Xfce 4.8 released!
Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6.
We hope that everyone will enjoy this release as much as we do. Sadly, this will not be the case as the folks using any of the BSD systems will notice a sudden loss of features. We think that this announcement is a good opportunity to express our disagreement with the recent “Linux-only” developments in the open source ecosystem, especially with regards to the utilities we need in desktop environments.
Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions.
With Xfce 4.8 our users will be able to browse remote shares using a variety of protocols (SFTP, SMB, FTP and many more). The window clutter has been reduced by merging all file progress dialogs into a single one.
Our panel application has been rewritten, thereby improvingpositioning, transparency, item and launcher management. It also introduces a new menu plugin to view directories. Its plugin framework remains compatible with 4.6 plugins.
We also improved our settings dialogs. The display configuration dialog now supports RandR 1.2, detects screens automatically and allows our users to pick their favorite resolution, refresh rate, rotation. Screens can be configured to either work in clone mode or be placed next to each other. Keyboard selection has become easier and more user-friendly. Also, the manual settings editor has been updated be more functional.
Aside from the features implemented in Xfce, the 4.8 development cycle brought us a bunch of other goodies. For the first time we had a serious release strategy formed after the “Xfce Release and Development Model” developed at the Ubuntu Desktop Summit in May 2009. A new web application made release management a lot easier. We worked hard on improving the situation of Xfce translators which led us to setting up our own Transifex server. Something else you will hopefully notice is that our server and mirroring infrastructure has been improved so that our servers hopefully will not suddenly surrender shortly after this release announcement.
There is a lot more to discover and we hope a lot of you will give Xfce 4.8 a try! There is a brief tour online on
http://xfce.org/ and http://xfce.org/about/tour
A summary of the changes since the 4.8pre3 preview release is available on the following URL (it also includes links to the changes introduced in all preview releases):
http://xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.8.0
The release can be downloaded either as individual releases or as a fat tarball including all these individual versions:
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8/
2011 has just begun and we are already planning for the future. The 4.10 schedule will be worked on soon and hopefully, we will be able to turn Xfce into a non-profit organization at this year’s FOSDEM, so stay tuned!
But until then we hope you will enjoy today’s release and join us in celebrating. Thanks go out to all our contributors, bug reporters as well as the awesome efforts of our translators and packagers.
Best regards,
The Xfce development team
News Update
A lot of things are going on lately and it turns out I'm way to busy to update my weblog on a regular basis. So, this is just a short post to keep you all updated.
Last two weeks
- I took a new student job at the university, at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, which I love most. I'll be working on haplotyping algorithms.
- I went to Barcelona and had a great time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit overall. Stephan and I were very productive. One evening during dinner we discussed our development and release process and later started writing it down. The result is a beautiful document that still needs a bit of polishing. I hope it'll serve as a good foundation for the development and release process of Xfce in the future. Several others commented on it and it looks like we'll give the proposed concept a shot after we've switched to git and all that.
- Even though the week in Barcelona was great for Xfce, I was disappointed with how it went with regards to the cooperation between Xubuntu and Xfce. I talked it through with Stephan and after I got back, I resigned from my position as the Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison.
At the moment
- I've started to implement the so-called thumbnail management D-Bus specification. My implementation is called Tumbler and it will hopefully start serving thumbnails for other apps soon. I'm planning to use it in Thunar, Stephan has expressed interest in using it in Ristretto and when discussing the specification and the existing hildon-thumbnail implementation, Philip van Hoof told me that Hildon/Nokia might be interested in dropping hildon-thumbnail in favor of Tumbler if it's flexible enough. I'm working on it as much as I can and I'm hoping to do a release within the next few weeks.
- I'm still working on the Transifex installation for Xfce. It's already running but I still need to import all the projects, releases and of course create accounts for maintainers automatically.
- The migration of Xfce to Git is still work in progress. Brian has most of the repository issues sorted out and is now waiting for me to finish the commit mail script. I have two or three possible implementations lying around but I need to have a look at that again.
- Jim needs the documentation repository next week, so I'm about to set it up.
- Our Buildbot server has arrived in Sweden. Today I set up the firewall. Samual is taking care of setting up the Buildbot host VM and other things. We're considering to move a lot of the services not related to development (like the Xfce websites) into separate VMs on that server too, in order to make the current server a development-only machine.
Besides that I'm trying to catch up with the work and personal stuff that piled up while I was away last week. And I really should go and sleep.
Trip to Barcelona
Tomorrow afternoon I'll be travelling to Barcelona, where I'm going to spend the week surrounded by hackers from all over the world planning the next release of Ubuntu. I'll meet up with Stephan, Cody, Michael and Steve there to improve Xubuntu but I'll hopefully also run into a few other familiar faces.
During the week I'll do my best in setting up the new Xfce documentation repository based on the discussions we had over the last few weeks. I'll also try to cook up Lunar Linux modules for Transifex so that we'll have it up and running as soon as we switch our repositories over to Git. These are my goals - let's see how far I can get.
I'm hoping for a few very nice couple of days. I've never been south of Germany and it's my first time in Spain ever. As a fortunate coincidence, there's the Champions League final Barcelona vs. Manchester United on Wednesday. Not that I'm much of football fan ... but I like it when people go crazy.
Thunar/GIO – Quick Status Report
I've started hacking on the migration of Thunar to GIO on April 9th. In about 61 commits, I've reduced the original number of ThunarVFS references in the Thunar source code dramatically. The most important and probably most time-consuming part of this work is only mentioned briefly on those pages: rewriting all recursive copy/move/trash/restore/chmod/chgrp/chown jobs -- by now most of the jobs have been rewritten based on GIO and the new ThunarJob framework ... and Thunar still works (for me at least)!
All in all, I suppose that about a third of the implementation work is done. Ok, maybe just a quarter, but an important one. I now have a very good overview over the source code and I'm almost done with one of the most critical parts of the migration.
If you want to know how that looks like for me, here's a screenshot:
These are the most important/big things that are still waiting for me:
- Replace ThunarVFSVolumeManager with GFileMonitor. Volume management is a large and complex subsystem of both ThunarVFS and GIO.
- Load ThunarFile objects asynchronously. This will be a pain. A lot of functions will have to be split up to fit into the asynchronous concept.
- Move the thumbnail related code into exo
These two are a bit out of scope but very important nonetheless:
- Integrate functionality similar to Gigolo (remote/virtual places management) into the file manager.
- Write GNOME-independent GIO extensions for volume management and the trash.
On a side node: Xubuntu 9.04 is available as of today! Go and grab it if you're interested in a nice distro based on Xfce. If you're interested in the Xubuntu development, you'll be able to meet Stephan, several Xubuntu folks and me at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona from May 25th-29th. I'm very excited already!