X(f)term colors
Well,
people are asking how to change xfterm color,
and I noticed that its not documented anywhere here.
xfterm4 is a wrapper that calls the terminal defined in the TERMCMD environment variable or else xterm.
So, to do that, you define so called X resources for xterm.
The program “xrdb” aids you with that, either directly by calling it and typing, or you put it into a file in your home directory, called .Xresources
Your xinit scripts will usually call xrdb for you.
An example Xresources file is at http://www.gonetoo.de/dannym/Xresources
X resources apply only to newly opened programs, so reopen your Xterm
Hope that helps someone :)
xfwm4 native multihead support
Hey, xfwm4 now supports native multi screen and is able to manage all the screens connected to a display from a single xfwm4 process.
Adding this caused deep and complex changes in the core of xfwm4, so that might be still a bit rough on the edges…
If someone with the HW could just test… What’s needed is a multiscreen configuration but without running Xinerama (ie, a setup with :0.0 and :0.1 as screens, for example)
Cheers,
Olivier.
xfdesktop rewrite done
well, it’s been quite a while since i posted here. i was getting tired of posting bad news, so i decided to stop.
but now i have good news: i finished my partial rewrite of xfdesktop, and not only is it designed much better now for multihead support, the app-crashing problem is gone (at least for me).
probably easiest is to point you to my post to the mailing list. the tarball can be downloaded here. hopefully i’ll have it all merged into CVS in a few days.
enjoy ^_^
Xfce wiki is back online
Hi,
Thanks to Marcus Moeller, who already provides Xfce packages for Suse 9.1, the Xfce wiki is back online. It includes all data collected on the previous Biju Chacko’s wiki page.
xfwm4 theme how-to
An xfwm4 theme how-to is available here:
http://www.xfce.org/xfwm4-theme-howto/
Enjoy!
Olivier.
New session manager
I’ve been working on a new session manager for about three months to fix the shortcomings of the old session manager. The code has now finally made its way into CVS. Its not yet in production state, but its already usable. The new version is completly incompatible with the old one, that counts for session save format – which is now plain text – as well as for splash themes. Old themes won’t no longer work with the new session manager. Francois is currently working on splash themes. I will wait for him to tell me whats missing until I declare the new format stable.
Besides that, the file system layout of the session manager has changed. It follows the XDG basedir spec now, that says, you’ll find the session data files in ~/.cache/sessions/ and the configuration in ~/.config/xfce4-session/ (the global config can be found in $sysconfdir/xdg/xfce4-session).
There are currently several options to customize xfce4-session, where most of them are “hidden options”, that is they are not changable from the settings dialog. I don’t want too much options in the GUI, to not confuse new users. The question is now, what options are important and what are “geek options”. If you have any opinion on this, please let me. Also if anybody thinks, there should be an option to customize behaviour ABC, please send mail to xfce4-dev.
The shutdown code was changed to be sudo-only. That is, if you use plain xfce4-session, you’ll need to have sudo installed to shutdown/reboot the computer, see README for details. Packagers can easily change this to use distribution specific methods, by replacing xfsm-shutdown-helper.c with their code.
And last but not least, multiple sessions are now supported (a nice side effect of the new design). I’ll add “realtime checkpoint” support soon. This will allow you to instantly switch between sessions – or “checkpoints” in this context – without having to relogin (the problem here is, how to handle non session aware applications).
So, for the brave, go to get your copy from CVS – and no, there’s no version available for the 4.0 branch, since xfce4-session makes heavy use of new features in libxfce4util. As usual, send bug reports and feature requests using the bug tracker or mailing to xfce4-dev.
Enjoy,
Benedikt
Libxfcegui4 Xinerama support dropped
Since gtk+ now provides all required tools for dealing with Xinerama, I’ve removed my own implementation from libxfcegui4.
Both the taskbar and the panel have been changed to use GdkScreen.
Partial struts support in taskbar
The taskbar now sets partial struts. That makes the configurable width a lot more useful.
Another neat effect is with Xinerama. The taskbar should not waste space on all screens anymore.
Xinerama support improved in xfwm4
Today Jasper and Brian suggested that we could replace our own Xinerama related routines with Gdk ones (provided by GdkScreen which appeared in 2.2.x).
I’ve now replaced all calls to our libxfcegui4 Xinerama routines with GdkScreen equivalents in xfwm4. As a side effect, that makes xfwm4 compatible with SUN Xinerama which is supported by GTK+. Another nice side effect is that xfwm4 doesn’t require Xinerama to be enabled in libxfcegui4, since it doesn’t use libxfcegui4 for Xinerama anymore.
At last, I’ve also added a fairly nice theme called “Waza” I did some time ago. It uses gtk colors with nice gradients (that is only available in xfwm4 from CVS, and all 3 themes shipping with xfwm4 now use that feature)
Partial struts commited
Beside a huge code reorganization (that should not affect the user, hopefully ;) ) xfwm4 now supports partial struts. It might not be perfect yet, as it has not been very well tested, especially with Xinerama. So if someone has the required HW (read Xinerama with preferably different resolutions betweens physical displays), it would be cool to check xfwm4 from CVS with it.
While I was at it, I’ve also added support for NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP. The panel plugin should be able to make use it it (ideally, it should keep the old code and use NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP only when supported by the WM) – Dunno who’s in charge of that plugin though.