Installing Xfce 4.6 on Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10
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.
Xfce 4.6, what do they think about it?
Xfce 4.6 has been out only since yesterday but there are already a great number of reviews spawning all around the Web. I'll try to keep a list of the main ones here:
- Phoronix
- Tectonic.co.za
- Zdnet.com
- Osnews
- Linux magazine
- Softpedia
- Ostatic
- Detector Pro
- Xubuntublog
- Arstechnica
French:
Spanish:
- And I've found a Spanish translation of the Xfce 4.6 tour, that's a nice work!
Czech:
As usual, Béranger found something to complain about 
But as he is complaining about the transparency of desktop icons, I think we can still say that 4.6 is a good release!
Reading those reviews, I can see two main issues: the desktop right click menu and the menu editor. For the menu editor, our rocking Jannis Pohlmann is already on it and is making really good progress on libxfce4menu: it'll allow us to use Alacarte to edit menus in Xfce 4.8 or to develop our own menu editor, if someone volunteers for this. For the right click menu, just find a beautiful wallpaper and remove all those ugly non-transparent desktop icons that hide it and your old beloved menu will be back!
If you find any other interesting reviews, please share them!
Edit: I added some links from the comments.
Xfce 4.6 is out!
Xfce 4.6 was officially released this morning!
Most distributions will have packages available in the next few days. Meanwhile, you can take a look at the tour to see all nice new features!
I would like to thank the Xfce Development Team who did a really good job. A 4.6.1 maintainance release will be out in the next few weeks to improve the translations and fix bugs that may pop up.
The website has also been updated, go and get Xfce 4.6!
News from the Goodies
Recently, there were a few releases in the Xfce Goodies project. I will try to summarize the main changes.
Xfce4 Power Manager 0.6.1 and 0.6.2
Those two bug fix releases fix various annoying problems: a tab was not working in the settings dialogs, there were some D-Bus related errors and the -r option is not needed anymore to start the application.
The author also added a brightness control plugin for the Xfce Panel to the Xfce SVN and discussions have started about merging the different battery panel plugins and the power manager. He also considers using DeviceKit. A lot of exciting stuff for the next release!
Midori 0.1.3
This new release of Midori, the fast Webkit based browser, brings a lot of interesting new features:
- improved zoom preferences.
- the interface can now be easily configured.
- a new Mouse Gestures extension allows you to bind actions to particular mouse gestures.
- Maemo integration for mobiles.
- Find as you type feature for the search bar: results are proposed while you type a word in the search bar.
Gigolo 0.2.1
This bug fix release fixes a few bugs: Obex URIs are saved correctly now, some interface related problems have been fixed and one can now use the @ symbol in adresses.
Xfburn 0.4.1
And one more bug fix release ! It fixes drag and drop related issues, a crash when creating folders in a composition and burners detection has been improved. It is also advised to use libburn 0.5.6 or higher, which fixes a few annoying crashes.
Xfce4 Screenshooter 1.5.1
Yet another bug fix release... The mouse cursor is now displayed on the screenshots, a crash when the application did not detect any application to open images and one memory leak fixed...
Those little goodies should appetize you for Xfce 4.6 !
Xfce 4.6 is on the way!
Stephan Arts, our beloved release manager, started to prepare the tarballs for Xfce 4.6! There are still some things to do before the release like testing the tarballs and getting the mirrors ready, but it should be out soon!
Update: most tarballs are ready now, the release should be for Thursday or Friday.
What can we expect in Xfce 4.8 ? For the menu…
I'll start to write some posts in English, in case some English speakers are interested by Xfce news, I made a category for each language, so that people can read the posts of their preferred language easily. Xfce 4.6 is not out yet, but some developers have already started to implement nice things for the future versions, particularly Xfce 4.8.
Libxfce4menu : easily editable menus ?
People have been complaining for a long time that menu editing is a pain in Xfce : Xfce 4.4 menu editor was quite limited. 4.6 is a bit better as you can put Desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications/ to modify the menu, but it lacks a GUI to do those actions quickly and easily.
Jannis Pohlmann, the developer of libxfce4menu, has recently announced that he has started to improve libxfce4menu so that it implements the whole Freedesktop menu specification. This work is only at its early stages, but it seems to be quite promising : he published a video where one can see him editing the Xfce menu using Alacarte, the Gnome menu editor.
His code is available on git.xfce.org and works pretty well. After installing this new version, you just need to restart xfdesktop and xfce4-panel, to edit the menu using Alacarte and to configure the menu panel plugin to use the ~/.config/menus/applications.menu menu file.
Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to set a custom menu file for the right click menu of the desktop, so no right click custom menu for now... This new version will also allow some neat things, which might interest sysadmins, such as having a menu file on a network and use it on the local machine.