Mumbles Brings Growl-like Notifications to your Gnome/Ubuntu Desktop

You’ve certainly have bumped into Gmail Notifier for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, the awesome little python-install application that brings Growl-like, transparent Gmail notifications to your desktop, Mumbles goes a lot further than that.

Mumbles is a promising open source, plugin-driven, python application that can be re-baptised as “Growl for Linux”. Using the DBus notification system – – similar to libnotify notifications, Mumbles lets those Gnome applications that use it to un-intrusively notify users of the status of the application.
The most recent release, Mumbles pre-release version 0.4.2 for Jaunty comes with plugins for Pidgin, Rhythmbox, Firefox, Thunderbird, and custom notifications – – like Resuming Session, Network Connections etc .

Firefox and Thunderbird plugins are not included in the download package. They are considered as Extras. These two generic DBus extensions or plugins can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-ons site – – if you want to add Thunderbird growl-like mail notifications and Firefox “Download Complete” notifications to Mumbles. [See Screenshots below]

Download Thunderbird DBus Notifications Extension | Download Firefox DBus Notifications Extension

Other Extra plugins for Amarok and Twitter (Twitter Check – checks Twitter for new Messages) are also available.

Mumbles 0.42 pre-release for Jaunty Jackalope also bundles-up eight customizable themes with fade-out and horizontal/vertical slclassing effects.

Ubuntu: If you use the Mumbles deb package, then you can add mumbles to the startup, the usual way. That is; System-Preferences->Startup Applications. Under the Startup Programs tab , click Add and enter ‘mumbles’ in the “Name” and “Command” fields . Next time you log in, mumbles should be started.
Note: Previous versions of mumbles downloadable from the host site have issues on Ubuntu 9.04.

If you run mumbles form the source package, follow the above procedure, but use the path to the mumbles directory like ‘~/mumbles0.4-branch/src/mumbles’ in the “Command” field.

The downside of this promising applications is its to many requisites. Mumble requires Python 2.4, PyGTK 2.8, Python Glade, Python Cairo, Python DBus and Python Setuptools for its full-functioning.

[Other Screenshots]

Download Mumbles – – version 0.42 pre-release | Mumbles Extras