After a few weeks of frantic coding by me and Brad Smith, the original author of the Caffeine Linux port, Caffeine 0.2 is now officially released! If you have somehow forgotten what Caffeine is, or if you never read my blog post on it at all, here’s a link to it.

In a nutshell, Caffeine is a coffee cup that sits in your system tray, waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it fills up with coffee and keeps your computer from going to sleep or activating the screensaver. This could be really useful for when you’re playing fullscreen games that don’t inhibit the screensaver, or when you’re watching a long flash video.

Any new features for the 0.2?

There sure are!

• New icons. Although I’m not so very happy with them. They might receive a makeover for the 0.3.
• Full support for gnome-screensaver and Kscreensaver
• Support for the old notification system as well as the new one.
• The ability to choose a time interval from a list, and have Caffeine be active during that time.
• The ability for the user to set the duration for the interval freely.
• Mutiple bug fixes.
• A new project page at Launchpad.

Sweet! Where do I get it?

We actually have a PPA now, so it’s easy as pie. Just follow these steps to add our PPA to your list of repositories, and then download and install Caffeine:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bnsmith/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys B7DEAC3C

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install caffeine

Of course if you’re not running Ubuntu or another distribution that doesn’t make use of the Debian package format, you can get all the files you need by running this command:

bzr branch lp:caffeine

Depending on your distribution, the process for having Caffeine automatically start when you log in is different. But here are instructions for Ubuntu:

1. Goto System → Preferences → Startup Applications
2. Click on Add
3. Enter “Caffeine” in the Name entry and just type “caffeine” in the Command field (the command should be in all lower case letters).
4. Log out and back in again, and Caffeine should be running in your system applet!

For instructions for other distributions, either consult your distribution’s support forum/IRC channel/Mailing list. Or shoot me or Brad an email. My email address can be found on the contact page, and Brad’s can be found at his blog.

What are the plans for 0.3?

The plans aren’t set in stone, but we’re hoping to rewrite the entire application and make it a bit more organized and  overall easier to work with. We’re also planning on making use of GtkBuilder to separate the graphical stuff from the logic. That will also allow us to use Glade, which will make creating the user interface a million times easier.

We also want to get proper support for Xscreensaver as well as stand-alone DPMS. Getting DPMS support is actually fairly trivial, but we have to create a preferences dialog first - as there’s no way to detect whether or not DPMS is running on its own or being managed by another program. Xscreensaver is a little bit trickier, so we’ll see how that goes.

As always, we’re interested in hearing your thoughts, ideas and your criticism. If you have tried Caffeine out and have something to say about it, you’re more than welcome to either leave a comment here or on the announcement post at Brad’s blog. I’m sure Brad would like to get some love as well. After all, it was he who started the development of this application!