I'm pleased to announce the initial version of actman . (currently) It is a command line activity manager (a'la KDE).

This applications is now called Desktop Activity Manager.

actman is a status-menu plugin that saves and restores desktop activities (or desktop profiles). An activity is defined as whatever exists on the 4 desktops of fremantle.

EDIT: All things below this point still work, but you should just use the GUI instead.
EDIT: It is available in extras-testing.
EDIT: It is available in extras.
EDIT: It has a wiki page.

So, you can do:
Using the command line utility you can do:
and an activity named "main" will be created that will hold the current desktop configuration. Then you can do:
and you will create (and switch to) a new activity named "empty". All desktop widgets, bookmarks etc will disappear. Then you can do:
which will switch to activity "clean" and restore previous widgets (since it is a clone of "main"). You can then remove whatever you don't like. After that you will have three activities:

* main: The initial configuration
* empty: A completely empty desktop (to remind you how fast N900 is)
* clean: A stripped-down version of the "main" activity.

Of course you can have as many activities as you like with different set of desktop configurations for each. The background is also saved/restored.

Currently the autobuilder is down so you'll have to get it from here. Just save the script in your home directory and run:
You'll need to have bash installed for the script to work. It is just a shell script so it will be easy to review if you like.

I've tested it on my N900 and on the SDK and seems to work without any problems at all.

Typical use cases:

• Have a "car" activity with very few buttons to make it easier to call from the car.
• Have an "empty" or "clean" activity to use it when you want to conserve battery.
• Have a "games" activity to include links of games and a proper background.
• Have a "work" activity without personal things on the desktop (like the calendar).
• Have a "phonebook" activity with contacts on the desktop
• ... and many more