bonobo-activation-server

bonobo-activation-server [OPTION...]

--help
    Displays a help message and exits.

--version
    Displays version information and exits.

The bonobo-activation-server was a critical daemon process within older versions of the GNOME desktop environment, specifically those leveraging the Bonobo component model (e.g., GNOME 1.x and 2.x). Its primary role was to act as an Object Request Broker (ORB) and an activation service for Bonobo components. Bonobo was a component architecture that allowed applications to embed functionality from other applications, similar in concept to Microsoft's OLE/COM or CORBA.

When a GNOME application needed to use a Bonobo component (e.g., embedding a Gnumeric spreadsheet into Evolution mail client), it would communicate with the bonobo-activation-server. The server was responsible for finding, launching, and managing instances of these Bonobo components, providing their interfaces to the requesting application. It facilitated inter-process communication and object lifecycle management for these embedded objects.

With the evolution of GNOME, particularly with GNOME 3 and the increasing adoption of D-Bus for inter-process communication, the Bonobo component model became obsolete. Consequently, the bonobo-activation-server and its associated libraries are no longer part of modern GNOME installations and are considered legacy components.

The bonobo-activation-server is a deprecated and largely obsolete component. It is not present in modern Linux distributions running contemporary GNOME versions (e.g., GNOME 3 or 40+). If you encounter this command, it typically indicates a very old or custom system setup. Attempting to run it on a modern system will likely result in an error indicating the command is not found, or if old libraries are present, it may not function correctly due to missing dependencies or incompatible system components.

The bonobo-activation-server was typically not started manually by users. Instead, it was automatically launched by other core GNOME components or by the system's session manager whenever a Bonobo component was requested by an application. It would run in the background as a daemon.

Bonobo aimed to enable 'compound documents' where parts of a document (e.g., a graph, a spreadsheet) could be handled by different applications within the same user interface, allowing for highly integrated desktop applications. This concept was common in older desktop environments (e.g., Microsoft OLE).

The Bonobo component model, and by extension the bonobo-activation-server, was a cornerstone of GNOME's architecture during its 1.x and early 2.x releases (roughly 1999-2005). It aimed to solve complex inter-application embedding and communication challenges. However, the complexity of CORBA (on which Bonobo was built via ORBit), performance concerns, and the emergence of simpler, more lightweight inter-process communication mechanisms like D-Bus led to its gradual deprecation.

Development on Bonobo largely ceased around the mid-2000s, and its components were progressively removed from GNOME's core dependencies. By GNOME 3 (released in 2011), Bonobo was completely phased out, replaced by D-Bus for IPC and other mechanisms for document embedding. The bonobo-activation-server therefore became a relic of a past architectural design.

d-bus(7), gnome-panel(1), corba(7), orbit2(1)