Looking for mirrors for archive.xfce.org
In the last couple of days we’ve radically changed the server layout for the various Xfce domains. A new server is hosting most of the websites (php/mysql) and archive.xfce.org is now using MirrorBrain to distribute the load across the mirrors using GeoIP.
Although we are very happy with the new mirrors that were kindly made available in the last couple of days; the picture below clearly shows only Europe and North-America are properly covered.
So, if you have a server or know anyone (ask around!) with mirror possibilities in the other continents, please contact us! Because we not only try to write a fast desktop environment, we also want everyone to download it in a blink of an eye.
More information on how to become a mirror: http://wiki.xfce.org/mirror
Attending FOSDEM 2011
Today Nick and I booked hotel rooms for FOSDEM so now it’s official that the two of us will be there. I’m very much looking forward to it and I’m hoping to meet some of you at the FOSDEM Beer Event on Friday! Still need to think about a way to make ourselves recognizable as Xfce folks though.
If you are planning to attend and would like to meet any of the Xfce folks, please add your name in the wiki:
http://wiki.xfce.org/events/2011/fosdem
We haven’t decided where and when to meet on Saturday and Sunday but I’m sure we will find something. Stay tuned for additional announcements on this weblog.
In addition to celebrating the 4.8 release of Xfce which is scheduled for next weekend, one of our goals for FOSDEM 2011 will be to sign the papers for registering the Xfce Foundation e.V. in Germany. The details of this still need to be worked out, however. I’ll keep you posted about this as well.
If you would like to talk to me about things other than Xfce, please drop me a mail and I’m sure we can arrange something.
Xfce 4.8pre3 released!
Xfce 4.8pre3 is now available for download.
It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:
exo 0.5.6 gtk-xfce-engine 2.7.0 libxfce4ui 4.7.6 libxfce4util 4.7.5 libxfcegui4 4.7.0 thunar 1.1.6 thunar-vfs 1.1.1 xfce-utils 4.7.4 xfce4-appfinder 4.7.2 xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.4 xfce4-panel 4.7.7 xfce4-session 4.7.3 xfce4-settings 4.7.7 xfconf 4.7.5 xfdesktop 4.7.5 xfwm4 4.7.4
Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre3/src http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre3/src http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre3/src http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre3/src
A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre3/fat_tarballs http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre3/fat_tarballs http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre3/fat_tarballs http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre3/fat_tarballs
Today we are pleased to announce the third and hopefully final preview release of Xfce 4.8 which is set to be pushed out to the public on January 16th, 2011. Compared to Xfce 4.8pre2 this release mostly features translation updates and bug fixes.
With christmas and new year’s eve between 4.8pre2 and 4.8pre3 it comes as no surprise that for most components only a few issues were tackled.
Among other things we updated the default keyboard shortcuts to include monitor keys. The status icon of the file manager’s progress dialog is now properly hidden when the dialog is destroyed. It’s wallpaper plugin is now capable of handling filenames with spaces. The environment variables of commands launched from the Xfce run dialog were not set properly, so we fixed that so that commands launched from the dialog always inherit the environment of the Xfce session.
We also made the --reboot and --halt parameters of xfce4-session-logout
work again which previously simply logged out the active user. In order
to avoid a race condition at session startup and in order to speed
things up a little more we no longer use xrdb to update xft and cursor
settings and instead, update the related XSETTINGS properties ourselves.
In the window manager xfwm4, we aligned the time period required for a double click with that of normal applications. Via the hidden option “/general/mousewheel_rollup” one can now disable windows being rolled up via the mouse wheel. The window manager now also properly handles resolution changes in fullscreen windows like those appearing in games. Xfwm4’s application switcher now only appears once in cloned mode.
This may sound like a few useful fixes but it’s nothing compared to the amount of work that went into the new Xfce panel once again. Around 20+ known bugs and regressions were fixed. Here is a short excerpt of the complete changelog: Translation domains were fixed for external plugins, plugins can be reordered with DND again, double-clicking items in the item editor shows their preferences, dragging items to the item editor dialog removes them from the panel again, tasklist windows can now be filtered by monitor. Another issue that appeared recently and has now been fixed is the icon sizing in the notification area, also known as the systray.
Xfce 4.8pre3 also features a lot of translation updates, as can be seen in the complete changelog on
http://xfce.org/documentation/changelogs/4.8pre3
Since we’re following the Xfce release model for 4.8, we’d normally announce code freeze and the creation of early lifecycle support branches today. We decided against this because there are not enough people active to take care of all this at the moment. So we will continue fixing bugs in master branches as we did between 4.8pre2 and 4.8pre3.
We’re hoping that you will enjoy today’s release. Thanks a lot to everyone contributing this time around! We’re pretty sure 4.8 is gonna rock.
Kind regards,
The Xfce development team
P.S.: Happy new year everyone!
Xfce 4.8pre2 released!
Xfce 4.8pre2 is now available for download.
It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:
exo 0.5.5 gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0 libxfce4ui 4.7.5 libxfce4util 4.7.4 libxfcegui4 4.7.0 thunar 1.1.5 thunar-vfs 1.1.1 xfce-utils 4.7.3 xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1 xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3 xfce4-panel 4.7.6 xfce4-session 4.7.2 xfce4-settings 4.7.6 xfconf 4.7.4 xfdesktop 4.7.4 xfwm4 4.7.3
Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre2/src http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/src http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre2/src http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/src
A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
Release notes for 4.8pre2
We are pleased to announce the second preview release of Xfce 4.8. This release marks the beginning of the string freeze. From today on until the final release, strings may no longer be changed in the master branch of Xfce core components. This will help translators to prepare their translations for the final release scheduled on January 16th, 2011.
For this release we focused on fixing bugs in all Xfce components. We managed to close a great number of them thanks to all the persons who reported them and tested proposed fixes quickly.
A few minor panel features were added despite feature freeze. We also managed to work on two long time requests: proper support for editing the application menu with menu editors (Alacarte being the one that we tested) and integration with the Compiz viewport. Of course, this release also features a lot of new and improved translations thanks to the amazing work of our translation teams.
A list of all changes is available on:
http://mocha.xfce.org/documentation/changelogs/4.8pre2
We hope you will enjoy this release. Please give us feedback by sharing your thoughts, blogging, tweeting, denting or by filing bug reports. With your help, 4.8 will be the best release ever (at least until 4.10)!
Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release,
The Xfce development team
Xfce 4.8pre2 released!
Xfce 4.8pre2 is now available for download.
It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:
- exo 0.5.5
- gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0
- libxfce4ui 4.7.5
- libxfce4util 4.7.4
- libxfcegui4 4.7.0
- thunar 1.1.5
- thunar-vfs 1.1.1
- xfce-utils 4.7.3
- xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1
- xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3
- xfce4-panel 4.7.6
- xfce4-session 4.7.2
- xfce4-settings 4.7.6
- xfconf 4.7.4
- xfdesktop 4.7.4
- xfwm4 4.7.3
Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):
- http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre2/src
- http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/src
- http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre2/src
- http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/src
A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:
- http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
- http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
- http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
- http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
Release notes for 4.8pre2
We are pleased to announce the second preview release of Xfce 4.8. This release marks the beginning of the string freeze. From today on until the final release, strings may no longer be changed in the master branch of Xfce core components. This will help translators to prepare their translations for the final release scheduled on January 16th, 2011.
For this release we focused on fixing bugs in all Xfce components. We managed to close a great number of them thanks to all the persons who reported them and tested proposed fixes quickly.
A few minor panel features were added despite feature freeze. We also managed to work on two long time requests: proper support for editing the application menu with menu editors (Alacarte being the one that we tested) and integration with the Compiz viewport. Of course, this release also features a lot of new and improved translations thanks to the amazing work of our translation teams.
A list of all changes is available here.
We hope you will enjoy this release. Please give us feedback by sharing your thoughts, blogging, tweeting, denting or by filing bug reports. With your help, 4.8 will be the best release ever (at least until 4.10)!
Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release,
The Xfce development team
Xfce4 Notifyd 0.2.0
Almost exactly two years after the first release of Xfce4 Notifyd, sorry for missing that, 0.2.0 is out.
Most of the work was done by Brian Tarricone, who allowed me to co-maintain this application due to his very limited free time.
The biggest change must be smart notification placement: when there are several notifications, they are placed in a grid-like way, instead of overlapping as they did with the previous version. This also comes with improved support for multiple monitors setups.
We also now support 'gauge' and 'icon-only' notifications as in Canonical's Notify OSD. Xfce4-volumed already uses this to provide a beautiful notification on volume change.
Finally, we are now compatible with the latest specification (0.9) which should fix a great number of issues which happened when applications expected us to be already doing so.
The little screencast I made a while ago:
New features of xfce4-notifyd (Jérôme Guelfucci) from Xfce on Vimeo.
Xfce at OpenRheinRuhr 2010
There will be an Xfce booth at OpenRheinRuhr 2010 on the 13th and 14th of November in Oberhausen, Germany, thanks to Enrico Tröger, Christoph Wickert, Mark Trompell and Christian Dywan.
They will be available for any information request, chit chat, technical or philosophical discussion, installation... You can also get some cool Xfce stickers or see the nice Xfce 4.8pre1 running live!
Thank you all four for this nice initiative and for others, don't hesitate to come and say hello!
Xfce 4.8pre1 released!
Xfce 4.8pre1 is now available for download.
It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:
exo 0.5.4 gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0 libxfce4ui 4.7.4 libxfce4util 4.7.3 libxfcegui4 4.7.0 thunar 1.1.4 thunar-vfs 1.1.1 xfce-utils 4.7.1 xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1 xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3 xfce4-panel 4.7.4 xfce4-session 4.7.1 xfce4-settings 4.7.4 xfconf 4.7.3 xfdesktop 4.7.2 xfwm4 4.7.1
Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src
A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs
Release notes for 4.8pre1
The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release for Xfce 4.8. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project announces the feature freeze for the final 4.8 release which is set to be pushed out to the world on January 16th, 2011.
This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular) from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop. The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.
Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8 is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, udev and many more. A lot of old cruft like has been stripped from the core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still around for compatibility reasons).
Thanks to the awesome Transifex translation platform, our language teams have been able to update their translations at an incredible pace. Please include them when praising this release!
A complete list of all changes since the latest stable release is available on
http://mocha.xfce.org/documentation/changelogs/4.8pre1
Below you will find download information for Xfce4.8pre1. Please give our mirrors a few hours to synchronize. We hope you will enjoy this release, feel encouraged to blog and tweet about it! Feedback is welcome in all forms. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker as usual. We need your help to make Xfce 4.8 our best release ever!
Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release,
The Xfce development team
Some Xfce News
Documentation
Nick Schermer is working on the infrastructure for the new documentation. It will be written in Mallard and translatable using Transifex. There are already a few drafts available: Nick made one for Xfce4 Panel (git branch) and Jim Campbell made one for Xfce4 Screenshooter (Bugzilla entry). Once the infrastructure is ready, contributions will be welcome! I will keep you posted.
Xfdesktop4
This is the second BIG thing currently going on: Jannis is porting Xfdesktop4 to GIO. He expects to have it done by the next weekend, the current work is available in a git branch. This is one of the last remaining by tasks for 4.8, so this is a really good news! <bisounours>Rock on!</bisounours>
Xfce Settings Helper
For those of you who care, I implemented two little features last week. First, Xfce now remembers the state of the Numlock when closing the session and restores it on startup. Gone are the days of numlockx \o/. Moreover, for people using xmodmap, the settings helper automatically processes .Xmodmap on start up and when changing the layout/variant using the Xfce settings dialog.
By the way, since my last post about the keyboard settings improvement, I also reviewed/applied a few patches by Martin Pitt and Lionel Le Folgoc which fix some crashes/bugs in the new code.
Xfce Utils
I fixed a bunch of easy bugs/enhancement requests for Xfrun. It can now handle URLs, opens files with the default handlers, folders with the default file manager... I also fixed history loading for the "Run in terminal" check box, fixed handling of command line options and added "#" as a shortcut to read man pages. I now plan to work on auto completion for path and command.
I also reworked an old patch by Mike Massonnet to improve the look of the Xfce documentation, it looks really neat now. I will try to see if we can use it with the new documentation.
Goodies
Florian Rivoal, maintainer of xfce4-cpugraph-plugin, launched a "all your unmaintained goodies are belong to me" operation. Basically he offered to maintain a huge number of unmaintained goodies for which there are a great number of patches waiting for review in the Xfce Bugzilla. You can find more details on this thread. This heroic move should not make you forget that contributors/new maintainers are welcome! Florian will not be able to implement new things (or only a limited number) given the work it represents but only to keep those apps functional which is already awesome!
XTerm as root-tail
The idea behind this title is to use XTerm as a log viewer over the desktop, just like root-tail works. The tool root-tail paints text on the root window by default or any other XWindow when used with the-id parameter.Using XTerm comes with little advantage, it is possible to scroll into the “backlog” and make text selections. On a downside, it won't let you click through into the desktop, therefore it is rather useful for people without desktop icons for example.
We will proceed with a first simple example, by writing a Shell script that will use the combo DevilsPie and XTerm. The terminals will all be kept in the background below other windows and never take the focus thanks to DevilsPie. DevilsPie is a tool watching the creation of new windows and applies special rules over them.
Obviously, you need to install the command line tool
devilspie. It's a command to run in the background as a daemon. Configuration files with a .ds extensions contain matches for windows and rules that are put within the ~/.devilspie directory.First example
The first example shows how to match only one specific XTerm window.The DevilsPie configuration:
- DesktopLog.ds
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog")
(begin
(wintype "dock")
(geometry "+20+45")
(below)
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(opacity 80)
)
)
devilspie is running, and spawning a single xterm process:- desktop-log.sh
#!/bin/sh
test `pidof devilspie` || devilspie &
xterm -geometry 164x73 -uc -class DesktopLog -T daemon.log -e sudo tail -f /var/log/daemon.log &
To try the example, save the DevilsPie snippet inside the directory
~/.devilspie, and download and execute the Shell script. Make sure to quit any previous DevilsPie process whenever you modify or install a new .ds file.
Second example
The second example is a little more complete, it starts three terminals of which one is coloured in black.- DesktopLog.ds
(if
(matches (window_class) "DesktopLog[0-9]+")
(begin
(wintype "dock")
(below)
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(opacity 80)
)
)
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog1")
(geometry "+480+20")
)
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog2")
(geometry "+20+20")
)
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog3")
(geometry "+20+330")
)
- desktop-log.sh
#!/bin/sh
test `pidof devilspie` || devilspie &
xterm -geometry 88x40 -uc -class DesktopLog1 -T daemon.log -e sudo -s tail -f /var/log/daemon.log &
xterm -geometry 70x20 -uc -class DesktopLog2 -T auth.log -e sudo -s tail -f /var/log/auth.log &
xterm -fg grey -bg black -geometry 70x16 -uc -class DesktopLog3 -T pacman.log -e sudo -s tail -f /var/log/pacman.log &
NB: You will probably notice that setting the geometry is awkward, specially since position and size are in two different files, getting it right needs several tweakings.
This blog post was cross-posted to the Xfce Wiki.
