[PLUG] Weather application for Xubuntu 18.04

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 14:59:48 -0500
Chuck Hast <wchast at gmail.com> dijo:

>Darksky was bought by apple and they have closed down
>all apps but iOS, I will refrain from more comments. So that
>is probably why you are not getting anything. Too bad, Dark-
>sky was a good app and service.

I discovered and resolved a problem, and now the maps are working,
although apparently still with darksky.

The problem was caused by Ubuntu. I have Xubuntu 18.04, and I decided
that it was high time I dist-upgraded to 20.04. Before doing that the
suggested practice is to apply all updates, so I used the GUI Software
Updater to do so. About a dozen of the files to update were Nvidia
drivers, to replace my version 440 with version 450.

After doing so everything seemed to be working OK, so I proceeded to do
the dist-upgrade, this time from the command line. Unfortunately, I got
an error message that there was no LTS version available. 'WTH' I
thought, 'I know they wait until the first dot release, but 20.04 was
released nearly five months ago.' After some research I discovered that
the developers are really still working on the first dot release,
because there are evidently a lot of problems.

So OK, I guess I'll just wait. Meantime I decided to update my VPN
client, only to discover that it failed with error messages about not
being able to find the display. Mind you, while reading the error
messages I was sitting in front of the display, which was working
perfectly. And then later I discovered that my CPAP reporting software
(OSCAR) refused to launch, also with error messages about the display. I
figured that there must be something wrong with the new Nvidia drivers,
and to troubleshoot I decided to reboot (which the Software Updater had
not required). And after rebooting the VPN client installed without
error, OSCAR launched as always, and the darksky maps now appear in
Meteo.

Now, y'all are shaking your heads wondering why I didn't just
automatically reboot, but you don't understand how much I hate
rebooting. To reboot takes about half an hour, first shutting down all
the apps and windows that are open, and after rebooting re-launching
them all and getting everything set up again. In fact, the last time I
rebooted this computer was when I shut it down to take it to the last
Clinic. Even now I would have rebooted if the Software Updater had
told me to do so, so naturally I took its silence as evidence that
rebooting wasn't necessary. After all, my display appeared to be
working perfectly, so who knew?

And getting back to meteo, I'd still like to get the outdoors
temperature to appear in the panel's notification area. I'd also like
to know where it's getting its weather data from, openweather, darksky,
or what? And what's going to happen when its source goes down or
changes its requirements?