Odomoter Applet

Telsa Gwynne

This is version 1.0 of the Odometer Applet manual.

Table of Contents
The odometer applet

The odometer applet

The GNOME panel odometer is an applet which tracks and measures the movements of your mouse pointer across the desktop. It is part of the gnome-applets package. This section of the guide refers to odometer-0.5, which is distributed in gnome-applets-1.1.2.

To add the odometer to your panel, you can start it by clicking mouse button 3 on an empty part of the panel and following the sequence Applets->Amusements->Odometer or you can issue this command at a command prompt: odometer_applet --activate-goad-server=odometer_applet &

The odometer applet was written by Fabrice Bellet (), and based on the Mousepedometa for KDE by Armen Nakashian, which in turn was based on the Motif-based Xodometer by Mark H. Granoff.

Please report bugs in the odometer applet to the GNOME bug tracking system. You can do this by following the guidelines on that site or by using bug-buddy from the command-line. For the package, put gnome-applets.

Usage

Once it is present, you don't need to do anything to the odometer. If you want to, though, the following options are available:

  1. Pressing mouse button 1 has no effect.

  2. Holding down mouse button 3 allows you to move the odometer about in the same way you move anything on the panel.

  3. Pressing mouse button 2 brings up the standard choices available for applets, including a properties menu explained below, and an About box.

In addition, moving the mouse pointer over the odometer produces a tooltip telling you the distance you have travelled.

Preferences

The properties dialogue box (which calls itself "Odometer setting" rather than properties) is divided into two sections, one for general options, and one for themes.

General

The general preferences tab has four options:

Use metric

If the use metric checkbox is checked, mouse pointer distance travelled is shown in metres. If it is not checked, the distance travelled is shown in feet. By moving the pointer over the odometer you can produce a tooltip which shows you whether it is currently displaying metres or feet.

auto_reset

If the auto_reset checkbox is checked, the odometer numbers return to zero.

enabled

If the enabled checkbox is checked, then the odometer will keep counting how far you have moved your pointer. If not, it will return the numbers to zero until you re-enable it.

digits number

The digits number field determines how many digits the odometer will display. The default is four, and the range is from 1 to 10.

Theme

The theme preferences tab has a variety of themes you can choose from. They are found by default in $PREFIX/odometer/.

Bugs and Limitations

None known currently.