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?? ;))
cu
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.
_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW tricks for new panel widget
As some of you may know, I have been working on creating some custom gtk widgets to be used for the panel (in Xfce 4.4). Well, some time ago I read this post on the wmspec mailing list that explains a trick that makes the kde panel work nicer.
The idea is that windows that set the dock type hint will not receive focus unless they specifically request it using a _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW message. This has the nice effect that clicking on something on the panel will not remove the focus from the window you were working with.
Screenshot. This doesn’t show what I talked about, but what good is a blog entry without a screenshot? ;-)
trash management
Basic difference between 4.0 and 4.2 trash collection: 4.0 collected a
list of all files in wastebaskets. This proved to be too much. Therefore
4.2 only tabulates a list of the wastebaskets themselves.
If you need to eliminate a single wastebasket and all its contents, just
select it and press remove button (or delete key), either from trash or
folder branch. All undeletion needs to be done by looking into a
wastebasket, selecting something and pulling it out. This is exactly
what you do when you pull something out of the wastebasket in your
office/bedroom/kitchen. Only you and God know what you want to do with a
recovered file, so xffm will not play God and leave it up to you.
The trash bin. Yes the big trash bin is not very good for undeleting
stuff. It is like going outside the office building, jumping into the
truck size garbage container and looking for the post-it note you threw
away yesterday. All this before the garbage truck comes along. This is
what MS-windows, gnome, kde expect you to do. Not very considerate.
Since the xffm trash bin is *not* meant for undeleting stuff (it’s meant
for collecting and disposing of trash, just as in the office building
analogy), undeleting from anywhere other than wastebaskets is not
supported. Yes, you can go ahead and jump into the trash bin if like to.
Good luck if you do. ;-)
Since you have to undelete from wastebaskets, you should also delete the
wastebasket when empty. If you eliminate all wastebaskets with the trash
collection branch, wastebaskets are also removed.
Yes, xffm has a different philosophy regarding trash.
Xfce window manager now includes its own compositing manager
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
Beta release, Bugzilla
Hi everyone… As you might have heard on the xfce4-dev list, we’re very close to releasing Xfce 4.1.90, which will be the first beta release of the next version of Xfce, 4.2.0. I’ll take this opportunity to re-introduce our new release manager, Biju Chacko. He’s been working this past weekend to get his system into a state to churn out release tarballs. After the release, I hope you’ll all be able to give it a try and give us your feedback so we can move quickly toward a final 4.2.0 release.
Also, many of you have probably noticed that http://bugs.xfce.org/ now points to our new install of the Bugzilla bug tracking system. I finished setting that up about a week ago, and it should help us to more easily track and fix bugs. If you had an account on the old bug tracker, it’s been migrated to the new one. Your username is now the email address you used to register, and you’ll have to ask it to reset your password, as I was unable to migrate the encrypted passwords from the old tracker. If you’re unfamiliar with Bugzilla, I’ve written up a “cheatsheet“, which is linked from the main page. You might also want to try the “guided format” to reporting a bug, which will guide you, step-by-step, in gathering the info you need to submit a useful bug report.
file manager changes
With the upcoming release of 4.1.90, changes to the xfce file manager are worth mentioning. Where to begin?
– The double treeview. In 4.0.x, this feature was a different view of the *same* treeview. Which is downright confusing. With 4.1.90, both treeviews are independent. Changes to one will not affect the other.
– The main menu. Now we have independent treeviews. To which treeview do the main menu functions apply? The old menu was confusing, so we have a new one. Actions which apply on a global scale are included in the main menu, those that are treeview specific are in the popup menu (except for the “goto” commands, which gray out when ambiguity is present).
– The applications branch. This branch was fun to program, but practically useless. Click: removed and replaced by a panel toolbar. The panel toolbar is useful if you are running the file manager on a remote machine (like a server), and you want a minimalistic remote xfce4-panel. Since remote server administration is rare, this option will not be compiled unless “–enable-panel” is specified during build (something server administrators know how to do). So don’t expect to see it unless you look real hard.
– The fork executor (Tubo). Select() replaced the equivalent glib function (which happened to be buggy). This allows a much faster response for all xfsamba functions, mount/unmount, find, tar creation and other commands.
– The copy/move routines were replaced by system defined cp/mv and run by Tubo. Thus, confusion is avoided by using the same default behaviour and error messages you would get by command line execution (plus, memory footprint is cut down).
– Other things that have changed significantly (I’ll explain these some other day): trash management, dropdown toolbar buttons, sidebar, column title popups, popup menus, sort methods, recent and frequent branches, mimetype icon editor, mimetype file association, icon theme handling, in-row cell editing for name and mode and owner/group changes, use of sudo for sudoizable commands, verbose diagnostic messages, recursive scrambling/unscrambling of directories, mount/unmount of smb shares, conversion of treeview branches to plugin architechture and something else I can’t remember now.
– During the 4.1.9x and 4.2.x release period you can expect to see changes within the internal organization aimed exclusively to bug fixes, optimization and code clean up.
– When optimization and code cleanup is complete, we might be ready for testing the icon-view representation (target 4.4, God willing).