Introduction
Portland is an joined OSDL/Freedesktop.org initiative to provide independent software developers (ISDs) with stable APIs into Desktop Linux and other Free Desktop platforms. The first result of the Portland initiative is Xdg-utils, a free set of open source tools that allows applications to easily integrate with the desktop configuration your customer has chosen to work with.
Xdg-utils
Xdg-utils is a set of command line tools that assist applications with a variety of desktop integration tasks. About half of the tools focus on tasks commonly required during the installation of a desktop application and the other half focuses on integration with the desktop environment while the application is running. Even if the desktop components of your application are limited to an installer, configuration or management tool, Xdg-utils provides you with an easy way to enhance the usage experience of your customers by improving the integration of these components in the user's environment. Best of all, Xdg-utils is provided as open source and free of charge.
Overview
Xdg-utils consists of the following installation related tools:
xdg-desktop-menu, install desktop menu items
xdg-desktop-icon, install icons to the desktop
xdg-icon-resource, install icon resources
xdg-mime, query information about file type handling and add descriptions for new file types
It also contains the following runtime integration tools:
xdg-open, open a file or URL in the user's preferred application
xdg-email, send mail using the user's preferred e-mail composer
xdg-screensaver, control the screensaver
License
Xdg-utils is licensed under the open source MIT license. See the License file for details.
Download
A complete version of Xdg-utils, including documentation and test suite is available as xdg-utils-1.0.1.tgz in the download area.
A stripped down version consisting only of the tools and their manual pages is available as xdg-utils-1.0.1-scripts.tgz This version is useful if you want to include the tools along with your application.
Using Xdg-utils
= Examples =
Feedback and Questions
You can give feedback on the Portland project through the freedesktop.org bugreporting system or via the Portland mailing list Please use the mailing list for any questions you may have.