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./shoutcast-radio

  • March 5, 2009
  • Mike Massonnet
Just like my older post about a "./jamendo-player", this time I am definitely more interested into good online radio stations. And SHOUTcast is the best that comes to my mind! It's been there for years, Winamp is the best music experience ever, and both have been promoting each other even though I don't know/remember what their relation are.

The good things about their widget is that it saves the recent radios and it also has a list of favorites but this one isn't working as-is with the code. It is possible to search for radios and to browse by genre. All of this stuff is saved under ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/<random>/ct.yourminis.com/.



So of course I couldn't resist but embed their available Flash widget inside a window :-) Again the code is very short, it's just about loading — well not a URL this time — an HTML string cause the Flash application all alone doesn't work out, it needs parameters passed outside. I didn't include the callbacks to handle "_blank" links, which means it is not possible to open any links, but this is useless as the widget is fully functionnal.

You can download the source code here.

Here are some installation instructions:
  1. Look into main.c
  2. The first line of main.c is a comment with a command to compile
  3. If you want a menu item in you desktop menu:
    1. Edit the Exec keys in shoutcast-radio.desktop
    2. Copy the desktop file to ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/applications
  4. If you don't have a gnome-radio icon, copy gnome-radio.png to ~/.icons/
By the way, I'm linking on the Xfce blog. Why? Cause there might be Xfce users interested into a simple to compile radio application. At least I hope some of you will enjoy it, more than the jamendo thingy :)

Update: The favorites actually do work, it just that the favorite button isn't always clickable.

Installing Xfce 4.6 on Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10

  • March 4, 2009
  • Jérôme

Packages for Xfce 4.6 are now available on my PPA, with some updates for the Goodies. Please report any bug you may find on the Xfce bugzilla.

Here are the lines you should add to your sources.list. For Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jerome-guelfucci/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

For Ubuntu Hardy (8.04):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jerome-guelfucci/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

You can also add the OpenPGP key of the PPA by following those instructions:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 0E23917F5D9DCE6C

gpg --export --armor 0E23917F5D9DCE6C | sudo apt-key add -

Please note that I will not offer support and debugging in the comments. Please head to the Ubuntu forums or to IRC to get help. Of course, If anything is wrong with those packages, let me know.

I would like to thank the Debian Xfce group and Lionel Le Folgoc, without them those packages would not be available.

Xfce 4.6.0 Released

  • March 3, 2009
  • Brian Tarricone

I’m a bit late with this, but we finally got Xfce 4.6.0 out the door. Others have written much more about this than I have, so feel free to read about it on our blog aggregator.

Xfce 4.6.0 Released

  • March 3, 2009
  • Brian Tarricone

I’m a bit late with this, but we finally got Xfce 4.6.0 out the door. Others have written much more about this than I have, so feel free to read about it on our blog aggregator.

Xfce 4.6, what do they think about it?

  • February 28, 2009
  • Jérôme

Xfce 4.6 has been out only since yesterday but there are already a great number of reviews spawning all around the Web. I'll try to keep a list of the main ones here:

French:

Spanish:

Czech:

As usual, Béranger found something to complain about :) But as he is complaining about the transparency of desktop icons, I think we can still say that 4.6 is a good release!

Reading those reviews, I can see two main issues: the desktop right click menu and the menu editor. For the menu editor, our rocking Jannis Pohlmann is already on it and is making really good progress on libxfce4menu: it'll allow us to use Alacarte to edit menus in Xfce 4.8 or to develop our own menu editor, if someone volunteers for this. For the right click menu, just find a beautiful wallpaper and remove all those ugly non-transparent desktop icons that hide it and your old beloved menu will be back!

If you find any other interesting reviews, please share them!

Edit: I added some links from the comments.

Xfce 4.6 is out!

  • February 27, 2009
  • Jérôme

Xfce 4.6 was officially released this morning!

Most distributions will have packages available in the next few days. Meanwhile, you can take a look at the tour to see all nice new features!

I would like to thank the Xfce Development Team who did a really good job. A 4.6.1 maintainance release will be out in the next few weeks to improve the translations and fix bugs that may pop up.

The website has also been updated, go and get Xfce 4.6!

Xfce 4.6 is out!

  • February 27, 2009
  • Jannis Pohlmann

Hey everyone. As of today, Xfce 4.6 is available to everyone. Let me quote Stephan Arts, our release manager of the 4.6 cycle:

After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.6.0 has just been released.

Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new session manager and sound mixer as well as several huge improvements of its core components. A list of all the changes since the last release candidate can be found on this page.

A visual overview of Xfce 4.6 is available here:
http://www.xfce.org/about/tour

Download Xfce 4.6 from the Downloads section of the Xfce website:
http://www.xfce.org/download

Regards,
The Xfce development team.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. Especially Stephan who did an amazing job. Thanks as well to Jerôme without whom the website update would not have been possible. It might not be the most clean and polished release ever and the release process was quite painful, but we can now look back at this and hopefully each learn our lessons.

I'm already looking forward on working on 4.8 with you guys, and thinking of some of the features to come gets me really excited.

News from the Goodies

  • February 25, 2009
  • Jérôme

Recently, there were a few releases in the Xfce Goodies project. I will try to summarize the main changes.

Xfce4 Power Manager 0.6.1 and 0.6.2

Those two bug fix releases fix various annoying problems: a tab was not working in the settings dialogs, there were some D-Bus related errors and the -r option is not needed anymore to start the application.

The author also added a brightness control plugin for the Xfce Panel to the Xfce SVN and discussions have started about merging the different battery panel plugins and the power manager. He also considers using DeviceKit. A lot of exciting stuff for the next release!

Midori 0.1.3

This new release of Midori, the fast Webkit based browser, brings a lot of interesting new features:

  • improved zoom preferences.
  • the interface can now be easily configured.
  • a new Mouse Gestures extension allows you to bind actions to particular mouse gestures.
  • Maemo integration for mobiles.
  • Find as you type feature for the search bar: results are proposed while you type a word in the search bar.

Gigolo 0.2.1

This bug fix release fixes a few bugs: Obex URIs are saved correctly now, some interface related problems have been fixed and one can now use the @ symbol in adresses.

Xfburn 0.4.1

And one more bug fix release ! It fixes drag and drop related issues, a crash when creating folders in a composition and burners detection has been improved. It is also advised to use libburn 0.5.6 or higher, which fixes a few annoying crashes.

Xfce4 Screenshooter 1.5.1

Yet another bug fix release... The mouse cursor is now displayed on the screenshots, a crash when the application did not detect any application to open images and one memory leak fixed...

Those little goodies should appetize you for Xfce 4.6 !

Looking for a Job

  • February 24, 2009
  • Jannis Pohlmann

My part-time contract with the university ends the next couple days and now I'm looking for a new job. I've worked at the university for the last few years but I'd like to work on something that is more relevant to my personal future from now on.

My involvement in the Open Source community has grown immensely within the last six months and I have realized that this where I see myself in the future. I love the vibrant communities around Open Source projects and the social and organizational aspects involved, like conferences, community coordination and, in general, meetings and discussions with people. This environment is exciting to work in and provides enough variety to keep me motivated. I'm always looking for exciting things to work on and I need change all the time. Oh, yeah, and I also love code. In fact, I'm a real code addict with a special affinity to clean C code, GTK+ and manually written ChangeLogs.

If you know or run a company which has a strong background in Open Source and preferably GTK+ which could be interested in hiring me, please let me know. My CV is available here. One important thing to note is that I'm currently not available for a full-time position because I'm still a student and am not going to graduate before next year. So something like 16-20 hours per week would be ideal.

Cheers, Jannis

GTK-Doc Suckage

  • February 24, 2009
  • Jannis Pohlmann

Here are several things that are not wise to do when working with GTK-Doc:

  • Have an enum called XfceMenuLayoutMergeType and a function ending with get_layout_merge_type(). This will only make GTK-Doc think that XfceMenuLayoutMergeType is a GObject class and then it will try to inspec the results of that function you have. In the end GTK-Doc will crash with a segmentation fault when running the scanner.
  • Have an XfceMenuNodeType enum, this time wrapped by a GType, and a GObject class called XfceMenuNode. If the GType function for XfceMenuNodeType is called xfce_menu_node_type_get_type() GTK-Doc will confuse it with the GType function for XfceMenuNode and thus, generate wrong API docs.
  • Have a class called XfceMenu and a library intialization function called xfce_menu_init(). GTK-Doc will always throw these two into one section because it thinks they are related.

Bad.