Here’s a screenshot, err, a picture of him just having found his own thumb:

Don’t expect anything Xfce-related from me any time soon…

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

Note that the giant machine on the left is my previously considered smallish 14.1″ laptop from Dell.

It comes with a Taiwanese distribution, Linpus Linux, based on Fedora 8. More specifically, it comes with the ‘Lite’ variant of the distribution which features Xfce as its desktop environment. Well, actually, it is part modified Xfce, part Easy(tm) interface created by Acer for this device (they call it xfdesktop2, a bit strange if you ask me).

Wow. A commercial offering available from a store for regular people, with software that I helped create. Awesome. Maybe I should have asked for a discount ;-)

I’ve just started playing with it and I think they did a pretty good job. The interface is really easy, but can only access a few predefined applications. I have wanted to write such a full screen launcher/control center interface for a long time, but never got around to actually doing anything about it. It would be perfect for my parents, who have a very hard time working with their Windows XP.

They use a modified Thunar (My Disk://, Removable://, indication of disk usage in the side bar) that seems to work fairly well.

They don’t provide easy access to changing the configuration, since they disabled the right mouse menu on the panel. However Alt-F2 brings up xfrun as in a regular Xfce installation and Terminal is installed.

There’s xfce-setting-show to bring up our own settings dialog. It doesn’t fit on the screen (1024×600), but this is partly due to the very big icon they added for screen settings, making all buttons in the dialog much bigger than they need to be. I got rid of the XP window decorations and used the Xfce theme instead of RedHat’s Nodoko. Now that looks better!

xfce4-panel -a gives you the add item menu, where you can add for instance the xfdesktop menu. Also in edit mode some right-click menus do become available (not all). I’ve added a menu and a pager to get a bit more functionality.

Since it’s based on fedora you can use yum to install more software. I’ve just installed gimp to be able to create a decently sized picture for this post.

It has an 8GB SSD for storage and two card reader slots for possible extensions. The one thing where the SSD really shows its advantage is boot time. It boots in about 15 seconds, maybe a bit less (although some daemons are still being started in the background), very nice indeed.

Oh, and it weighs slightly less than 1 kg.

So, now I’ll go back to playing with this thing ;-)

update:
Screenshot

Cute photograph

Her name is Leonie and she was born on Sunday, January 6, 21:06 CET. She is undoubtedly the most beautiful baby in the world. You´re thinking all fathers say that, but I´m sure this time it is true ;-)

It’s a new language with C#-like syntax with a compiler that generates C code. Could be interesting. Although, generally speaking, code generators suck, you shouldn’t have to deal with the generated code at all in this case. The code is written in Vala, which is compiled to native code, but if you create a library it will have (or generate?) an API that is compatible with C.

I am going to have to try this some time (because, you know, I have lots of free time to spend on playing around with obscure programming languages, oh wait, I don’t ;-) So, has anyone else tried this?

It may not be directly obvious, but that sure looks like Xfce to me ;-)

Just changing the panel window and the base plugin classes, I got the following result:

Not too bad. All widgets that have their own X window, or that do some custome drawing are not transparent, but the others are. I had to choose a theme with white foreground text to make labels somewhat readable. That will require special attention to get right. Shadows or outlines maybe…

But, no longer does this have to be true:

I already knew about the gtk interface, but I never heard of the xft support. I got the instructions from EmacsWiki:

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co -remacs-unicode-2 emacs
$ cd emacs
$ ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft
$ make bootstrap && make && sudo make install
$ emacs --enable-font-backend --font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10"

I have been thinking about this for Xfce as well: it would be really cool if we could provide plugin writers with data sources and display widgets to easily write status monitors for the panel.

The idea I had is that the display widgets could be in-process, so it would be an internal plugin, but the data to display would be obtained and processed by an external process, through a DBUS protocol or whatever. This has the shared advantage of in-process widgets, which are a lot easier to handle (no more XEMBED, yay), and out-of-process data handling (no GUI blocking or crashing of the panel).

Of course we really should get Xfce 4.4 out before even considering the possibilities for 4.6…

It would be kinda cool if we could support the same API for Xfce 4.6. Most of the GNOME dependencies seem to have been dropped… or maybe, by the time we release 4.6, we simply switch to using the GNOME panel, who knows?

Or maybe I should be nice to our plugin writers and not change the panel API every major release :-)

“…,but that should be a minor problem as long as people don’t try to use the trash as primary storage for their documents.”

;-)

So, for good measure, I’ll throw in a new screenie, because I see the last one dated from January: Screenshot .

The background image was shot on our holiday in Italy, where we went hiking in the Alpi Liguri. I can recommend it to anyone — if you aren’t afraid of a few blisters, that is… ;-)

    CATEGORY / GLOBAL HECTARES
    FOOD  / 1.5
    MOBILITY / 1.7
    SHELTER / 1.7
    GOODS/SERVICES / 2.7
    TOTAL FOOTPRINT / 7.6

Not too bad, you would say, considering Brian got 24, but…

    IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 4.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

I don’t know where they got this figure, but I have a very hard time believing that. I have a small car, a small house, produce little waste and usually don’t fly. That should be below average, except maybe for the 130km a day I have to drive, so let’s say average, not 1.5 times higer.

    WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON. 

    IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.2 PLANETS.

Oops ;-)

Anyway, I added some code to the panel to use a very nice trick by Frederico Mena Quintero to get a pretty graph of startup performance. Benedikt already did this for Thunar.

The first graph is here: http://www.loculus.nl/xfce/files/panel-startup.png.

Interestingly, I defer so much of the actual work until the panel is actually shown, that all most of the time is spent in the gtk_widget_show() call and handling of the signals that are involved in this.

I guess I need to add more mark points to conclude anything at all ;-)

Now, back to fixing the panel customization dialog… I’ll have an alternative implementation available for testing/criticizing soon.

1. You’re in a game and you have to choose one of three doors behind which there may be a prize (apparently in this case a donkey, hmm, maybe not a prize then ;-)
2. After you have chosen a door, the game show host opens one of the other doors behind which there is no prize.
3. You get the chance to change your choice of doors.

The correct answer is that you should switch your choice without thinking, because it doubles your chance to get the prize. Is this the problem we are talking about?

Most people will intuitively feel that there is now a new situation where you have a 50% chance of getting the prize, because there are two doors left and one of them has the prize.

The reason this is not the case is in rule number 2 above. The important part is that the host chooses one of the other doors and never the door you have chosen. Now, this gives you two possibilities:

1. You initially chose a door with the prize: (33% chance) -> This is easy for the game show host, he can chose any of the other doors. The other door has 0% chance to contain the prize. Switching will give you the wrong door.
2. You initially chose a door with no prize (66% chance) -> The game show host has no choice. He has to choose the remaining empty door. Now this is interesting. The other door has 100% chance of containing the prize. Switching will give you the right door.

See, because the chance to choose a room with no prize initially is twice as high, you have a bigger chance that the game show host is forced to open the other empty room, which gives a bigger chance for the third room to contain the prize.

Does that help? Or were you talking about something else entirely? ;-)

Update:

Maybe this is a better summary:

If you choose right the first time, switching will never give you the prize. If you choose wrong the first time, switching will always give you the prize. There’s a much bigger chance you choose wrong (2 out of 3).

After 14 years (!) Janine and I finally decided to get married. We had a wonderful day!

More pictures, taken by my sister. There’s more to come, can’t wait to see them, including the official photo shoot.

Original by Tigert
Tigert’s blog

Replies:
Garrett LeSage
Benny

I think I agree.

So, Olivier, if you’re reading this, don’t be so quick to ditch the Xfce engine in favour of Clearlooks. You might hurt its feelings ;-)