Fink:Notification Plugins

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About Notification Plugins

Fink has the ability to notify you of what it's doing in a number of ways. For details on the plugins that are available in your Fink installation, run fink plugins. Since version 0.26 fink supports more than one plugin at a time.

Configuring Notification Plugins

To enable a specific notification plugin, you must edit /sw/etc/fink.conf, and add the line:

 NotifyPlugin: PluginName

Null

This plugin is used when no other plugin is available. It does nothing!

Growl

This plugin will give you notifications through Growl (which can itself be configured to give you info in many different ways). This is the default plugin if Growl is available, otherwise the Null plugin is used. For Fink to find it, you must install Growl manually (and, when asked, make sure you install it globally, not just for your user), and you must have Mac::Growl installed for the perl version that is your system perl (ie, the perl in /usr/bin/perl). Mac::Growl is available in fink (the mac-growl-pmXXX package), or, if you must, you can get Mac::Growl from cpan.

You can get the perl version by running /usr/bin/perl --version.

 $ /usr/bin/perl --version
 
 This is perl, v5.8.6 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
 (with 2 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
 
 $ fink list mac-growl
 Information about 5200 packages read in 8 seconds.
      mac-growl-pm581                        0.7-10                        Perl module for GROWL notification system
      mac-growl-pm586                        0.7-10                        Perl module for GROWL notification system
 $ fink install mac-growl-pm586

File:Fink Growl.png

QuickSilver

Quicksilver is a system tool that does many things, including Growl-like notifications and Spotlight-like search and application launching. To use Quicksilver notifications, just install QuickSilver and set "NotifyPlugin: QuickSilver" in your fink.conf.

Say

Uses osascript to notify you with Apple's text-to-speech engine. To use Say notifications, just set "NotifyPlugin: Say" in your fink.conf.

Syslog

Uses /usr/bin/logger to log Fink actions to /var/log/system.log. To use Syslog notifications, just set "NotifyPlugin: Syslog" in your fink.conf.

Writing Notification Plugins

You need to make a perl module that @ISA(Fink::Notify). For more information, run "perldoc Fink::Notify".