How to determine unity or gnome-shell or something else is running in C

[Jeff Lane]

On 10/05/2011 10:01 AM, Didier Roche wrote:
> Le 05/10/2011 15:50, Jeff Lane a écrit :
>> On 10/05/2011 02:30 AM, Didier Roche wrote:
>>> Le 05/10/2011 08:17, YunQiang Su a écrit :
>>>> I am trying to make a program has different tray in different
>>>> environment:
>>>> when indicator is supported, indicator plug-in is used,
>>>> when in gnome-shell or gnome-panel, notification area written by gtk
>>>> when KDE, use the way KDE prefer,
>>>>
>>>> Then the problem is that how I can determine which are using dynamic?
>>>> unity, gnome-shell or something else ?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> You can detect Unity using dbus. There is a Bus Name
>>> com.canonical.Unity.Launcher which is there only when Unity is running.
>>> This method is 100% reliable compared to session name
>>> (DESKTOP_SESSION=ubuntu, DESKTOP_SESSION=ubuntu-2d…) which isn't cross
>>> distribution.
>>>
>>> For other like gnome-shell, I'm not sure if something similar exists.
>>
>> Didier,
>>
>> Is there a specific dbus method for determining 3D vs 2D? We
>> previously were simply looking for com.canonical.Unity since at that
>> time, Unity only ran in 3D, with Gnome begin the fallback. Now that we
>> have both 3D and 2D, how can we make that determination. It would be
>> useful in testing to know if the installation is providing 3d or 2d by
>> default.
>>
> Interesting question! There is nothing "official" right now, but only 3D
> has the Debug method right now, so you can base on that:
> com.canonical.Unity,
> /com/canonical/Unity/Debug
> use the interface com.canonical.Unity.Debug.Introspection and GetState()
> method.
> You should open a wishlist so that we can add a common dbus method
> returning 2D or 3D (and raise it at UDS if possible) so that it's on the
> list.
>
> For ubuntu only from Oneiric, you can rely on the DESKTOP_SESSION
> environment variable being "ubuntu" for unity 3D and "ubuntu-2d" for
> unity 2D. (the detection is done before choosing the session). That
> won't tell you if the ui crashed at startup though.
>
> Didier
>

Awesome, thanks! I'll look at incorporating this and definitely open a 
wishlist bug.

-- 
Jeff Lane - Hardware Certification Engineer and Test Tools Developer
Ubuntu Ham: W4KDH
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