Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

I've just discovered two very interesting minimal word processors. They're designed by writers, for writers. They aim to get out of the way and let you just write, with no distractions.

PyRoom

First is PyRoom, which relies only on pygtk. It's really quite minimal and not distracting in the slightest, and easily themeable. I like it a lot. I created an ebuild, available here. Thank goodness for distutils!

WordGrinder

Second is WordGrinder, an even more minimal application that's entirely console-based. Unfortunately, it uses some weird freaky build system called PrimeMover, and it's scary. I asked one of my fellow developers who maintains the Lua package about it, but he's never heard of it. There aren't any eclasses for dealing with any Lua build system.

According to WordGrinder's Readme, the PrimeMover setup should be pretty simple. However, take a look at the pmfile itself. Man, that's ugly. It looks like three hours of judicious sed usage within the ebuild. I can't see any other way to alter it to something sanely installable to /usr.

If anyone has any tips, I'm all ears. I've got a skeleton ebuild for WordGrinder available in my repository, but it really needs fleshing out. So, who's willing to help?

Hardware: graphics shuffle redux

In other news, I had a really fun time getting my ATI X1950 Pro to work (again) with a silent aftermarket cooler (AC Accelero v1 rev2) and the latest bleeding-edge radeon, mesa, and libdrm packages. The hardware mods were fun, but the software . . . well, that's a long story for next time.

Desktop

Oh yes, and this month's Xfce desktop. Token uncluttered version here. All those artists in that Thunar window are amazing. You should be listening to them right now.

icons: Meliae-dust (needed something reddish)
gtk+: Rezlooks L & D
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk (yes, it is confusingly named)
background: The Empire (from pixelgirlpresents)

You have horrible fonts in Firefox and don't know how to fix it? It is fairy simple:

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
cp ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf .

And this is it. Restart X.

The FOSDEM schedule has been published. You can find the Cross Desktop room schedule here. There will be two talks about Xfce. Short descriptions are linked from the schedule. We’re also mentioned in the press release.
We will be a fairly large group of people (around at dozen at least, with most of the core developers being present) so it’ll definitely rock!

On the Xfce mailing list people have been asking about graphical installers for 4.6. I’m currently preparing them and there should be installers for Xfce 4.6 RC1, RC2 and the final release. The main installer is already working except for one thing that’s bugging me. Should be able to fix it though.

The FOSDEM schedule has been published. You can find the Cross Desktop room schedule here. There will be two talks about Xfce. Short descriptions are linked from the schedule. We're also mentioned in the press release.

We will be a fairly large group of people (around at dozen at least, with most of the core developers being present) so it'll definitely rock! On the Xfce mailing list people have been asking about graphical installers for 4.6. I'm currently preparing them and there should be installers for Xfce 4.6 RC1, RC2 and the final release. The main installer is already working except for one thing that's bugging me. Should be able to fix it though.

Thanks to Mario Limonciello for fixing the Xfce4 & GKD issue. It turns out that xfce4-session starts gnome-keyring-daemon when “Launch gnome services” is enabled. The problem is that a pam module also tries to start gnome-keyring-daemon now (and correctly). By patching xfce4-session to no longer start gnome-keyring-daemon, the issue is resolved.

Hello Folks,

Just a quick note to those testing the development version of Xubuntu and other flavours/derivitives that make use of Xfce4. It appears that the new version of gnome-keyring breaks the desktop and prevents you from getting to your desktop. The current fix for those of you using the development version is to simply downgrade to the previous version for gnome-keyring, libgnome-keyring0, libgp11-0, and libpam-gnome-keyring until we get this fixed.

Cheers!

I was enough bored from my (small) music collection that I wanted to listen to something new, without actually caring what it is. I know Jamendo has a big load of music with artists uploading music under creative commons licence. So I went on their website to have a look, and they have "widgets". They are a small flash application not bigger than 200x300, but I actually didn't find any link to open such a widget inside an external window, except some lost links on some pages. In conclusion it was enough annoying to get an external player that I fired up vim and wrote a 20 lines C program.

/* gcc `pkg-config --cflags --libs webkit-1.0` main.c -o jamendo-player */

#include <gtk/gtk.h>
#include <webkit/webkit.h>

#define URL_FORMAT "http://widgets.jamendo.com/fr/playlist/?playertype=2008&playlist_id=%s"

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  GtkWidget *window;
  GtkWidget *webview;
  gchar *url;
  gchar *playlist_id = argv[1];
  if (argc < 2)
    {
      playlist_id = g_strdup ("65196");
      g_message ("Loading the default playlist %s", playlist_id);
    }
  url = g_strdup_printf (URL_FORMAT, playlist_id);
  gtk_init (&argc, &argv);
  window = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
  g_signal_connect (window, "delete-event", G_CALLBACK (gtk_main_quit), NULL);
  gtk_window_set_icon_name (GTK_WINDOW (window), "multimedia-player");
  gtk_window_set_title (GTK_WINDOW (window), "Jamendo Player");
  gtk_window_set_resizable (GTK_WINDOW (window), FALSE);
  webview = webkit_web_view_new ();
  gtk_widget_set_size_request (webview, 200, 300);
  gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (window), webview);
  webkit_web_view_open (WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW (webview), url);
  gtk_widget_show_all (window);
  gtk_main ();
  return 0;
}

The result is pleasing, the flash application has nice colors, and is something I would never be able to do with GTK+ :-)

If you like the code, feel free to extend it and send patches, I will enjoy any contribution. For now I will just leave a desktop file inside my applications directory to open it when I am bored again of my music :-p

Update: I hacked a little on the program to handle the links inside the Flash application. This means it is possible to change the playlist, which was one the thing that started to annoy me very much.

However, this update requires WebKit 1.0.3 and GLib 2.16.


This time I'm making the code available here instead of pasting it as it has grown up to 120 lines.