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
Development Release: Parole 0.9.2
With a huge code cleanup effort, complete plugin development documentation, and numerous bug fixes, Parole Media Player 0.9.2 paves the way for future development. What’s New? General Homepage updated to docs.xfce.org Xfce URLs were switched to HTTPS New Features A new keyboard shortcuts helper was added to the Help menu New and keybindings for previous … Continue reading Development Release: Parole 0.9.2Xubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” Released
Xubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” was released on April 13, 2017 with several fresh Xfce GTK+ 3 releases, bug fixes, and new features in tow. What’s New? Several Xfce panel plugins and applications have been ported to GTK+ 3 Core Xfce libraries exo and libxfce4ui have been updated with full GTK+ 3 support Greybird and Numix were … Continue reading Xubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” ReleasedXubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus” Released
Here we are again, folks. After six more months of development (two years since the last LTS), we’ve got another fantastic release — Xubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus”! I wanted to find a nice squirrel quote, but it seems most folks have a horrific dislike for the little critters. — Myself, after looking up squirrel … Continue reading Xubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial Xerus” ReleasedTranslation Updates!
Some releases are notable only for their improved translations. LightDM GTK+ Greeter Settings 1.2.1, MenuLibre 2.1.3, and Xfce Panel Switch 1.0.4 are such releases. Translation Updates LightDM GTK+ Greeter Settings Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish MenuLibre Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Croatian, Czech, … Continue reading Translation Updates!Catfish 1.3.4 Released (New PPA)
With a slew of updates and a new build system, Catfish 1.3.4 is now available! This update fixes a number of bugs, adds initial support for PolicyKit, and introduces a new PPA for Ubuntu users. What’s New? New Features Initial PolicyKit integration for requesting administrative rights to update the search database. Bug Fixes Fixes for … Continue reading Catfish 1.3.4 Released (New PPA)Clock applets in the Xfce panel in Xubuntu 15.10
Both Xfce and Xubuntu have had new releases relatively lately. In a way or another, this has resulted in an issue with Xubuntu 15.10 release: the Orage clock doesn’t show a transparent background even if it is set to show one. (Upstream bug in Xfce: 11915.)
Don’t be afraid! Instead of using the Orage applet, you can use the DateTime and Clock applets to get a transparent background – and while they itself do not allow for changing the color of the text in the applet, you can work around that with a .gtkrc-2.0 file in your home directory. Here’s how.
Set up the applets
To set up the applets, simply add the DateTime and/or Clock applets to your panel. You can control the format in which the time/date is shown in the applet via their preference dialogs found from their right-click context menus.
Bear in mind, if you wish to have two different clocks in the panel, we will be using the regular panel foreground (text) color for DateTime (white for Greybird) and modify the text color for the Clock applet in the steps below.
Modify the Clock applet color
To modify the Clock applet foreground color, we will need to make a modification in a theming file. The best way to do this is to use the per-user config file, found at ~/.gtkrc-2.0. If you don’t have this file, simply create one.
The code snippet to modify the Clock applest text color is the following:
style "panel-clock-custom"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#66CCCC"
fg[PRELIGHT] = "#66CCCC"
fg[ACTIVE] = "#66CCCC"
text[NORMAL] = "#66CCCC"
text[PRELIGHT] = "#66CCCC"
text[ACTIVE] = "#66CCCC"
}
widget "Xfce*Panel*clock*" style "panel-clock-custom"
In this snippet, we’re setting the foreground color for all the Clock applets to a certain turquoise – #66CCCC – which compliments the 15.10 wallpaper well.
You can substitute this hex color value with any other that fits your needs.
The end result
For me, the end result looks like this:
Have fun modifying your own!