Launcher activities for Linux apps show loading screen for too long

[sridhar]

If a normal Linux app is launched as a Sugar activity, the loading (splash) screen stays animated in the background for about one and a half minutes. This doesn't affect the operation of the app, but it is confusing for users.

If Sugar was able to easily and seamlessly run normal Linux applications, its potential application base would be far greater.

Sample activity: ​http://dev.laptop.org.au/attachments/177/NetworkConnections.xo

More information:

• ​http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-May/031039.html
• ​http://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/595
• ​http://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/434
• ​http://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/430

[greenfeld]

For some reason Sugar has its own approach to watching for opened windows. I do not know the historical or technical reasons why, although I have asked about this in the past.

Using libsugarize may help with your custom wrappers if you haven't tried it already - I believe Martin recompiled a version for the 10.1.3 release.

Ideally we should eventually support listening to something like X Startup Notification either directly or through one of the standard libraries:

​http://standards.freedesktop.org/startup-notification-spec/startup-notification-latest.txt

[sascha_silbe]

As Samuel mentioned Sugar currently uses a ​custom protocol for startup notification, so the behaviour you see is as-designed. Using a standard protocol is planned (#2434), but nobody has done the implementation work yet.
A quick & dirty workaround would be to map an X window with the custom properties in a wrapper script. A less quick hack would be an LD_PRELOAD wrapper that interjects X11 calls and adds the custom properties. libsugarize ​seems to implement the latter option.