task-switcher for X11. It tries to provide an alternative when taskbars or regular task-switchers aren't the most efficient way of switching tasks (like when you have a lot of applications open). When activated (currently only through a hotkey), it will arrange and scale snapshots of all windows on the current desktop and it'll let you pick a window using a mouse or a keyboard. It's very similar to Apple's Expose.

In this article, I'll be using skippy version 0.5.0 on Fedora Core 2 as an example and you will find pre-compiled RPM packages for FC1 and FC2 at the bottom this article.

As a requirement, you will need to install imlib2 and imlib2-devel packages first. I would recommend to download them from Fedora Extra Repository:

[tchung@localhost imlib2]$ ls
imlib2-1.1.2-0.fdr.1.2.i386.rpm  imlib2-devel-1.1.2-0.fdr.1.2.i386.rpm
[tchung@localhost imlib2]$ sudo rpm -Uvh *.rpm
warning: imlib2-1.1.2-0.fdr.1.2.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 8df56d05
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:imlib2                 ########################################### [ 50%]
   2:imlib2-devel           ########################################### [100%]
[tchung@localhost imlib2]$

To build the RPM package, you'll need:
Tarball - skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2
Spec File - skippy.spec
Desktop File - skippy.desktop
Image File - skippy.png

Let's begin:
(Make sure you have created rpmbuild directory in your own home.)

[tchung@localhost skippy]$ ls
skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2  skippy.desktop  skippy.png  skippy.spec
[tchung@localhost skippy]$ cp *.bz2 *.desktop *.png ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
[tchung@localhost skippy]$ cp *.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/
[tchung@localhost skippy]$ rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/skippy.spec
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.88704
+ umask 022
+ cd /home/tchung/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ LANG=C
+ export LANG
+ unset DISPLAY
+ rm -rf /var/tmp/skippy-0.5.0-buildroot
+ cd /home/tchung/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ rm -rf skippy-0.5.0
+ /usr/bin/bzip2 -dc /home/tchung/rpmbuild/SOURCES/skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2

..omitted..

Wrote: /home/tchung/rpmbuild/SRPMS/skippy-0.5.0-1.fc2.src.rpm
Wrote: /home/tchung/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/skippy-0.5.0-1.fc2.i386.rpm
Wrote: /home/tchung/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/skippy-debuginfo-0.5.0-1.fc2.i386.rpm
Executing(%clean): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.12434
+ umask 022
+ cd /home/tchung/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ cd skippy-0.5.0
+ rm -rf /var/tmp/skippy-0.5.0-buildroot
+ exit 0
[tchung@localhost skippy]$

To install the RPM package,

[tchung@localhost skippy]$ sudo rpm -Uvh /home/tchung/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/skippy-0.5.0-1.fc2.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:skippy                 ########################################### [100%]
[tchung@localhost skippy]$

To launch the program, either you can type following command and press F11:

[tchung@localhost skippy]$ skippy

OR, you can launch it from following menu and and press F11:

Here is the screenshot

Here are the pre-compiled RPMs for skippy version 0.5.0 for FC1 and FC2.

UPDATE:
If you get following warning message when you try to run it from command line, try copying default config file to your home directory.

[tchung@localhost tchung]$ skippy
WARNING: Couldn't load config file '/home/tchung/.skippyrc'.
 
[tchung@localhost tchung]$ cp /etc/skippyrc ~/.skippyrc
[tchung@localhost tchung]$ skippy