Xfce Weekly News – March 14th through March 31st
Welcome to this week’s Xfce (bi)Weekly News, which I am now subtitling “XFW – Slightly Later, Every Week!” In this edition we see the first entry in what we hope to be a continuing series of short articles on the major new features and technologies in the coming 4.4 release of Xfce. This week, the mysterious and powerful “panel widget”.
Also, I would like to thank Francois Le Clainche for cleaning up the format of last week’s news. If you see Francois, buy him a beer, or whatever the cool kids drink these days.
On to the main event!
Ranting (2)
Here’s a reponse to all the noise, to try and get back to normal conversation: OSNews editorial. Great style, Eugenia.
Human communication is flawed and it takes courage to publicly accept part of the blame. Hopefully this unfortunate episode will lead to something good in the end ;-)
Xfce Weekly News – March 4th – March 13th 2005
Welcome to this week’s Xfce Weekly News. This week I’ll be adding links to the mailing lists where appropriate, for those of you who want to delve a little deeper. Also, I am going to start posting some of the interesting tidbits floating around in the commits list – yes, dear readers, I brave the commits list. So you don’t have to.
Of real people, belgian beer and sandals
So, FOSDEM is already over. Man, it was great! So good to finally meet the people I only know from email and IRC and to be able to connect the writings to a real person.
Friday I met up with Brian, Jens and Olivier and had something to eat. Olivier and me had ‘Waterzooi’ — we still live ;-) Brian kinda looked like a zombie, but that’s actually pretty good, considering he had been awake for 24 hours by that time.
Saturday morning started with skipping the first talk (wikipedia??) and instead we had coffee with the lunar / xfce group — 11 people (12 eventually), that’s a huge number for a small group like ours.
After that it was off to see and hear Richard Stallman speak. That was dissappointing. His arguments were not always convincing, but what was worse, he proved to be very rude when he couldn’t hear the questions. Oh, and Jean-François appears to have made a picture of FOSDEM staff trying to kill RMS. Or were they trying to cut his hair? Here it is.
Lunch in some restaurant down the street. Auke and Stacey go for ‘chicken’, the others prefer real food. François arrives and is hugged by Jaime. Repeatedly.
Olivier, JF and me go to the ddd talk (Auke claimed we needed it…), the others went to some clustering talk I believe. The talk by Andreas Zeller was very entertaining.
We lost the group and walked around looking for them for a while until François called and said they’d gone back to their hotel ;-) We went to Olivier’s hotel and discussed his presentation. Also had a look at the thin-client by HP using Xfce. Very nice.
Dinner at a restaurant where they gave us our own floor, played to most awful collection of music that you’ve ever heard, and which was outrageously expensive. But we had good fun ;) Auke did a speech like a real project leader. Although he may have tried to delegate it first…
Sunday, the people who could get up early enough went to see a talk about KDE by Mathias Ettrich. Very enjoyable. The colors of the projector where wrong though (no blue), so Olivier was a bit worried, but it turned out to be a configuration problem and was fixed when Olivier connected his own laptop.
Olivier’s talk was excellent. The demo of transparent windows was awesome, that must have impressed a few people. At the end there were some good questions … and there was one strange fellow who started a rant about wanting ‘normal’ configuration files that he could change from scripts or something instead of xml — we didn’t quite get what he meant, actually.
In the afternoon we had a small developer room to ourselves. There were some interested people besides our own group, so that was cool. I managed to scare half of them away with my talk about the panel. It wasn’t that bad, I thought… Here are the slides I used.
Brian did a talk about Xfmedia, which was pretty interesting and unsurprisingly ended with a lot of feature requests by us ;-)
Moritz showed us once again that we are missing out on real money because we don’t have a way to accept donations. He proposed to let Auke try and set-up a not-for-profit company to manage these things for Xfce, Lunar and possibly other projects as well. How could we disagree with that?
Auke then acted as a stand-in for benny and tried explain the design considerations for creating a simple file manager for Xfce. Even if not prepared properly, still a very enjoyable talk. Extra cool thing was that Alexander Larsson of Nautilus fame showed up and took part in the discussions. Thanks Alexander! I don’t think we have actually made up our minds about the design just yet…
I had a great time this weekend, thanks to everyone who was there. We have a great group of people, even in real life.
What’s that thing about sandals you say? Well, we were all kinda shocked that this crazy guy from California actually showed up in Brussels wearing sandals! It was snowing! I hope he didn’t catch a cold.
Let’s do this again some time.
Xfce, project of the week on “OSDir.com”
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 4.2.0 released
The Xfce Team is pleased to announce the availability of Xfce 4.2.0, the next major version of the Xfce Desktop Environment and Development Framework for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Xfce 4.2.0 can be downloaded here.
Xfce 4.2.0 includes new applications like a session manager and an application finder, a new and beautiful icon theme, support for bleeding-edge features (like the X.org Composite extension), usability and performance improvements, better support for multihead desktops, new and updated translations, additional themes, and various other improvements over the previous stable releases. See this page for a complete list of changes between Xfce 4.0 and Xfce 4.2.
Furthermore, Xfce 4.2 is the first desktop environment to ship with an easy-to-use and platform-independent graphical installation wizard, which takes care of compiling and installing Xfce on your system. Visit the os-cillation installers website for download links and instructions.
If you want to try Xfce 4.2.0 first, without installing anything on your system, you might want to try the Xfce Live Demo 0.2, provided by os-cillation, to discover the power and efficiency of Xfce.
A short trailer that introduces Xfce 4.2.0 is available in high- and low-bandwidth versions here.
CVS branched
Olivier yesterday created a new xfce_4_2 branch in CVS. This definitely means release is getting closer.
New developments will go into HEAD, as usual. There won’t be too much development activity before we release 4.2.0 though. I hope.
Xfce 4.2 Release Candidate 3 is out
Yes it is!
Official announcement
Bugfixes list
Download links
Enjoy !!
An evil goblin, maybe?
I usually don’t post here, but this blog is too quiet these days. The calm before the 4.2 storm, maybe?
So… let’s write some pointless chatters.
First, I’m sure there is an evil goblin in my house. I’ve lost two of my three computers in a month, including the laptop (fried CPU and hard-drive failure), and my main machine behaves oddly, whereas it was working like a charm since my last Debian installation in 2002… I’m going to install again the whole system tonight and/or tomorrow and/or the day after, so I’ll unplug myself from the internet and I’ll be back asap. I don’t know yet if I’ll choose Debian again, or switch to lunar linux, even if I’m not a source-based distro fan, for a compile-time duration question.
You may have noticed that xfce.org now only shows one screenshots page. This allows to decrease drastically the bandwidth usage, including the distributed one, and finally, I prefer it like this. On the other hand, I’ll try to create a page somewhere else in order to show all the numerous and nice Xfce 4.1.99.x screenshots that the users have sent to me, probably on the Xfce goodies server.
Maybe you have noticed that the FAQ (and overview and documentation pages) have been rewritten too. If you have other Q&A ideas, they are welcome, as long as they are hm… relevant :P
I’m glad that Benedikt’s new Terminal received quite positive feedback. It’s a really great terminal application.
At last, here is a screenie. Of what? Of my desktop! You know, the one that the evil goblin is trying to annihilate. Why the hell couldn’t I show my desktop like everybody does already?? ;))
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Transparency configurable
Yesterday I added support to the panel and the iconbox for setting the transparency value. Simply create the file ~/.config/xfce4/transparency and add the lines:
panel=40
iconbox=40
The value can be between 0 (no transparency) and 100 (full transparency), well actually 80. The above settings give you something like this.