After a few months of hard work (mostly by Isaiah, as of lately), Caffeine for Linux has now reached adulthood with its 1.0 release! With this release, we finally feel like Caffeine is stable enough to be used on a day to day basis, and should fix most situations where the screensaver is being mischievous. It is our hope that this release will somehow make it into the official Ubuntu repositories, but of course maintainers of other distributions are more than welcome to include Caffeine in their repositories as well.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Caffeine is a tiny little applet that sits in your system tray and uses magical caffeine to keep your computer from going asleep or activating the screensaver. This could be helpful when you’re giving presentations, playing full-screen games or when you’re watching flash videos.

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This is old news! Caffeine 1.0 has been released. Go check it out!

I know you have all been waiting impatiently for this ever since we released Caffeine 0.2, but now it is finally here - Caffeine 0.3!

For those of you with short memory, 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.

This has been in the making ever since we released 0.2. The biggest change for me is that we now have another - extremely productive and skilled - developer working with us. His name is Isaiah Heyer, and he has really been the driving force behind this release. Many, if not most, of the new features are written by him.

What’s new in Caffeine 0.3?

Our main goal with this release was to completely rewrite the code in a neater fashion - to make future development easier. Because of Isaiah’s work, this was completed rather quickly, and thus we decided to include some more features that we were originally planning to release in version 0.4.

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As the developer base for Caffeine has grown larger, we’ve realized that we needed some place to organize information and hold development discussions. Launchpad is great for hosting code, keeping track of bugs, organizing blueprints, etc. It even works as a front-end for translators. But it really lacks a place for proper discussions and there’s not really any space for end-user information.

Therefore I went ahead and created a wiki for our project!

The Wiki is powered by MediaWiki and is hosted at Levonline (who are graciously providing hosting for this blog). Setting it all up was very easy, and probably took less than half an hour. If you’re looking to set up your own Wiki, I highly recommend trying MediaWiki.

→ Here’s the link to our project wiki.

There you will find any and all information about Caffeine.

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!

If you are a programmer, designer, student, freelancer, or just really, really like stumbleupon, you know how important caffeine can be for you late at night. Well, your computer needs it too! When you’re busy playing a game or watching a movie, your computer has nothing to do, and might just fall asleep, unless you give it a little boost of extra energy.

Mac users have been able to do this for some time now, by using this little piece of software. But the only option for our poor Linux powered computers seems to have been never to fall asleep at all, or fall asleep while we’re busy watching Mel Gibson show off what’s under his kilt. That is until now!

Thanks to Brad Smith, there is now an application that tries to mimic the functionality of the Mac application Caffeine. If you didn’t quite what I was trying to say with the previous two paragraphs, here’s how it all works.

Installation

Go to this site, scroll down a bit to the “Installation Instructions” part, then just follow the directions given to you.

Usage

A coffee cup looking something like the image below will appear in your system tray (edit 2009-07-02: New icons. Fetch the newest version from launchpad).

If you click it, it’ll fill up with coffee, instantly giving your computer a boost of caffeine to keep it awake - disabling both the screensaver and sleep mode! Why is this useful? Well, some applications allow your screensaver to kick in even if you’re running a full screen application - for example when you’re playing a game or watching a movie. Of course you can go in and manually disable sleep mode and the screensaver, but that’s a lot of hassle for something that should be automatic. With caffeine, all you have to do is click the little applet.

It will now look something like this.

So… Why are you mentioning this?

Hehe, because I’m a narcissist, of course! Guess who made those icons? Yup. Yours truly. Note that the screenshots on the project home page are outdated, and that those are the old, not-so-pretty icons.

But that’s not the only reason. The other reason is that I like how this tiny program represents how you don’t have to be a master hacker and spend 4 years constantly working on a project to make a meaningful contribution to the community. All you need is a comfortable chair, some knowledge of a programming language (Caffeine for Linux is written in Python) and a few hours of  your time.

But before you rush off to install the latest and greatest contribution to the open source world, you might want to note that this is the very first release (0.1), so it still has some major issues, and really only works well if you’re running Gnome. The KDE support is still dodgy, and support for other DEs is still far away.

If you want to help with the project, I’m sure the author would be very grateful. Below you’ll find a link to the announcement of Caffeine for Linux 0.1.

Caffeine: Not Just for Beverages Anymore