Xfce Screensaver 0.1.0 Released
I am pleased to announce the release of Xfce Screensaver (xfce4-screensaver) 0.1.0! This is an early release targeted to testers and translators. Bugs and patches welcome!
About
Xfce Screensaver is a screen saver and locker that aims to have simple, sane, secure defaults and be well integrated with the Xfce desktop.
It is a port of MATE Screensaver, itself a port of GNOME Screensaver. It has been tightly integrated with the Xfce desktop, utilizing Xfce libraries and the Xfconf configuration backend.
Features
- Integration with the Xfce Desktop per-monitor wallpaper
- Locking down of configuration settings via Xfconf
- DBUS interface to limited screensaver interaction
- Full translation support into many languages
- Shared styles with LightDM GTK+ Greeter
- Support for XScreensaver screensavers
- User switching
Requirements
- DBus >= 0.30
- GLib >= 2.50.0
- GTK+ >= 3.22.0
- X11 >= 1.0
- garcon >= 0.5.0
- libxklavier >= 5.2
- libxfce4ui >= 4.12.1
- libxfce4util >= 4.12.1
- Xfconf >= 4.12.1
Screenshots
Click to view slideshow.Downloads
Please be aware that this is alpha-quality software. It is not currently recommended for use in production machines. I invite you to test it, report bugs, provide feedback, and submit patches so we can get it ready for the world.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.0 Released
Xfce Screensaver is a screen saver and locker that aims to have simple, sane, secure defaults and be well integrated with the Xfce desktop.
It is a port of MATE Screensaver, itself a port of GNOME Screensaver. It has been tightly integrated with the Xfce desktop, utilizing Xfce libraries and the Xfconf configuration backend.
Features
- Integration with the Xfce Desktop per-monitor wallpaper
- Locking down of configuration settings via Xfconf
- DBUS interface to limited screensaver interaction
- Full translation support into many languages
- Shared styles with LightDM GTK+ Greeter
- Support for XScreensaver screensavers
- User switching
Requirements
- DBus >= 0.30
- GLib >= 2.50.0
- GTK+ >= 3.22.0
- X11 >= 1.0
- garcon >= 0.5.0
- libxklavier >= 5.2
- libxfce4ui >= 4.12.1
- libxfce4util >= 4.12.1
- Xfconf >= 4.12.1
Screenshots
Downloads
Please be aware that this is alpha-quality software. It is not currently recommended for use in production machines. I invite you to test it, report bugs, provide feedback, and submit patches so we can get it ready for the world.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Xubuntu Development Update September 2018
A week later than expected, it’s the September development update! The theme for August (and early September) has been visual improvements, with a few bug fixes tossed in for good measure. Check it out!
Xubuntu
Bionic Beaver (18.04)
Bionic was pretty stable in August, with only one of our packages making it through the SRU process and into the hands of our users.
- xfce4-terminal 0.8.7.4-0ubuntu0.18.04.1
- This is a new upstream release with a number of improvements (LP: #1782327).
We’re currently looking to get these new releases and fixes into Bionic.
- Catfish 1.4.6
- This is a new release with numerous bug fixes and a much-improved thumbnailer.
- Xfce Settings: Mouse acceleration not configurable in Xubuntu 18.04 (LP: #1758023)
- This issue is related to libinput taking over mouse configuration, and will be resolved by building xfce4-settings with libinput support.
Cosmic Cuttlefish (18.10)
The following source package updates landed in Cosmic in August.
- elementary-xfce 0.12-1ubuntu1
- The elementary-xfce icon theme is now available on Debian! Previously, this theme was part of the xubuntu-icon-theme package.
- ristretto 0.8.3-1 (Debian sync)
- thunar-archive-plugin 0.4.0-1 (Debian sync)
- thunar-media-tags-plugin 0.3.0-1 (Debian sync)
- xfce4-taskmanager 1.2.1-1 (Debian sync)
- xubuntu-artwork 18.10
- The development wallpaper is set on boot and the desktop.
- The xubuntu-icon-theme is now a branding package, that upgrades the elementary-xfce icon theme with the Xubuntu distributor logo.
- xubuntu-default-settings 18.10
- “Square icons” were enabled in all supported plugins, improving size and shape consistency on the panel.
- Orage configuration was updated to use the “paplay” command for sounds by default (LP: #1054396)
- The panel was updated to be 80% transparent at all times. This is a settings migration to support the new GTK+ 3 panel.
- The Xubuntu session was updated to correctly set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP (LP: #1590089)
- xubuntu-meta 2.227
- This package release replaces the fwupdate dependency with the newly minted fwupd.
Xfce
New Releases
Xfce had 3 new releases in August, featuring a variety of bug fixes and usability improvements.
Xfce Display Profiles (Preview)
Simon has been hard at work implementing a nifty new feature for the Xfce Display Settings, display profiles! This feature allows you to save and switch between various display setups, useful for users on the go or presenters. This hasn’t been merged into master yet, so designs are not final.
Spacing Improvements
I’ve spent the last week submitting patches to the Xfce core applications, panel plugins, and Thunar plugins. My goal is to improve the overall look and feel of Xfce by improving the consistency of it’s preference dialogs. A few before and after screenshots are below.
I’ve based my work on the excellent GNOME 2 HIG Window Layout documentation. Xfce has long borrowed the design philosophies from this document (to varying degrees) and is once again benefiting from the well-written work.
Shimmer Project
Elementary Xfce Icon Theme
Xubuntu’s beloved icon theme has had a few significant updates in recent weeks. From build optimizations to new upstream icons, there’s a lot to unpack.
The theme has added a Makefile and build tool to convert the theme’s SVG sources to PNG. Xubuntu has included the PNG-building functionality for some time, and now it’s available for everyone. PNG-based themes are faster to load and generally crisper at various sizes. Included in the new build options are PNG optimization. Optipng is now used to optimize each of the generated files, reducing the overall file size.
Updated icons coming from upstream this month include dialog-password, selection icons, graphics icons, and manila-colored folders. The manila folders are a sharp contrast from the longtime blue, but after using them for a few days, they’re actually pretty nice.
Other Updates
Mugshot 0.4.1
I released Mugshot 0.4.1 early last month with a number of bug fixes and code quality improvements. You can check out the release notes and find downloads here.
Contributing
Ready to start giving back to your favorite open source projects? Remember that there’s something for everyone, and you can get started quickly with the Xubuntu and Xfce contributor docs. If you don’t know where to start, join us at #xubuntu-devel on Freenode… we’ll point you in the right direction.
Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 (and 0.4.1) Released
Stable as a rock. Xfce PulseAudio Plugin hit a new stable milestone with the 0.4.0 release. This release wraps up the awesome development cycle we’ve had on this over the last few months and is recommended for all users.
What’s New?
Since 0.2.5, the previous stable release.
Device Management
- Added support for audio input devices
- Added support for the XF86AudioMicMute key
- Added ability to switch active audio devices and streams
- Simplified audio volume controls
MPRIS2 Integration
- New optional MPRIS2 support (play/pause, raise, track switching, playlists)
- Added multimedia keyboard support, keys control the active media player and add keyboard support for any MPRIS2-enabled player
- Experimental libwnck support adds support for raising windows that do not otherwise support it (Spotify included)
- Players can be selectively hidden from the menu in the preferences dialog
General
- Significant code cleanup, dropping unused IDO support and simplifying widgets
- Improved memory management with numerous memory leaks patched
Translation Updates
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmal, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Available on Debian Testing and Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. Included in Xubuntu 18.04.
Xfce Settings 4.12.3 / 4.13.2 Released
Fixes galore! Xfce Settings 4.12.3 and 4.13.2 were released on March 18th with several improvements, feature parity, and translations.
What’s New?
Both 4.12.3 and 4.13.2: Improvements for Multi-monitor Support
- Visualize all three display configuration states
- Visually note if two displays overlap (mirrored) but are not cloned
- Always draw active display last so it’s on top
- Fix: Correctly position monitors in extended mode
- Fix: Race condition with monitor connect and disconnect
- Fix: Segfault on monitor reconnect
Xfce Settings 4.13.2
- New: Show location of the mouse pointer on keypress (Introduced in 4.12.2)
- Fix: syncdaemon not starting with certain locales
- Fix: division by 0 crash from gdk_screen_height_mm()
- Fix: Remove existing socket from socket viewport (Xfce #13847)
- Fix: Use transient notifications for improved logging
- Fix: Do not expand event sounds section so font scaling is correctly
positioned - Resolved GTK+ 3.22 deprecations (Xfce #14273)
Translation Updates
Amharic, Arabic, Asturian, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English (United Kingdom), Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Uighur, Ukrainian
Downloads
Xfce Settings 4.12.3
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Available in Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. Included in Xubuntu 18.04.
Xfce Settings 4.13.2
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Available in the Xubuntu QA Experimental PPA
Parole Media Player 1.0.0 Released
It’s here, it’s finally here! The first 1.0 release of Parole Media Player has finally arrived. This release greatly improves the user experience for users without hardware-accelerated video and includes several fixes.
What’s New?
Parole 0.9.x Developments
If you’ve been following along with the stable release channel, you have a lot of updates to catch up on. Here’s a quick recap. For everybody else, skip to the next header.
- Parole 0.9.0 introduced a new mini mode, boosted X11 playback, and made the central logo clickable. When your playlist is complete, the “play” logo changes to a “replay” logo.
- Parole 0.9.1 improved support for remote files and live stream playback. Older code was stripped away to make Parole even leaner and faster.
- Parole 0.9.2 introduced a keyboard shortcuts helper (Help > Keyboard Shortcuts), fixed numerous bugs, and included a huge code cleanup and refactor.
Parole 1.0.0: New Feature, Automatic Video Playback Output
- We’ve finally resolved the long-standing “Could not initialise Xv output” error (Xfce #11950) that has plagued a number of our users, both in virtual machines and on real hardware.
- In the past, we were delighted when we were able to implement the Clutter backend to solve this issue, but that API proved to be unstable and difficult to maintain between releases.
- Now, we are using the “autoimagesink” for our newly defaulted “Automatic” video output option. This sink provides the best available sink (according to GStreamer) for the available environment, and should produce great results no matter the setup.
Parole 1.0.0: Bug Fixes
- Fixed 32-bit crashes when using the MPRIS2 plugin (LP: #1374887)
- Fixed crash on “Clear History” button press (LP: #1214514)
- Fixed appdata validation (Xfce #13632)
- Fixed full debug builds and resolved implicit-fallthrough build warning
- Replaced stock icon by freedesktop.org compliant option (Xfce #13738)
Parole 1.0.0: Translations
Albanian, Arabic, Asturian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Uighur, Ukrainian
Downloads
Parole Media Player 1.0.0 is included in Xubuntu 18.04. Check it out this week when you test out the Beta!
sudo apt update sudo apt install parole
The latest version of Parole Media Player can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 1.0.0 from the below link.
https://archive.xfce.org/src/apps/parole/1.0/parole-1.0.0.tar.bz2
- SHA-256: 6666b335aeb690fb527f77b62c322baf34834b593659fdcd21d21ed3f1e14010
- SHA-1: ed56ab0ab34db6a5e0924a9da6bf2ee91233da8a
- MD5: d00d3ca571900826bf5e1f6986e42992
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.5
Activity is slowing down as the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin matures and heads toward the 0.4.0 stable release. With some usability refinements and bug fixes, users will find the latest release both easy and convenient to use.
What’s New?
New Feature: Move Streams on Default Output Change (Xfce #14157)
- Prior to this update, when a new output device was selected from the plugin menu, only newly opened applications would utilize the selected option.
- With this change, any active output streams will immediately be routed to the newly selected device.
New Feature: Management of Known MPRIS2 Players (Xfce #13903)
- Known media players can now be cleared or selectively hidden from the menu.
Bug Fixes
- Correctly reflect the current volume state at session startup (Xfce #14071, #13677)
- Clear stale data retained after a new Metadata signal (Xfce #14068)
Translation Updates
Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Irish, Japanese, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Malay, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.5 is already included with Xubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. Check it out when you test the Beta next week!
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.5 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 25e7bc414edf6e16140c31ca4e7dcedd4e17d40ea23a2921beb799fed11a99bb
- SHA-1: 955268828ac53fdfbfa346fbec376aa4f6199385
- MD5: 30cd40be36895c4ced48c2433ff440c4
Catfish 1.4.4 Released
I’ve got some great news for fans of Catfish, the fast and powerful graphical search utility for Linux. The latest version, 1.4.4, has arrived with performance improvements and tons of localization updates!
What’s New
This update covers both versions 1.4.3 and 1.4.4.
General
- Improved theming support
- Improved error handling with thumbnails
- Improved search performance by excluding .cache and .gvfs when not explicitly requested
- Improved locate method performance with the addition of the –basename flag
- Added keywords to the launcher for improved discoverability and Debian packaging improvements
- Updated included AppData to latest standards
Bug Fixes
- All search methods are stopped when the search activity is canceled. This results in a much faster response time when switching search terms.
- Debian #798074: New upstream release available
- Debian #794544: po/en_AU.po has Sinhalese (not English) translations for catfish.desktop
Translation Updates
Afrikaans, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Debian Unstable and Ubuntu Bionic users can install Catfish 1.4.4 from the repositories.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install catfish
The latest version of Catfish can always be downloaded from the Launchpad archives. Grab version 1.4.4 from the below link.
https://launchpad.net/catfish-search/1.4/1.4.4/+download/catfish-1.4.4.tar.gz
- SHA-256: a2d452780bf51f80afe7621e040fe77725021c24a0fe4a9744c89ba88dbf87d7
- SHA-1: b149b454fba75de6e6f9029cee8eec4adfb4be0e
- MD5: 8fd7e8bb241f2396ebc3d9630b47a635
Xubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” Released
It’s another great Ubuntu release day, with fresh versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and my personal favorite: Xubuntu.
This has been a comparatively quiet development cycle for Xubuntu. With increased development on Xfce as we prepare for Xfce 4.14, less Xubuntu-specific changes took place this cycle. Thankfully, there are still plenty of goodies to get excited about.
- Appearance Updates: Greybird‘s client side decorations (CSD) have been refreshed and now consume much less space. elementary-xfce, our preferred icon theme, has been updated and includes new device, mimetype, and panel icons. And we have a fancy new wallpaper.
- Application Updates: This is the first release of Xubuntu to feature GNOME Font Viewer, a handy tool for font management. LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird have been updated to their latest versions (5.4, 56, and 52.4 respectively). On the Xfce side, Dictionary, Genmon Plugin, Mount Plugin, Exo, and Tumbler have been updated to take advantage of the latest GTK+ version and continue the march toward Xfce 4.14.
- Technical Updates: GTK+ 3.26, Python 3.6, and Linux 4.13 are all included. Thanks to the Ubuntu Desktop team, hardware accelerated video, improved bluetooth audio, and driverless printing round out a solid development cycle.
Screenshots
Download
Download Xubuntu 17.10 from Xubuntu.org. It’s available in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties.
What’s Next?
After the release festivities calm down, work will begin on Xubuntu 18.04, our next LTS release. These are always our most active cycles as we polish the work that we’ve been doing the past 18 months and prepare for a 3-year support window. A few things we already have planned…
- Replacing the Sound Indicator with the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin, a very capable replacement with more features landing soon.
- Replacing the Xfce Indicator Plugin with the Xfce StatusNotifier Plugin, a fully compatible and better maintained plugin with a few new tricks.
- Another wallpaper contest to showcase the community’s artful taste.
- And plenty more as we begin the blueprint process!
In Case You Missed It
- I had a nice chat with Igor at Dedoimedo about Xfce and Xubuntu.
- Simon just published a significant xfce4-notifyd release.
- Pasi refreshed the Xfce Bugzilla, and it’s so much better.
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.1
A new release, some handy new features! But, I’ve never posted about this plugin before, so we’ll start with a proper introduction.
Xfce PulseAudio Panel Plugin
This is a plugin for the Xfce panel that allows the user to easily adjust the audio volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As of the 0.3.0 release, this plugin was extended with support for controlling multimedia players via the MPRIS DBUS interface. And with this latest release, users can now easily toggle the default audio input and output devices.
Features
- Control device volume, from 0% to 100% and beyond
- Instantly mute volumes by middle-clicking the plugin or clicking the mute toggle
- Launch the configured audio mixer
- Open, raise, or control playback from known media players (since 0.3.0)
- Select default input and output devices (since 0.3.1)
Screenshots
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.1 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 61a39f892e5e06723a08f919682362ebaf54792ed1076f5be828d0209a52f482
- SHA-1: 6db0e12f5f171bd57b1330c7996d503aca7a4883
- MD5: ab2a12283555db063db3abea26b3237e