Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

This blog post is the funniest thing I read today (scroll down for the screenshot).

How about some Xfce download statistics in that style? ;-)

There have been a bunch of new releases in the Goodies during the last few days.

Midori 1.5.0

This new release mainly brings changes under the hood which aim at easing the future development of the application and its stability. A lot of old code which was used to provide backward compatibility for the old Webkit releases was removed, as well as the internal source viewer: Midori now uses your default text editor.

There are also some visible changes: it is now possible to download files directly, without using an external application and a new extension called 'Colorful Tabs' makes your browser shiny!

Xfce Power Manager 0.6.5 and 0.8.0 alpha

Two releases during the last few days: a stable release and an alpha release for the future 0.8.0.

The 0.6.5 version provides the standard Freedesktop.org inhibit interface which allows you to prevent power managers to suspend, shutdown, etc your computer under certain conditions.

The 0.8.0 version contains far more changes. The user interface was simplified and the inhibit and power management standard interfaces have also been added. Xfce Power Manager is now able to detect if your session is idle and to reduce the brightness in that case, it can also detect if you are watching a movie and then disables screen suspending or brightness reduction. Two new panel plugins are available: one to set the brightness of the screen and the other one to manage the inhibit stuff. Your suspend, sleep and brightness keys should also be detected correctly.

The developer of this applications would appreciate if people could test this alpha release and report any bug on the Xfce Bugzilla.

Xfmpc 0.1.0

Xfmpc now has an additional developer who will speed the development up. This release features a preferences dialog for the MPD server and the appearance of the player, and improved play list with new context menus to show information about the songs, to add and remove songs, etc. A search entry was also added to the song database browser to find songs easily.

Xfce Clipman Plugin 0.9.1

This is a minor bug fix release which fixes some little issues. The next release (1.0) should be far more exciting with the actions support: the plugin will be able to execute some actions when it detects a given pattern in your clipboard.

Having Xfce translated into as many languages as possible and maintaining translations of high quality is essential. People will not use a desktop environment that they do not understand! The Xfce i18n Project is in charge of this task and always needs new contributors. You do not need any particular skill, except understanding English, writing your own language correctly and motivation.

Let's see how you can contribute to this project.

First step: contact any existing translators for your language

Reference: the Language Maintainers page on the Xfce i18n Wiki.

Their might already be contributors to the translation of Xfce into your language listed on this page. If this is the case, you should get in touch with them and ask them how you can help. If the page is not up to date, you should warn us or update it yourself.

Let's see how to translate an application or to update a translation now.

Second step: download the translation files

The applications are translated using pot files, with a 'po' extension: those files basically contain each English string and its translation. There is also a template for creating a pot file for a new translation: it is the file which has a 'pot' extension. Every time a developper changes a string in the application, he will update the pot files and the translation will have to be updated accordingly.

Those files are located on the Xfce SVN to ease cooperation and distribution. We will use a script to ease the downloading of those files, this script will also allow you to update your pot files easily. This script requires Subversion to work.

Download the script and move it to a folder where you want to store the pot files. Then run the following command in this directory to make the script executable:

chmod +x xdt-i18n

Then, use this command to get the pot files for the core applications for the first time:

xdt-i18n init xfce/trunk

And for the goodies:

xdt-i18n init goodies/trunk

You should always make sure that you are using the latest pot files when starting to translate a project. This command allows you to update the pot files quickly:

xdt-i18n update

Third step: start translating

The script above downloaded the latest translation files and put them in separate folder. Go to the folder of the application you want to translate or or of the application whose translation you want to improve. The translation files will be available in a po folder. If there is a file for your language, you will be able to start translating directly. If not you will have to create a file for your language by copying the pot file and renaming it to your_locale_identifier.po. To find the locale identifier, you can use this page.

To translate, open the po file using your favorite text editor. You will see a main header composed of likes similar to this:

"Project-Id-Version: Thunar\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2009-01-11 00:20+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2009-02-11 13:20+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Mike Massonnet <mmassonnet@gmail.com>\n"
"Language-Team: French <xfce-i18n@xfce.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n > 1);\n"

Update the PO-Revision-Date field with the current date and time and the Last-Translator field with your name and your email so that the next translator can contact you if he has some questions. After that you can start the real translation job.

Every sentence already translated is displayed in the po file as the following one:

msgid "Invalid file name"
msgstr "Nom de fichier non valide"

Untranslated strings are displayed as this one:

msgid "Only local files may be renamed"
msgstr ""

Some strings may also be marked as fuzzy, which means that the original sentence has changed a bit and that the translation is not totally wrong but still needs to be checked and/or fixed. Make sure to remove the '#,fuzzy' after fixing the string.

#, fuzzy
msgid "Screenshot.png"
msgstr " Screenshot"

msgid allows you to identify the original string and msgstr to identify the translated strings. Modifying the msgid strings will have no effect, if you see a typo in one of them, file a bug. To translate a string or update a translation, just modify the text between the "" in the msgstr field.

Some strings may contain slashes or weird characters such as "%s" or "%i". You should always make sure that those characters are also present in the translated string in the same order, or the application will be broken in your language. To check if your translation is valid, the xdt-i18n script offers a check option which will check all po files for your language:

xdt-i18n check your_language_code.po

If it displays any warning, you must fix it before sharing your translation.

You can also use this script to see the stats for a given language, that is to say the number of translated messages, the number of fuzzy and untranslated ones:

xdt-i18n stat your_language_code.po

You can also use Poedit to modify the po files. It updates the po headers automatically, sorts the strings by category (translated, fuzzy and untranslated) and provides a friendly interface.

Fourth step: get your translation in

Once you are done with your translations, go to the root of your xfce/trunk folder or goodies/trunk folder and use the following command to create a patch named my_language.diff containing your translations:

svn diff > my_language.diff

If there is a maintainer for your language, you should send him this file asking him politely to review it and get it in. If not, you should send it to the Xfce i18n mailing list where someone will review it and get it in.

Fourth step: this tutorial sucks and you need more information

The Xfce i18n Wiki contains a lot of information but some of it may be outdated. If you have any questions, please ask them on the Xfce i18n mailing list.

I hope that I was clear enough and that we will be flooded with new or improved translations! We need you!

Now that all Xfce dependencies have been removed from libxfce4menu, I'm planning to rename it to something more generic. Travis Watkins from Alacarte has expressed interest in helping with writing the XfceMenuEditor (err GDesktopMenuEditor) part. He is also working on Vala bindings for the library.

With a more complete API and polished code perhaps we can even move gdesktopmenu over to freedesktop.org ... who knows.

During the last few days, I found some time to improve Xfce4 Screenshooter and implement some new features.

Interface

The interface has been slightly improved, it should be more user friendly and take less space. I also added an option allowing you to chose whether the mouse pointer should be displayed on the screenshot.

Improved 'Region' mode

When selecting a region to be screenshooted using the mouse, you can now use the Escape key to cancel the operation.

Saving screenshots to remote locations

It is now possible to save screenshots to remote locations such as FTP, computers accessible via SSH, a Samba shared folder... The window below is displayed to show the progress of the upload and to cancel it.

This is totally transparent for the user. Remote locations connected with Gigolo or gvfs-connect are automatically available in the save dialog, as any other local folder.

I still have to update the documentation for those new features and to improve various other points, a new release might be out in May.

I've semi-officially (whatever that means) started working on my thesis on migrating Thunar from ThunarVFS to GIO. I'll work on it in public. That means research material, testing results, status reports and of course the code will be publically available in a read-only wiki and our Subversion repository in a special branch respectively.

I'm always open to suggestions and opinions. Just drop me a mail if you have something to say.

If everything goes as planned (err, did I really sayplanned?) GIO will land in Thunar 1.2 which is supposed to be released along with Xfce 4.8. There's no warranty for this though.

I just had a look at the screenshots of Parcellite, a GTK+ clipboard manager, mainly because I didn't know what it is.

And just like with Getting Things Done tools before, I immediately had a few ideas how clipboard managers like this could be improved.

If you add a file or a URI to the clipboard, what do you expect to see in a visualization of the clipboard? Do you expect to see the path or filename or do you expect to see an icon and the filename together with a button to open or launch that file? Maybe even a possiblity to drag the item into a file manager or some other program? It's very easy to do things like that with GIO or even ThunarVFS.

What if you copy an email address into the clipboard? Do you expect only to see the email address or would you rather like to see the email address with one or two buttons (add to addressbook, send email)?

What are your experiences with clipboard tools? Are you using them at all? If not, why? What features would you like to see in a clipboard manager to make it attractive to use?

I've started to read Getting Things Done by David Allen some time ago. You can read about the concept of GTD at 43 Folders or Lunch & Learn if all you want is a short summary.

I think it's an interesting idea and it sounds very pragmatic and feasable. I'm a very unorganized person. I usually try to keep everything I need to do in my head and I rely on friends to remind me of birthdays, exams and other events because I don't have or use a calendar. I guess I'm a tough test candidate for GTD ... and I'm planning to give it a shot.

Now the only problem I see is the question which tools I should use. I'm not that much into paperwork, so I'd like to use my laptop for organizing my tasks. Of course you can use simple text files or other generic tools to do that (just like you can use paper) but that's really far from optimal.

About a week ago, a program called Getting Things Gnome! popped up on Planet GNOME and of course there is a number of online or offline tools designed after GTD available for Linux. Most of them allow you to define tasks, add notes, group them into projects and stuff like that. However, what they are missing is proper integration with other programs, online services and file formats. Notes are limited, they usually only consist of text, though sometimes they also support markup. In a lot of scenarios this is not enough (at least it is a very complicated way) to attach useful information to a task.

Just imagine the following situation: I receive an email from someone with a link and a few pictures and asks me to do something with them, e.g. upload these pictures to the website with the given link. If I want to make that a task, I'd like to be able to attach the pictures and the link to the task. So that afterwards I can trash the mail and thereby empty my inbox again. I don't necessarily want to keep it somewhere in my email program unless it has a really good search function.

Imagine another situation: Someone sends me an email describing a problem in my software together with a link to a bugzilla entry and a backtrace file. Let's say I'm working on a new release, there's a deadline for this release and the bug is critical. I'd like to create a task for that, attach the mail content and the backtrace file. Due to the deadline I also want to set the date this task is due and have my favorite calendar application being synchronized of course.

Basically, for a GTD application to be really useful in a computer environment, it

• has to allow arbitrary task attachments likes files, emails, links or even calendar events (possibly implemented as plugins),
• has to support calendar synchronization (off- and online),
• needs to provide extensions for programs that are part of the workflow so that the user can create tasks from anywhere,
• should use a storage format that can easily be converted into other formats (to make it easier for people to switch tools without losing all their tasks).

Of course there's more involved in getting it right. But most of todays GTD applications for Linux lack the above features and thus keep me from trying GTD out on my machine.

What are your experiences with GTD software? What features do you think are essential?

After having finished watching Barfly, I kinda felt like I had to sum up the day. It went like this:

• Wake up hungover at noon
• Raise 265€ during the day with a call for Xfce server donations
• Buy groceries and have breakfast at 6pm
• Work out at the gymn
• Eat pizza
• Review and commit a patch
• Watch Barfly
• Finish the day with a glass of Redbreast 12 Years Old

That's it.

There won't be many days like this in the next few weeks. I'm about to move in with a friend of mine at the beginning of next month. I'm going to start working on my thesis about Thunar next week. I still have a voluntary oral exam in software verification ahead of me in 12 days (I think ...) and of course I need to find someone to take over the appartment I'm currently living in. Lots and lots of things to keep me more than busy.

Tonight I’m going to (attempt to) update to Xfce-4.6 on my Xfce VM, so I’ll let you know how that goes goes.

On a side note, drizzt has been busy working on stages for Gentoo/FreeBSD on amd64, so I’m probably going to attempt to install that in a VM, and see how we get on with that. With any luck, we’ll hopefully have the ~amd64-fbsd keyword in the tree at this rate!

We've talked about the possibility of an Xfce Buildbot server for a while now. Samuel Verstraete, a fellow Lunar Linux developer, and Thomas Dupas have offered to donate a server for that. The University of Stockholm has kindly accepted to house it. The main Lunar Linux/Foo Projects server is already located there and we've made very positive experiences with them in the past.

But right now the server is still in Belgium. Samuel has calculated that 87 EUR are needed for UPS shipment. The server currently has 2 GB of RAM which is not much considering that we're planning to run several virtual machines on it. So if we could gather 40 EUR for an another 4 GB of RAM that would be great! In addition its worth thinking about adding another CPU. The machine has two sockets of which only one is being used right now. That would add another 40 EUR.

So, all in all we're in need of 130-170 EUR here. This is why we'd be very happy if you people could help us out here.

Every donator will be personally mentioned on this weblog (and thus on blog.xfce.org) and on our mailing lists. Due to the lack an official PayPal account for Xfce, donations can be send to my account: info@sten-net.de.

A start has already been made by these people:

• Michael Marending (who donated to Thunar a while a go)
• Enrico Tröger
• Colin Leroy
• Michele Renda
• Madcap
• Harold Aling
• Christoph Borsbach
• Nick Schermer
• Jim Campbell
• Jean Philippe Neumann
• Brian J. Tarricone
• Maximilan Schleiss
• Fedora
• Alexander Zolotko

Current Status: 485/170 EUR

We'll post a final update in a few days, when the missing hardware has arrived at Samuel's place.

Thanks to everyone for making this happen so fast!

In Xfce 4.4 there was a little hack that worked to refresh the background. I managed to get the same result for Xfce 4.6 with the following "hack":

#!/bin/sh
MONITOR=${1:-0}
PROPERTY="/backdrop/screen0/monitor${MONITOR}/image-path"
IMAGE_PATH=`xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p ${PROPERTY}`
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p ${PROPERTY} -s ""
xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p ${PROPERTY} -s "${IMAGE_PATH}"

Now when will this be useful? Barely never. Still enjoy it :-)

Or better, there is Vala in the Notes plugin. It's been a long time I thought about a hypertext view widget for the notes plugin, so it can highlight links and open them on click, and doing this in pure C/GObject is quite a PITA because there is a lot to take care about (more lines of code), and then you didn't start thinking about the whole functions of the object. Now this is retro with the presence of Vala. I played with Vala some time ago, doing some very rudimentary hello worlds, and I never had a chance to really write something in Vala, untill two days ago. I started to write a very dummy object on top of GtkTextView that implements the simple undo/redo feature I wrote inside notes.c and it was very fast and easy to backport from the C code to Vala, and this gave me a very good start with Vala (now that was one Vala too much, wasn't it? anyway...). Yesterday I added skel functions to support hyperlinks which I finished today. Finally I integrated the Vala object inside the notes plugin in a way that it compiles to C code when you are in MAINTAINER_MODE, which means for end-users they won't need Vala but only gcc.

Now for those interested into Vala, here is the file I played with: hypertext.vala. This source contains at the end of the HypertextView class, another class that contains a main function so it can be compiled to a binary. This proves how easy it is to test a class, and all you need to do is to run the following command: valac --pkg=gtk+-2.0 hypertextview.vala && ./hypertextview.
There are many samples available with the source of Vala and on Gnome Live. The tutorial covers important points, the FAQ too, but the documentation is a little less interesting if you already know GObject IMHO.
One important thing I learned about Vala was the difference between the out and ref arguments.

If you have a hard time at finding the right method definitions, look into /usr/share/vala/vapi/gtk+-2.0.vapi for instance for GTK+. There you can quickly find any function name you now from the C API, for instance if you want to have a look at gtk_text_view_get_iter_at_location search for get_iter_at_location. By scrolling up you will see that you are in the class Gtk.TextView. Vapis are very easy to read.

I am very interested into porting the objects of the Xfmpc project to Vala, and then start trying out the plugin sample (loading modules during runtime)... I hope my fellow will like that idea :-)

Now for the people interested to develop Vala classes with VIM I have some tips. First follow these instructions in order to get Vala syntax. Then I suggest you install the Tag List plugin, and to get it working with Vala you will need to add the following lines to your vimrc configuration:

" Work-around Tag List
let tlist_vala_settings='c#;d:macro;t:typedef;n:namespace;c:class;'.
  \ 'E:event;g:enum;s:struct;i:interface;'.
  \ 'p:properties;m:method'

If you don't know about folding then you miss a lot of VIM culture, in fact you can fold/unfold brackets by going over a bracket and typing zf% in command mode. And that's all folk, thanks for reading til here.

Proud to have been a part of delivering the following upstream projects 100% translated to Brazilian Portuguese:

• GNOME 2.26 UI: 100% translated.
• Xfce 4.6 UI: 100% translated
• Openbox: 100% translated

I also helped the GNOME Italian team with their commits.

Now, onto LXDE and some modules for Fedora.

Just like my older post about a "./jamendo-player", this time I am definitely more interested into good online radio stations. And SHOUTcast is the best that comes to my mind! It's been there for years, Winamp is the best music experience ever, and both have been promoting each other even though I don't know/remember what their relation are.

The good things about their widget is that it saves the recent radios and it also has a list of favorites but this one isn't working as-is with the code. It is possible to search for radios and to browse by genre. All of this stuff is saved under ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/<random>/ct.yourminis.com/.


So of course I couldn't resist but embed their available Flash widget inside a window :-) Again the code is very short, it's just about loading — well not a URL this time — an HTML string cause the Flash application all alone doesn't work out, it needs parameters passed outside. I didn't include the callbacks to handle "_blank" links, which means it is not possible to open any links, but this is useless as the widget is fully functionnal.

You can download the source code here.

Here are some installation instructions:

1. Look into main.c
2. The first line of main.c is a comment with a command to compile
3. If you want a menu item in you desktop menu:
   1. Edit the Exec keys in shoutcast-radio.desktop
   2. Copy the desktop file to ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/applications
4. If you don't have a gnome-radio icon, copy gnome-radio.png to ~/.icons/
   

By the way, I'm linking on the Xfce blog. Why? Cause there might be Xfce users interested into a simple to compile radio application. At least I hope some of you will enjoy it, more than the jamendo thingy :)

Update: The favorites actually do work, it just that the favorite button isn't always clickable.

Packages for Xfce 4.6 are now available on my PPA, with some updates for the Goodies. Please report any bug you may find on the Xfce bugzilla.

Here are the lines you should add to your sources.list. For Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jerome-guelfucci/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

For Ubuntu Hardy (8.04):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jerome-guelfucci/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

You can also add the OpenPGP key of the PPA by following those instructions:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 0E23917F5D9DCE6C

gpg --export --armor 0E23917F5D9DCE6C | sudo apt-key add -

Please note that I will not offer support and debugging in the comments. Please head to the Ubuntu forums or to IRC to get help. Of course, If anything is wrong with those packages, let me know.

I would like to thank the Debian Xfce group and Lionel Le Folgoc, without them those packages would not be available.

I’m a bit late with this, but we finally got Xfce 4.6.0 out the door. Others have written much more about this than I have, so feel free to read about it on our blog aggregator.

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