News and Xubuntu HugDay
There are only ten days left until the first beta release of Xfce 4.6 and we still got a lot of things to do. Over the past week(s) we’ve been working on new features in xfwm4, xfce4-session and xfce4-appfinder mostly.
Olivier added NET_WM_PING support to xfwm4. This means you can now kill applications which are not responding using a dialog that pops up after a few seconds – great! As a funny coincidence I was just browsing the xfce4-dev mailing list archives a few days ago when I found one of my first posts there which was about a similar feature.
About one or two months ago Auke Kok posted a patch for parallel application startup for xfce4-settings on the mailing list. Brian now took the time to implement it and finally committed it yesterday. It notably speeds up the Xfce startup process.
When we tried to fix the main xfdesktop crash which we thought to be related to libxfce4menu a few weeks ago, I tried to reproduce it by adding ThunarVFS monitoring support to xfce4-appfinder and see if it would crash as well. My modifications were pretty rough and I decided to rewrite the appfinder to make its code more readable and flexible. I’ve been working on this for the last two days and comitted it today. I’ve used recordMyDesktop to record a video presenting the new features again, but this time I also recorded my (creepy) voice! It’s awful to hear how long it took me to pronounce “freedesktop.org menu specification compliance” and how I sucked at mentioning the name of the library it’s based on: “libxfce4menu”. Apart from that I’m glad it worked, so I can continue to plan the video series for 4.6.
On to something else: Last week I’ve been announced the official Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison and I completely forgot to announce that on the mailing lists … anyway, this reminds me of the topic of this post: today is Ubuntu BugDay with special focus on Xubuntu. If you’re interested in getting things fixed in Xfce 4.4.x or Xubuntu in general, you’re welcome to take part by hugging a few bugs!
That’s it! I’ll try to keep you posted on news about the beta release.
Cheers,
Jannis
Edit: I already fixed the categories problem as you can see here.