KDE memory usage

September 13, 2006
Olivier

I came out across an article from Lubos Lunak on KDE memory usage, relayed by OSNews.com.

I find the article very interesting as memory usage is a topic that pops up regularly on our mailing lists. I’d just like to point out a small detail, regarding the methodology used for measuring “plain” desktop usage with real life apps.

Both OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Thunderbird used with Xfce to measure its memory usage, are quite heavyweight applications. Usually, people use lighter alternatives with Xfce, like Abiword. Abiword can be plain GTK+ and doesn’t require GNOME libs (it can make use of GNOME libs, but there are not mandatory and Abiword can compile and operate w/out).

Same goes with Thunderbird, people sometime prefer a plain GTK+ mailer like Sylpheed or Sylpheed-Claws which are very capable mailers instead of Thunderbird. With these apps, you can run plain GTK+ apps w/out KDE and GNOME libs.

Still, I agree that people who want to use a Web browser will probably choose Firefox. But similarly a lot of people I know use Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org or Firefox with either KDE or GNOME too.

NVidia drivers updated

December 5, 2005
Olivier

NVidia has finally released a 8xxx version of its driver for Linux.

The 7xxx had a serious problem with accelerated render, and was causing random freeze with Xfce WM embedded compositor. The 8xxx version seems to be a lot better in this regard.

So if you use xfwm4’s compositor with NVidia, make sure you get the latest driver from here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Patch for Compaq R3000 laptop

August 7, 2005
Olivier

Off topic, but since I’ve been working on this mostly for the past few weeks… I’ve prepared a workarround to an incredibly crappy harware bug that cause the timer to run 3 times too fast on some of the Compaq R3000/HP zv5000 laptops.

The page is here : http://www.xfce.org/~olivier/r3000

Xfce, project of the week on “OSDir.com”

February 13, 2005
Olivier

Xfce is the Open Source project on the week on OSDir.com.

You can rate Xfce from this link at O’Reilly’s OSDir.com.

Xfce window manager now includes its own compositing manager

October 3, 2004
Olivier

It tooks me a while and a lot of work to get the compositing manager working in xfwm4, the Xfce window manager (obligatory screenshot)

I’ve been asked why making a separate compositor rather than using X.org’s xcompmgr.

To make it short, because it makes perfectly sense. The compositor is like a WM on its own, it manages a stack of all windows, monitor all kinds on X event and reacts accordingly.

Having the compositing manager embedded in the window manager also helps keeping the various visual effects in sync with window events.

An RPM archive for fedora with compositor enabled is available here (source RPM here)

This package is to be used in place of the regular xfwm4 package from Xfce 4.2 RC2 available here

Menu shadow effect for gtk+-2.4.3

June 20, 2004
Olivier

Hey, I took some time to prepare RPM packages and pre-patched source archives of gtk+-2.4.3 with the menu shadow patch applied (the patch remains the same and applies fine on gtk+-2.4.3)

Updates from the usual xfce page or from Sourceforge.

xfwm4 native multihead support

June 16, 2004
Olivier

Hey, xfwm4 now supports native multi screen and is able to manage all the screens connected to a display from a single xfwm4 process.

Adding this caused deep and complex changes in the core of xfwm4, so that might be still a bit rough on the edges…

If someone with the HW could just test… What’s needed is a multiscreen configuration but without running Xinerama (ie, a setup with :0.0 and :0.1 as screens, for example)

Cheers,
Olivier.