swails / wanda

Wanda the fish revival

Wanda The Fish

If you were a heavy user of GNOME 2, then you almost certainly remember the Wanda-The-Fish applet that you could put on your toolbar and click to get nuggets of wisdom and encouragement.

And then... GNOME 3. Not only did it replace everything that was good about GNOME 2 with stuff that sucked (slowly, and using a lot of memory), but they deep-sixed our lovable fish as well.

That was the last straw, I moved to XFCE which has an interface reminiscent of the GNOME 2 glory days... but sadly no Wanda The Fish.

But no more!

With this simple script, Wanda is revived. Just add a "custom launcher" to your toolbar, copy wanda into /usr/local/bin, and enjoy. You can even add an image of Wanda herself to the custom launcher to get closer to what we all remember and love.

Prerequisites

Wanda is written in Python 2 using the Tkinter GUI toolkit. You will need to make sure that the Tcl/Tk bindings to Python are installed. Below, I show how to do this for a handful of popular Linux distributions (please do not feel slighted if I left out Your Favorite Distro (TM)).

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python-tk

Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat

sudo yum install tkinter

SUSE/OpenSUSE

sudo zypper install python-tk

Gentoo

Make sure you have the tk USE flag turned on for the Python package.

Others

Consult Google.