A learning project, please help

koindrop has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've been programming with perl here and there for a while, though I am still a pretty basic programmer. I came up with the idea of a learning project where my long term goal is to program a screensaver, on a system running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS with Gnome 2.22.3, that gets track info from Rythmbox 0.11.5 and puts it on screen moving around. I really have no idea where to start, so I was hoping some people could give an idea of the concepts and toolsets I would need to learn to accomplish this. To give you an idea of what I know, my most complicated programs are 500ish lines of code using perl, GTK2 and lwp. Thank you in advance.

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Re: A learning project, please help by marto (Cardinal) on May 09, 2013 at 20:57 UTC
Phosphor is a reasonably common screensaver on Linux. It's pretty customizable, and can take the output of another program as input. Interestingly enough this example I read today illustrates this. Perhaps there's an API or plugin for your media player you could use to create a script to achieve your goal using Phosphor. IIRC other apps like pidgin can read track info from various media players. That may be an avenue to explore.	[reply]
Re: A learning project, please help by forgot_other_usrname (Novice) on May 09, 2013 at 21:53 UTC
On Gnome, programs can communicate through DBus. You'll want to check out this article (from 2006, but 8.04 is ancient anyway so it should still be relevant for your needs). I've never tried, but I'm guessing Net::DBus should be a place to start looking.	[reply]