Heat and computers
Hey all,
I’m back from my hollidays, but I’m still rather incommunicado. Temperatures here were up to an uncharacteristic 32 degrees C, so naturally my computer — not being used to these temperatures — decided to die on me :^/
I’ll be back up and running soon … I hope.
Bugs
We currently have 62 bugs in the database. Of those bugs, 20 are marked RESOLVED, so that leaves us with 42 bugs to handle.
A little more than half of the open bugs are assigned to someone, the rest is still marked ‘new’. Some bugs are actually feature requests, while others are ‘real’ programming errors. Most bugs already have some comments on them, to clarify what is going on or to ask for more information.
If you are feeling bored or are looking for something to help us with, this is a good place to start. You could look at some of the unassigned ones, or — hey, I can try — start fixing the ones assigned to me ;-)
Oh, and if you feel something is wrong with Xfce, please help us by reporting it in the bug tracker.
Just thought I’d try and draw some extra attention to this very useful development tool. Happy bug hunting!
Linux distros
This is not a rant about favorite linux distros. Go here if you were looking for that :-)
No, I just read this article by Ian Murdock. Interesting perspective, especially this:
The Linux distribution industry needs to start looking at Linux in a new and different way–as a platform to be shared rather than as a product to be owned.
Would be nice indeed.
Add some noise to this blog
I saw this on Planet Gnome: a very interesting read about copyright and DRM; a guy from EFF gives a talk for Microsoft to explain why DRM is bad for bussiness and society.
Also, we need more off-topic (non-xfce) blog entries. Everyone else has them ;-)
Panel icon themes
Yesterday I added a new panel icon theme implementation in CVS. The panel now follows the general icon theme, that can be set in the user interface dialog.
The goal is to have a fully themed panel with all the major icon themes (gnome and kde ones) out there, without having to create special xfce icons. To achieve this I use a list of possible icon names based on gnome and kde themes.
Unfortunately, the currently available icon themes are far from complete even for gnome and kde. I hope there will be a default icon name spec on freedesktop.org soon. That would help a lot.
So, the panel now looks for icons in this order:
- Xfce icons in the current theme, e.g. xfce-terminal.
- Gnome and/or kde icons in the current theme, e.g. gnome-terminal.
- A default (fallback) icon in the ‘hicolor’ theme, which is actually returned in the first looup step already.
For the new xfce icon names you can look in the icons/ directory in CVS.
state of free software
Just a small observation. I just read this message.
It used to be the case that a holiday would be a good opportunity to hold a meeting of free software developers; now apparently it is a reason to postpone it. The times are changing it seems.
New add item dialog
I changed the panel to use a dialog instead of a submenu to add a new item. This looks a bit better IMO and is more easily extendible to show extra info.
Also, someone really needed to add another entry to this blog, in case people start wondering if this project is still alive ;-)
Panel mcs settings fixed
Aah, finally got to do some coding today. From the CVS commit message:
* change deprecated functions to xfce_* replacements
* change atoi to strtol
* fix mcs settings
* remove libxml dependency of mcs dialog
* use new icon from Nikola Pizurica
* add atomic saving for panel settings
If you are or have been experiencing problems with global settings you should log out of X (or kill xfce-mcs-manager), remove ~/.xfce4/settings/panel.xml and log back in.
Screenshot new gtk / xfwm4 default themes
Just wanted to say I love the new default gtk theme. Well done Olivier! The default xfwm theme of the day is very nice as well, but probably already different when I’m writing this ;-)
Excuses for not blogging
Hey, I just started a new job, what’s your excuse for not blogging? ;-)
All I can do now, it seems, is share an opinion now and then. Hope to get back to coding when things settle down a bit.
Great things are happening for Xfce and I can hardly take part in it. Just to name a few:
- benny started to create the basic framework for API docs for the libraries.
- kelnos has been very busy with the menu system.
- master^shadow has a first implementation of xfce4-appfinder, a utility to list and find programs in the system (gnome/kde/freedesktop) menu. Damnit I need to make the panel launcher dialog accept .desktop files as imput.
- p0llux has made a menu editor, one of the most obviously missing graphical configuration utilities.
If you don’t know who these people are, you need to drop by more often in #xfce on irc.freenode.net ;-)
Ok, gotta go prepare something for work tomorrow :/
/jazman
PS
Olivier, be a sport, switch on the commenting to your blog entry.