Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

All right, I finally did it. I went for the eyecandy. I've never set up any thing having to do with composite, transparency, etc., but I figured that since as long as I'm living on the p.masked Xfce edge anyway, I might as well use its built-in compositor. And...it's interesting. I don't particularly like how the panel automatically gets translucent whenever the mouse isn't on it, and it's actually distracting when I have a terminal superimposed on both Firefox and another terminal...I was surprised that the backgrounded Firefox itself becomes clear enough to see the other terminal underneath it.

And yet people dig this stuff? Or maybe they just dig the effects of more nifty compositing window managers like compiz. Anyway, I don't know if I'll stick with it or not. I'm pleased to say that after a little tweaking, it's a minimal resource hit even for my ancient integrated nVidia GeForce2 Go chip. (One of the very first dedicated mobile GPUs, a whole 16MB memory.)

Interestingly, I seem to be running only semi-hardware-accelerated, as I call it. running "glxinfo" gives a segfault, as it can't find the GLX extension to load, despite the visual results. Problem is, I can't enable "AllowGLXWithComposite", as that results in random hard lockups, which is the fault of being forced to use nvidia-legacy-drivers. These older 7xxx drivers are known to have such bugs, but the newer 8xxx drivers don't support my vintage 2001 hardware. Ah, well. At least adding "RenderAccel" to xorg.conf lets me run this stuff with very little noticeable slowdown. I suspect that I am getting hardware accel; it's just confused.

I think I'll bring along this composited laptop to SCALE and show off the wonders of unstable Xfce and the latest eyecandy. Which reminds me, now I need to see about getting all the effects of compiz, but without using that WM or unmerging yet more masked packages. I want to see what else this old graphics hardware is capable of.

...to Xfce4 4.4, that is. I've finally heeded the urgings of my fellow Xfce enthusiasts dostrow, nichoj, et al, and moved my laptop over to the latest Xfce 4.4 prerelease. Sometimes as a developer, you have to live somewhat on the bleeding edge, in this case, a couple of dozen entries in package.unmask. Yow! Hot stuff. The new Xfce has changed considerably since 4.2. It more resembles a traditional desktop environment, but it still retains the speed and ease of use that it had from the older days. That said, some configuration changes have been made. Configuring the panel is a little less intuitive; the same control works for both the icon strip at the bottom and the window list at the top. (So don't just kill the panel process entirely!) No more xftaskbar4 to kill.

There are still a few outstanding bugs, such as missing icons from things like the main configuration window, missing panel plugin icons (none for cpu-freq), and missing icons for mail and webbrowser in the terminal Applications menu. Also missing is the old ability to change the icon spacing in thunar. Though a host of other features have been added, folder views take up way too much space. Need the icons to be spaced about half as far apart as they currently are.

Also, the new battery applet is not nearly as helpful as the old one. For example, even though lm_sensors doesn't work on this laptop whatsoever, the basic thermal zone info from ACPI was parsed by the battstatus applet (don't ask me why, I'm just glad it did). It displayed temperature, battery charge, and an indicator whenever the fan turned on. Handy, right? Well, the fan indicator is still there, but there's no provision for temperature display anymore. WEAK. Grr. I'd downgrade, but the stable version blocks the masked version. Anyone know a fix-it for this?

Speaking of WEAK, my back has taken a sudden turn for the worse over the last couple of days. Earlier this week (i.e. before I started my new schedule on Wednesday), I was almost back to normal. I could walk without limping, at least most of the day. And now...now I'm not doing so hot. Some excrutiating twinges, and constant pain every step. It's a little better than it was yesterday, but I for sure need to get to the doctor's office and get that x-ray done. The doc said it'd take a minimum of six weeks to heal, and at the end of that time, I can say that I'm definitely not recovered. %$^&# sciatica. And at my age, too. I'd hoped to be well by my wife's birthday and Christmas, but doesn't look like that will happen.

Maybe I'll be fully healed in time for SCALE in February?

There were some good comments on my last journal entry, thanks to everyone who responded. I'm happy to say that some of the problems have been dealt with. I've been talking to several developers who are rather likeminded; just check Planet's entries for the last week or so.

Anyway, I've decided to give my trusty ol' lappy das boot, by which I mean "the boot" rather than "the boat."

It's had Gentoo (Jackass! 2005.1, yay for my old project) installed on it since August 31, 2005. And what with one thing or another, it's just been slowing down. It's got a strange partition layout on it, too. A whole unused 10GB ntfs partition (never got around to installing Windows), a smaller Linux test partition, and the main desktop stuff. Rather inefficient usage of the 60GB disk, considering its recent use. The slowness, combined with space issues, and the fact that I haven't updated it since before gcc-4.1.1 went stable on x86 means that I've decided to just reinstall. Why spend a week compiling when everything will likely break if I try to simultaneously migrate to modular Xorg and switch from gcc-3.4, as well as all the crazy kernel/udev/nvidia/madwifi updates?

Time to wipe the disk and move on to something more recent. I've spent today moving /home to my new USB key and dumping it to my AMD64 box. It really highlights the slow-as-molasses USB1.1 on the laptop, as well as the crappy I/0 and slow system bus. I'll be doing some smarter performance tuning this time around, as well as installing only Xfce. I've been running mostly in Gnome because of some weird Xfce/Fluxbox issues, but with only 128MB memory, any and all workloads are just about unbearable.

Of course, the simpler solution would have been to just plug the laptop drive straight into the IDE cables on the AMD64 box for the updates, but unfortunately, the drive uses some weird laptop-only ATA/power combo connector, not the standard IDE connector. Oh well. I don't mind trying out the Installer LiveCD, especially since I'll have nothing to lose.

Guess I have to go re-read all the changes I've been making to the installation handbooks.

Sigh. I know people don’t read directions. I know that, when you want to get someone to read something, brevity is better: the less there is to read, the more likely the recipient is to read it.

But when the first line of a Bugzilla mail says “Do not reply to this email. To comment on this bug, please visit: (URL)”, you’d think that people would, you know, just click on the damned link. How is it easier to hit reply, delete “bugzilla-daemon@xfce.org” from the “to” line, and paste my email address in there?

(Ok, spambots, have at the bugzilla-daemon address. It goes directly to /dev/null anyway.)

So now, Xfce Bugzilla emails start with this: “DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. Also, do not reply via email to the person whose email is mentioned below. To comment on this bug, please visit: (URL).”

Hopefully that’s clear enough, and not too long for the ridiculously lazy among us to read.