Linux clipboard utilities lead to frustration and defeat

I went looking for Linux clipboard manager utilities and found plenty to choose from. The trick is figuring out what to Google for: "Linux clipboard manager" and "Linux clipboard viewer" seem to do the trick.

I started with a simple "apropos clip" on a Centos 5 system. That returned "xclipboard". Great, I don't have to go find anything. Let's give it a whirl:

 # xclipboard
 Error: another clipboard is already running
 

Huh? I'm not sure why that would matter anyway, but:

 # ps -ef | grep -i clip
 root      2501  2481  0 03:16 pts/1    00:00:00 grep -i clip
 # 
 

Naww, nothing is running. It turns out that xclipboard doesn't work with Gnome. Kind of a stupid error message and you'd think that the man page might have mentioned that, but hey, maybe it used to and just needs an update. Is there an update? Let's fire up the package manager and see. Strangely, a search for "xclipboard" said that no matching software could be found. So it's installed, but the package manager knows nothing about it. OK, moving on..

I tried "clip" in the package search and that returned "xfce4-clipman-plugin". Hmm, what's that? Oh, well, I'm not running xcfce and am not going to start it up just to see this. The most common recommendations seem to be Klipper (KDE) and Glipper (Gnome). Let's try Glipper.

I tried finding Glipper for Centos - no binary, no rpm, "yum install" claims no knowledge of it.. OK, I'll compile it. The first try failed looking for a newer version of "intltool". That was easy enough to update through the Centos Package Manager, so I tried again. This time the compile ran longer, but ultimately failed complaining about these:

 No package 'gtk+-2.0' found
 No package 'pygtk-2.0' found
 No package 'pygobject-2.0' found
 
 Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
 installed software in a non-standard prefix.
 
 Alternatively, you may set the environment variables GLIPPER_CFLAGS
 and GLIPPER_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
 See the pkg-config man page for more details.
 
 

Arrgh. Is the problem that Centos 5 uses gtk2, not gtk? Whatever, I'm done with this. I am not going to spend my day chasing down dependencies. Let's try something else. Another commonly recommended clipboard utility is "parcellite".

Unfortunately, that has the same problem as Glipper:

 checking for GTK+ - version >= 2.10.0... no
 *** Could not run GTK+ test program, checking why...
 *** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the
 *** exact error that occured. This usually means GTK+ is incorrectly installed.
 configure: error: Requirement not met: gtk >= 2.10.0
 

This MIGHT be simple to fix. I MIGHT be giving up too easily. I looked for "gtk" in the package manager and found that I could install that. Unfortunately, it only seems to have gtk+ version 1.2.10 and both Parcellite and Glipper want 2.0 or better. I can see where this is going: I'll go find gtk+ 2.whatever, and then it will need some other obscure library.. no thanks, I'll try something else.

What about "gcm"? I had a little trouble finding the source but it didn't matter - this too wanted a newer gtk. Damn.. OK, I'll try finding that.. grumble, grumble..

The "Requirements" page for GTK+ made me grumble more:

 Requirements
 
 You will need to get the GLib, Pango and GTK+ packages to build GTK+.
 You may also need some of the external dependencies that are also linked for each version listed below.
 

Oh, goodie: I love chasing rabbits.

Then there was this:

 Stable Release
 
 To build GTK+ 2.14 you may find the user guide helpful. For additional help, the FAQ is a good starting point.
 

So I need a user guide? Joy of joys: it's so refreshing to find something that might need more that "./configure && make", isn't it? I don't know about you, but I find stuff that compiles easily sooo boring..

I read the guide. It wasn't that bad. I figured I'd just press my luck and try it. I started with the Glib, and that was a long, long process (so many output lines that the "make install" alone was more than 2,400 lines!) , but it did seem to have gone well. Feeling that someday I might actually be able to use one of these clipboard managers on Centos 5, I pressed on to compile Pango.:

 ...
 checking for some Win32 platform... no
 checking for perl5... no
 checking for perl... perl
 checking for X... no
 configure: WARNING: X development libraries not found
 checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
 checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
 checking for FONTCONFIG... no
 no
 checking Carbon/Carbon.h usability... no
 checking Carbon/Carbon.h presence... no
 checking for Carbon/Carbon.h... no
 checking for CAIRO... no
 no
 configure: error: *** Could not enable any of FreeType, X11, Cairo, or Win32 backends.
 *** Must have at least one backend to build Pango.
 

OK.. isn't Gnome X11? And what's with the "perl5... no"?

 # perl -v
 
 This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
 

Well, it's probably the X11-development. Back to the package manager to install that, and then another run at Pango:.

 ...
 checking for GLIB... no
 configure: error:
 *** Glib 2.14.0 or better is required. The latest version of
 *** Glib is always available from ftp://ftp.gtk.org/.
 

Dammit, I just installed Glib 2.18! Or so I thought - looking back at the output files, it seems to have written everything into a glib-2.0 directory. So what the heck does that mean? It's all very frustrating and has gone far beyond my patience level.

Linux Desktop folk: I WANT Linux to succeed. Really. But this kind of stuff is exactly why I never recommend Linux to ordinary people. You run into this kind of thing constantly and that's why I tell them to buy a Mac.

Yes, I know: if I had used some other release or some other desktop, things might have gone differently. But that's MIGHT, and if this particular rabbit was easily bagged on another system, some other hare would have led me through the fields for hours just like this and I would have ended up with nothing in my bag.

Had I no other choice for a Unix OS, I'd put up with it. I'd fight my way through all the dependencies and other lapses and eventually get something to work. I'd certainly do that before I'd put up with Windows. But I do have another choice: Mac OS X.

yeah, I know, it's not fair. OS X is one version, one desktop, and that makes it very easy for developers. Yeah, I get it. But I don't care: I don't want to spend half a day chasing programs and libraries just to look at some utility to see if I like it.

If I don't want to put up with this, how can you expect any ordinary user to suffer like this? I'm not a super-geek, but I'm far more geekish and forgiving than Joe User. If I get frustrated and annoyed, can you possibly imagine how a more typical user would react?

These are the clipboard manager programs I found:
http://data-manager.sourceforge.net/
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/index.dml/tag/parcelite
http://parcellite.sourceforge.net/?page_id=2
http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-clipman-plugin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klipper
http://glipper.sourceforge.net/about.shtml
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/10/22/enhance-your-clipboard-with-a-clipboard-manager/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/gcm/
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/ClipLord-21322.shtml
http://members.chello.nl/~h.lai/gnome-clipboard-daemon/index.html
http://linux.nawebu.cz/wmcliphist/

Perhaps someday when I have more hours to waste I'll actually get one of them working. Or better yet, I might find an RPM - though so far that's turned up empty.