gcp: Seemingly worthy, possibly flawed

I love being able to see what my computer is doing. What most often frustrates me is when a computer is apparently busy, but gives me no feedback to be sure.

This was the issue a few months ago, when I talked about Advanced Copy. gcp scratches that itch for me too.

2013-11-12-lv-r1fz6-gcp

And I would speak of gcp in the same glowing terms I used with Advanced Copy, except for one strange issue: I get error messages when I try to use this in an X-less environment. 😯

For posterity’s sake, or for debugging purposes, this is the error message that appears in a virtual console.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gcp", line 678, in 
    gcp = GCP()
  File "/usr/bin/gcp", line 205, in __init__
    raise e
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

It works fine in a terminal emulator in a graphical environment. But shifting to a console gives that error. I’m not good with debugging, but that’s a little sad.

Perhaps the issue is in the dependencies. Still, I’d sure hate to think that something as simple as a copy tool with a progress bar would rely on all of X to get the job done.

More than likely I have done something wrong. That’s usually the case. Yes, let’s blame it on K.Mandla. 😳

And I see a package called gcp in Debian, and that might be the same. Perhaps it works. Let me know if it does.

I looked for a bug tracker or some sort of feedback mechanism, but I don’t know if it’s available. In the mean time I’ll stick with Advanced Copy, even though gcp was quite promising.

5 thoughts on “gcp: Seemingly worthy, possibly flawed”

  2. Goffi

    Hi, I’m the developer of gcp, and I just found this page

    Actually you need to launch a D-Bus session: that’s automatically done in X, but not in pure console. You can do it by enterring
    eval `dbus-launch –sh-syntax`

    I do this automatically with a script, I have put the informations in the README of my other project (Salut à Toi), but not yet in gcp. Here is the part of the README:

    ### SàT README ###

    To use SàT, you need to have D-Bus daemon launched (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/). If you use X Window, it should already be launched. If your are on a terminal environment without X11 (e.g. on a server) you may have to launch it. You can launch a daemon using the following command:
    $ eval `dbus-launch –sh-syntax`

    Be careful to use the same environment variables if you start a new session.

    I personnaly use the following script to do that automaticaly:

    — /usr/local/bin/dbus-launch.sh —
    #!/bin/sh

    DBUS_PATH=”/tmp/.dbus.`whoami`”

    if [ ! -e $DBUS_PATH ]; then
    dbus-launch –sh-syntax > $DBUS_PATH
    chmod 400 $DBUS_PATH
    fi

    cat $DBUS_PATH
    — end of /usr/local/bin/dbus-launch.sh —

    You can launch this script by putting at the end of your .zshrc (or whatever you’re using):
    eval `/usr/local/bin/dbus-launch.sh`

    ### END SàT README ###

    It’s a bit tricky because Debian (as other distros) don’t launch D-Bus automatically outside of X. I should print a message in gcp to explain how to manage this case.
    But I’m really busy working on my other project (Salut à Toi, an XMPP/Social client), so I don’t work a lot on gcp, I’ll try to find some time to improve it.

    In addition there is a bug report tool: http://bugs.goffi.org, you can ask for enhancement there (or contact me by email or XMPP) 🙂

    Cheers
    Goffi

    1. K.Mandla Post author

      Hello Goffi! Thanks very much for the instructions! I’ll give this another try soon; I am certain with your help it will work fine. Cheers and thanks again! 😉

      1. Goffi

        you’re welcome.

        Seeing the main topic of your blog, I think you can give a look at my other project, specially the cli frontend, here is a video of kind of things you can do with it (it’s in french, but quite easy to understand): http://sat.goffi.org/static/videos/screencasts/pr%C3%A9sentation_S%C3%A0T_4_copie_et_pipe.webm (around 1:30 there is a demo on how to pipe a video to a XMPP contact, and before it’s a demo of a file transfer, similar to gcp but to a distant contact). It’s in Debian too and a new release is on its way.

        cheers

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