Hamster can be found packaged in most distributions. The instructions below
are for installing from sources for testing and development purposes.

The instructions are mix between Gnome 2 and Gnome 3, so, errm, just bear with
us.

Previously hamster was installed everywhere under hamster-applet. As
the applet is long gone, the paths and file names have changed to
hamster-time-tracker. To clean up previous install follow these steps:

git checkout d140d45f105d4ca07d4e33bcec1fae30143959fe
./waf configure build --prefix=/usr
sudo ./waf uninstall

Debian-based: apt-get install git-core gettext intltool python-gconf
RPM-based: yum install git-core gettext intltool gnome-python2-gconf

./waf configure build --prefix=/usr
sudo ./waf install

After that make sure that the old daemons aren’t roaming around:

killall hamster-service && killall hamster-windows-service

Make sure gconf settings are owned by you and not root:

cd ~/.gconf/apps/
ls -l | grep hamster-time-tracker
sudo chown -R <user>:<group> hamster-time-tracker

Now restart your panels/dockies and you should be able to add hamster to your panel!

sudo apt-get install python-requests python-beaker

To enable/disable the icon glow:

$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-time-tracker/icon_glow" --type bool "false"
$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-time-tracker/icon_glow" --type bool "true"

To enable/disable the activity label:

$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-time-tracker/show_label" --type bool "true"
$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-time-tracker/show_label" --type bool "false"

To set the maximum label length:

$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-time-tracker/label_length" --type int "20"