The very latest WhatPulse Linux clients

Version 0.97, 2010-01-22

Changes:

• Do not show the Geek Window when double-clicking the tray icon in order to pulse
• Fix crash when using "kbd" driver in X
• Fix a possible unjustified "Savefile has been corrupted" message
• Add context menu to Geek Window

Download

32bit (.tar.gz, 153 KB, MD5: 3aef789af781db661ebfb01ca7ae4c28)
32bit (uncompressed, 294 KB, MD5: fb6cb75e5d10b89095fe09cdf6d9bb59)

64bit (.tar.gz, 154 KB, MD5: d828b9da6ef6dd81e37a4fc4d0b8c01f)
64bit (uncompressed, 310 KB, MD5: b1f7661407b59ec881eb0a0d3ed0cc82)

Script to set up permissions (only required if you haven't set up permissions before)

Community contributed downloads:
WhatPulse forums user hostname was kind enough to provide a Package for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint 64bit (.deb, 165 KB). It contains everything you need (including the setup script) for Debian-based distributions.
Fine print: Please note that community-contributed packages are not officially supported. If installation fails, contact the creator of the package via the forums.

Notes

Requires Qt. WhatPulse is built on the Qt4 library, which means that you need that (at least QtGui and QtNetwork, to be precise). If you have KDE SC 4.x (or any KDE 4.x application) installed, you already have Qt4. If you need to install Qt4 (for example on a default Ubuntu or Fedora installation), use your package manager to install the required packages. They're called "libqtgui4" and "libqt4-network" on Ubuntu; and "qt" and "qt-x11" on Fedora. On any other distro, just search for the appropriate package names, or ask us if you have problems.

Configuration files. WhatPulse 0.95 and later uses a new location for its configuration files (~/.config/whatpulse instead of ~/.whatpulse). Normally, you shouldn't even notice that, but it means that you need to pulse before upgrading from a version using the old location (0.8, 0.9).

File permissions. Both for ultimate reliability and enhanced cheat protection, WhatPulse gets its key/button events directly from the kernel. Usually, regular user accounts aren't allowed to read this data, which is why you have to set up permissions first.
You can either grant your user read access to /dev/input/event* yourself, or just run the provided script as root. The script will create a new group called 'input', add your user account to that group, and make the event device files readable for the group.
Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where you have downloaded the script. If you have sudo configured on your distro (e.g. Ubuntu provides this by default), just run:

$ chmod +x setup-permissions.sh
$ sudo ./setup-permissions.sh

If your distro uses su (e.g. Fedora), enter these commands:

$ chmod +x setup-permissions.sh
$ su -c ./setup-permissions.sh

Synaptics touchpads. [Update: Apparently this also applies to ALPS touchpads.] By default, the synaptics driver grabs the event device exclusively, which means that any other program listening for device events won't see any. You can override this behaviour as follows:
If your touchpad is configured by HAL (which is the usually the case on modern distros), add the following line into the appropriate <match> section of the respective configuration file, usually /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi or something similar (the precise filename doesn't matter, as long as the file is in the right directory):

<merge key="input.x11_options.GrabEventDevice" type="string">false</merge>

If you feel confused, have a look at this example file.
Alternatively, if your touchpad is configured in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (which was the usual method before xorg-server-1.3), add the following line to the Device section for your touchpad in that file:

Option "GrabEventDevice" "false"

Reboot, and WhatPulse should be able to register clicks on your touchpad.
Note: Tapping the touchpad does not generate real click events; it's the responsibility of the driver to detect taps and interpret them as clicks. Therefore, WhatPulse can't register clicks that you performed by tapping, and that won't change anytime soon.

Keyboard drivers. WhatPulse is designed to work with the "evdev" keyboard driver, which is automatically used if your keyboard is managed by HAL. Normally, this is the case on current distributions. If you're using an old distro, please consider upgrading. If you're managing your X.org configuration yourself, make sure your keyboard uses the evdev driver. Using the kbd driver should generally work, but might lead to problems.

Distributions. This version of WhatPulse has been tested successfully on the following distributions:

Ubuntu 9.10
Fedora 12
OpenSUSE 11.2
Arch Linux (current)
Gentoo (current "unstable")

It should run on just about any other current Linux distribution as well (since there are literally hundreds of them, we can't test them all). If you encounter any problems, post to the forums or send a mail to jmrk [at] whatpulse [dot] org. If you have successfully run WhatPulse on a distribution not listed here, tell us about it and we'll add it to this list ;-)

Have fun using WhatPulse!

Archived versions:

Version 0.96, 2009-12-13

Changes:

• Fixed auto-pulsing after x keys/clicks
• Added tooltip to tray icon

Known Bugs

• The "About" dialog still says "Version 0.95". Oh well.
• If your X server uses the old "kbd" driver for your keyboard, some keys ("Windows", "Context Menu", "Right Arrow", "Insert", "Delete", maybe others, maybe not all of them) will cause WhatPulse to crash. Solution: upgrade your distro / reconfigure your X to use evdev/HAL.