Clock applets in the Xfce panel in Xubuntu 15.10
Both Xfce and Xubuntu have had new releases relatively lately. In a way or another, this has resulted in an issue with Xubuntu 15.10 release: the Orage clock doesn’t show a transparent background even if it is set to show one. (Upstream bug in Xfce: 11915.)
Don’t be afraid! Instead of using the Orage applet, you can use the DateTime and Clock applets to get a transparent background – and while they itself do not allow for changing the color of the text in the applet, you can work around that with a .gtkrc-2.0 file in your home directory. Here’s how.
Set up the applets
To set up the applets, simply add the DateTime and/or Clock applets to your panel. You can control the format in which the time/date is shown in the applet via their preference dialogs found from their right-click context menus.
Bear in mind, if you wish to have two different clocks in the panel, we will be using the regular panel foreground (text) color for DateTime (white for Greybird) and modify the text color for the Clock applet in the steps below.
Modify the Clock applet color
To modify the Clock applet foreground color, we will need to make a modification in a theming file. The best way to do this is to use the per-user config file, found at ~/.gtkrc-2.0. If you don’t have this file, simply create one.
The code snippet to modify the Clock applest text color is the following:
style "panel-clock-custom"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#66CCCC"
fg[PRELIGHT] = "#66CCCC"
fg[ACTIVE] = "#66CCCC"
text[NORMAL] = "#66CCCC"
text[PRELIGHT] = "#66CCCC"
text[ACTIVE] = "#66CCCC"
}
widget "Xfce*Panel*clock*" style "panel-clock-custom"
In this snippet, we’re setting the foreground color for all the Clock applets to a certain turquoise – #66CCCC – which compliments the 15.10 wallpaper well.
You can substitute this hex color value with any other that fits your needs.
The end result
For me, the end result looks like this:
Have fun modifying your own!
How to fix broken Xubuntu Natty panels?
Since many people have had problems with the Xubuntu Natty panels due to bug #747137 (which is fixed now), we thought it would be nice to tell how to fix the panels. Here goes:
- Log out from Xfce
- Open a TTY (eg. press Ctrl+Alt+F1)
- Log in in the TTY
- Run ‘rm -rf $HOME/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml’
- Log out from the TTH (‘logout’ should do the trick)
- Get back to TTY7 (Ctrl+Alt+F7) or if that doesn’t work, TTY8 (Ctrl+Alt+F8)
- Log in and your panels should be now fixed and have the default settings
Note that this problem with the panels only appears on systems already running Natty, new installs shouldn’t be affected.
Restoring the Xfce panels
One question that people looking for help with Xubuntu often have is some form of “my panels/taskbar/menu disappeared”. Unfortunately, this is something that happens quite frequently.
The good news is that this is fixed easily. All that’s required is to press Alt+F2 to bring forward the Run program window, and run the command xfce4-panel.
Not only is this a quick fix for the problem, it also makes for a quick blog post that might still help quite a few people 
Update: Xubuntu 9.04 will include Xfce 4.6 which should be able to automatically restore the panel in the event of a crash. Hooray 
Update to that: According to willerlite, the panels do not automatically re-appear. Hmm :S
