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The Ultimate Contributor’s Guide to Xfce

  • December 3, 2018
  • André Miranda

Once in a while someone comes around and ask hey, I love Xfce and would like to contribute, but where do I start? How can I be of use? How can I implement a fancy new feature?, I have no doubt the answer is 42. Unfortunately, we don’t have a supercomputer (and millions of years) to distill a meaning from that one-size-fits-all answer, therefore to offer proper guidance, some questions should be asked first, e.g. What exactly do you want to improve? Do you have any programming skills? Besides programming, how else would you like to help? It’s been a long time since I’ve been planning to write a comprehensive guide, I hope this to be helpful to hitchhikers and new contributors. As any open source project, there are several ways to collaborate, everyone is welcome to help in any or many ways they are able, in this guide I’m going to explain and give hints for all contribution forms I can think of.

Translation

Our translators do an amazing work, most of major languages are constantly updated, I really appreciate their tirelessly effort. But don’t feel unmotivated, there is always room for improvement, especially if you speak any of the not so updated languages.

Xfce uses gettext which generates .po files from source code. You can view those files from any component repository, for example Thunar.

Fortunately, translators need not know terminal commands or any complex tool, since Xfce translations are handled in Transifex, a web-based translation platform. At that link you can see the overview of the current status of translations.

Once you sign up, you can ask to join a translation team. Be patient, it may take a while for a coordinator to approve your request. If you think your request is taking longer than it should, say a couple weeks, please poke us via the translation mailing list.

After joining a team, Transifex should be intuitive, there is even a comments section in case of doubts for a particular text to be translated, but developers are not notified. In this case I recommend using the mailing list or bug tracker.

For further details check the documentation page about translations.

Donations

If you have spare coins to donate, the official way to do so is via Xfce’s bountysource page. You can donate to the organization itself or put a reward of a specific bug. The money is more than welcome, but we are not actively making use, hence I hint donors to place rewards for things they expect (bug fixes, features, etc). Even if you make a hefty donation, we would be very thankful, but this is an open source project 100% run by volunteers, no one is implicitly obliged to act upon your requests.

Bug Reporting / Testing

This one could be of your interest if you are an enthusiast eager for new features and not afraid of rough edges. Xfce versioning is quite simple, even versions (e.g. 4.12) are stable and odd ones (e.g. 4.13) are development versions. Since development cycles are very long (2~4 years), at some point the development version gets good enough to be used (read “tested”) on a daily basis. Unsurprisingly development version users may find regressions (new bugs) and getting reports for them is invaluable to developers, this ensures the stable release will be more solid for more people when it comes out.

The bug tracker is where those bug reports live. Please try your best to look if a bug has already been reported and please try to be as more descriptive as possible, but avoid verbosity. Mozilla has a nice guide on how to write a bug report.

Have some Programming/QA/DevOps knowledge? Please, please, please lend a hand to xfce-test, we need automated tests really bad.

Theming

Are you more into design and CSS is a breeze for you? Good news, gtk3 themes are completely written in CSS, you can even use a preprocessor such as Sass. Truth must be said, since the introduction of gtk 3.0 (2011, I guess) there were several compatibility breaks, many theme authors got fed up and abandoned their projects. Fortunately things are more stable since 3.20 (I guess).

Our friends of Project Shimmer have being doing an amazing job, their theme Greybird is shipped on Xubuntu and is now Xfce’s reference theme. Xfce is also supposed to look good under Adwaita (gtk’s default theme). By the way, until 4.12 (gtk2) Xfce ships several classic themes, unfortunately they had to be archived because they need to be rewritten for gtk3.

Finally, as a theme author what are your contribution options? I would say: contribute to Greybird, port/rewrite the classic themes to gtk3, improve Xfce support in other themes out there or roll your own theme!

Since you made this far in this section, perhaps you have web design skills, if so, improvements to our website are also welcome. You may want to file reports for the www.xfce.org project. Just keep in mind that Xfce’s philosophy is about minimalism.

Documentation

Our wiki and docs sites contain many helpful pages, but one doesn’t need to browse much to notice that some have outdated information. Think you can help us with that? Please write a draft or two and share them via the mailing list, we may then give you permissions to edit those pages.

Xfce documentation has some hints on how to write docs.

Coding

This is the most effective way to help, we are always looking for new people to improve, fix, hack and eventually maintain Xfce’s components. You don’t have to be a ninja, just the basic knowledge of a programming language, preferably C, a bit of git and most importantly the desire to learn. Some people are scared of C, because they heard it’s too low level… Fear not, the language is quite simple. Yes, there are pitfalls and gotchas, as any other language, but the experience is improved by gtk’s and glib’s utility functions and abstractions.

First things first, Xfce’s modular architecture feature several components, some are part of its core and some are optional apps or panel plugins. Take some time to read their description. You might wonder what the heck is a window manager? or I never heard of freedesktop.org or d-bus, are they edible?. Search for them, I can’t possibly explain everything there is to know about Linux desktops in a single blog post.

In my opinion the best way to get started with code is to scratch your own itch, you know, deal with that annoying bug or a behavior that could be improved. The rule of thumb is to browse Xfce’s Bugzilla and look for that bug or report it in case no one noticed the problem until now. Then go to Xfce’s repository browser, clone the repository for the component you are about to hack, fix the problem and attach a patch to the bug report. That’s easy for me to say, isn’t it? I’m going to prove you it is not that hard, let’s go step by step.

Building from source

Suppose we are interested in hacking xfce4-appfinder, the first thing we need to do is to build and be able to run that component:

git clone git://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-appfinder
cd xfce4-appfinder
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --enable-debug
make

The ./autogen.sh command will fail if you never compiled a Xfce component before, we need to have installed development packages for dependencies, unfortunately it’s hard to give instructions since package names vary between distributions. In most cases it helps a lot to not panic and read the error message. For example:

checking for exo-2 >= 0.12.0... not found
*** The required package exo-2 was not found on your system.

For Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt install libexo-2-dev does the trick. Actually on Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt build-dep [package-name] installs all build dependencies of the given package, xfce4-appfinder in our case. On Arch Linux, there is no *-dev packages, if you have Xfce installed, you will need to figure out fewer dependencies packages to install and you can also check the makedepends variable from the PKGBUILD of the component you are interested.

Moving on, the --prefix=/usr option is useful if you want to install the component on your system (with sudo make install), it means to replace the version provided by the system package manager. Be aware that daily usage of development builds is cool because of unreleased fixes and new features, but it’s also risky because new bugs may appear or due incompatibilities with stable components.

The --enable-debug allows interesting things for development such as debugging with gdb, more detailed backtraces and compiling warnings. Keep in mind that binaries with debug symbols are larger and possibly slower, often unnoticeable.

After make, the binary is ready to run, however xfce4-appfinder as some other Xfce components run in background (daemon mode), in this case we need to stop its process with xfce4-appfinder -q. Hint: this specific component has a preference to disable daemon mode (Preferences -> General -> Keep running instance in the background), so I recommend disabling it while in “write code-compile-run” loop. Now from the root of the repository, run src/xfce4-appfinder. Congratulations, you have just built your first component! If you don’t believe me, change the window title “Application Finder” (appfinder-window.c) to something else, build and run again with make && src/xfce4-appfinder.

This was just a quick summary of how to build Xfce components, the wiki has a much more detailed explanation.

Smashing bugs

Now to make things interesting let’s fix a bug, but this time I need you to clone and build Mousepad, Xfce’s text editor. The steps are very much the same, except that Mousepad does not run in background which makes things easier. Go on, clone and build it. Hopefully you have successfully built Mousepad by now, if not read carefully error messages spilled on the terminal, if you can’t figure them out searching those messages on the web could be helpful. If you tried really hard and nothing worked, ask for guidance at #xfce-dev, stay online and be patient, try one more time if no one replies after one day.

Now you are able to execute Mousepad with mousepad/mousepad from the source folder, we are ready to smash a real bug. Obviously I wouldn’t be so reckless to let a bug live just for beginners fix it and never push the fix, the bug I have in mind was fixed centuries ago (2014), actually it was one of my first contributed patches. With the magic of git, we can travel back to mousepad-0.3.0 (gtk2!) and smash that bug once again. Before we go back, clean the source folder with make distclean, now you are good to run git checkout mousepad-0.3.0. Git will complain that “you are in ‘detached HEAD’ state”, you might know what that means, otherwise ignore it for now and remember to learn git later, because you know, having a detached head is not comfortable at all ;)

Once again configure and build Mousepad (./autogen.sh && make) and fix the bug… Oh, but I haven’t even told what is broken :) Allow me: execute Mousepad, type “hello world”, save the file somewhere and close Mousepad. Now run Mousepad again and open that file, type some gibberish and choose File -> Revert, it will ask for confirmation, press “Revert” and it says it failed to revert even though it worked. Weird, isn’t it?

So where do we get started? Have a look at the terminal, it says g_error_free: assertion 'error != NULL' failed, looks fishy. Open Mousepad source folder in your favorite editor. I hope the editor you are using features a text search on all files, because to locate the suspect part of code, we need to search for the error message from the dialog, in this case “Failed to reload the document.”. Ignore .po files, they are used only for translations. If you are still following me this far, you might have found the message at mousepad-window.c:3983 and look! Just below that line there is g_error_free which was mentioned by that terminal message, so we must be close, my dear Watson. Notice how that chunk of code is executed only if succeed is FALSE, and succeed is the result of mousepad_file_reload function call. Hmmm, let’s go into that function (mousepad-file.c:859), take your time to read it.

As you might have reckoned (or not, no worries), it starts with state checking, checks if the file still exists, clears a buffer and, the most important part, reloads the file, the result goes into a boolean also called succeed. At this point, you may want to use gdb to debug this code, but I won’t teach you this, there lots of tutorials out there. The poor’s man debug is printf, I use it a lot, though some claim it’s a bad practice. Anyway, try it, put g_print ("succeed is %s\n", result ? "TRUE" : "FALSE"); in the line after succeed gets assigned (mousepad-file.c:886), then build and try to reproduce the bug, messages on terminal may help you understand what is happening. Ok, indeed succeed is FALSE at that point, so let’s dive into mousepad_file_open, then read it.

Found anything interesting? No? Go back and check its signature. Still no? What about its return type? Yes, it returns gint which is assigned to a gboolean variable! How is that even possible? If you know a bit C, you probably know any non-zero number yields TRUE when evaluated in a boolean expression, consequently 0 yields FALSE. If you read that function code, you saw that it returns non-zero when something went wrong (a common pattern in C programs and libraries). By now it should be clear that this is the opposite of what we expect for succeed, 0 means no error but when converted to boolean results in FALSE. So what is the fix? Well, try to figure it out yourself, you have all the information needed :)

Once you have your solution, compare it to the one provided in Bug #10636.

Sharing Code

Now you know how to build components and smash bugs, browse Xfce’s bug tracker and try to fix something that looks easy. If you have an idea on how to fix or some code that seems to work but you are not so sure, don’t be afraid to ask at #xfce-dev. Once you have a good enough solution, attach a patch (see git commit & git format-patch) to the bug report. Wait a few days, if you get no answer, poke us at #xfce-dev or use the Xfce4-dev mailing list. After some merged patches, you may ask commit rights and join the dev club, yay!

By the way, (I hope that) soon we will move our infra to GitLab, so merge requests will be the new standard way to share code, much more convenient IMHO.

Tools

  • Use whatever text editor/IDE you are comfortable with.
  • The terminal is your friend, get used to it, then you will love it.
  • Now that almost all components are gtk3-based, GtkInspector is an invaluable tool.
  • Offline documentation browser such as Devhelp and Zeal are faster and more convenient than using a web browser.
  • Glade is a WYSIWYG interface editor, many Xfce components have their ui created with it.
  • D-Feet is useful when dealing with D-Bus.
  • Tricky bugs will need advanced tools to find their cause, in this case gdb and valgrind are good companions.
  • Xorg’s utilities, for instance xev and xprop.

Communication

  • General user questions? Xfce’s forum and #xfce at IRC/Freenode are the best place to get help.
  • Translation stuff? Xfce-i18n mailing list.
  • Stuck with anything related to code? Xfce4-dev mailing list. Besides that #xfce-dev at IRC/Freenode is where devs hang out. All of us have a real life (I think) and live across different time zones, so once again, be patient and stay online.

Conclusion

I wasn’t sure where to tackle this subject, so here it is: maintainers are awesome folks, but don’t take this role too seriously, it creates frustration in many ways.

Let me explain: someone is trying to figure out how to fix a bug or introduce a new feature, but may think that effort is a waste of time since the maintainer should be much more experienced and able to implement it in the blink of an eye. The bug is not updated for a long time so users get tired of waiting (it’s an absurd, this bug is from 2008!), probably the maintainers are lazy, stupid or both. It doesn’t take long to maintainers also get tired and abandon development for their own reasons. Finally the component is considered unmaintained which greatly reduces the chances of contributions (patches) make their way into releases.

Don’t take that as a rant or as “shut up and let’s work at our own pace”. What I mean is that newcomers are more than welcome to propose solutions and send patches, do not expect a dedicated maintainer for the every component (people come and go). Be proactive, take part, propose, ask, learn, disagree, fix, explain, help and eventually you become a maintainer :)

That’s it, I hope this guide covers as much as possible contribution forms as possible, even at the penalty of its length. And remember, this is a volunteer-based project not a job so have fun!

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released

  • November 25, 2018
  • Sean Davis

After 3 weeks of dedicated development time, the first Xfce Screensaver beta release is now available! With better event handling, a significantly upgraded preferences dialog, and a tidier codebase, the new version is nearly ready for prime time. 🎉

What’s New?

Features

  • All available configuration options are now available in the Preferences dialog, boosting the easily accessible options from 4 to 13!
  • Idle time is now based on the X11 Screensaver plugin instead of the GNOME Session Manager.
  • Xfce Screensaver now respects the xdg-screensaver state, inhibiting the screensaver when using apps like Caffeine or watching a fullscreen video.
  • Screensaver and lock screen functionality can easily now be toggled separately.

General

Preferences

  • Dropped unused configuration options [1, 2, 3]
  • Renamed all Xfconf properties for improved clarity and easier maintenance [1, 2]

Bug Fixes

  • Replaced Help link with a link to the Xfce Docs (Xfce #14877)
  • Added /usr/lib and /usr/libexec as trusted engine paths, enabling local installs on Linux with access to existing screensavers (Xfce #14883)
  • Fixed screen blanking and locking on FreeBSD and OpenBSD (Xfce #14846)
  • Fixed lock screen crash on laptop lid-close events (GTK #1466)
  • Fixed daemon crash when scrolling through available themes
  • Improved window size resizing for smaller displays
  • Renamed included screensavers to avoid conflicts with MATE Screensaver
  • Reduced flicker rate when multiple keyboard layouts are available (still not fully fixed, but greatly improved)

Build Improvements

  • Silenced warning: ar: ‘u’ modifier ignored since ‘D’ is the default
  • Fixed warning: Target given more than once in the same rule

Code Quality

  • Applied cpplint fixes and added cpplint configuration file
  • Cleaned up unused variables, trailing spaces, and deprecated code
  • Glade templates were cleaned up and organized for easier maintenance

Translation Updates

Albanian, Basque, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Malay, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Turkish

Screenshots

Downloads

This is the first beta release of Xfce Screensaver. While still not recommended for production machines, this is a great time to test and report bugs so we can put together an awesome stable release soon.

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Xubuntu users (18.04, 18.10, and 19.04) can grab the package from the Xubuntu QA Experimental PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/experimental
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xfce4-screensaver

Remember to also remove or exit light-locker and start xfce4-screensaver (or log out and back in) and add support for xfce4-screensaver to the xflock4 script.

Thanks and enjoy!

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released

  • November 25, 2018
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

Features

  • All available configuration options are now available in the Preferences dialog, boosting the easily accessible options from 4 to 13!

  • Idle time is now based on the X11 Screensaver plugin instead of the GNOME Session Manager.

  • Xfce Screensaver now respects the xdg-screensaver state, inhibiting the screensaver when using apps like Caffeine or watching a fullscreen video.

  • Screensaver and lock screen functionality can easily now be toggled separately.

General

Preferences

  • Dropped unused configuration options [1, 2, 3]

  • Renamed all Xfconf properties for improved clarity and easier maintenance [1, 2]

Bug Fixes

  • Replaced Help link with a link to the Xfce Docs (Xfce #14877)

  • Added /usr/lib and /usr/libexec as trusted engine paths, enabling local installs on Linux with access to existing screensavers (Xfce #14883)

  • Fixed screen blanking and locking on FreeBSD and OpenBSD (Xfce #14846)

  • Fixed lock screen crash on laptop lid-close events (GTK #1466)

  • Fixed daemon crash when scrolling through available themes

  • Improved window size resizing for smaller displays

  • Renamed included screensavers to avoid conflicts with MATE Screensaver

  • Reduced flicker rate when multiple keyboard layouts are available (still not fully fixed, but greatly improved)

Build Improvements

  • Silenced warning: ar: ‘u’ modifier ignored since ‘D’ is the default

  • Fixed warning: Target given more than once in the same rule

Code Quality

  • Applied cpplint fixes and added cpplint configuration file

  • Cleaned up unused variables, trailing spaces, and deprecated code

  • Glade templates were cleaned up and organized for easier maintenance

Translation Updates

Albanian, Basque, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Malay, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Turkish

Screenshots

View fullsize Screensaver Settings
 View fullsize Lock Screen Settings
 View fullsize Xfconf Properties

The new Xfce Screensaver documentation.

Downloads

This is the first beta release of Xfce Screensaver. While still not recommended for production machines, this is a great time to test and report bugs so we can put together an awesome stable release soon.

Source tarball (sha1, sha256)

Xubuntu users (18.04, 18.10, and 19.04) can grab the package from the Xubuntu QA Experimental PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/experimentalsudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install xfce4-screensaver

Remember to also remove or exit light-locker and start xfce4-screensaver (or log out and back in) and add support for xfce4-screensaver to the xflock4 script.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released

  • November 25, 2018
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

Features

  • All available configuration options are now available in the Preferences dialog, boosting the easily accessible options from 4 to 13!
  • Idle time is now based on the X11 Screensaver plugin instead of the GNOME Session Manager.
  • Xfce Screensaver now respects the xdg-screensaver state, inhibiting the screensaver when using apps like Caffeine or watching a fullscreen video.
  • Screensaver and lock screen functionality can easily now be toggled separately.

General

Preferences

  • Dropped unused configuration options [1, 2, 3]
  • Renamed all Xfconf properties for improved clarity and easier maintenance [1, 2]

Bug Fixes

  • Replaced Help link with a link to the Xfce Docs (Xfce #14877)
  • Added /usr/lib and /usr/libexec as trusted engine paths, enabling local installs on Linux with access to existing screensavers (Xfce #14883)
  • Fixed screen blanking and locking on FreeBSD and OpenBSD (Xfce #14846)
  • Fixed lock screen crash on laptop lid-close events (GTK #1466)
  • Fixed daemon crash when scrolling through available themes
  • Improved window size resizing for smaller displays
  • Renamed included screensavers to avoid conflicts with MATE Screensaver
  • Reduced flicker rate when multiple keyboard layouts are available (still not fully fixed, but greatly improved)

Build Improvements

  • Silenced warning: ar: ‘u’ modifier ignored since ‘D’ is the default
  • Fixed warning: Target given more than once in the same rule

Code Quality

  • Applied cpplint fixes and added cpplint configuration file
  • Cleaned up unused variables, trailing spaces, and deprecated code
  • Glade templates were cleaned up and organized for easier maintenance

Translation Updates

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released

Albanian, Basque, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Malay, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Turkish

Screenshots

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Screensaver Settings
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Lock Screen Settings
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Xfconf Properties
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Documentation

Downloads

This is the first beta release of Xfce Screensaver. While still not recommended for production machines, this is a great time to test and report bugs so we can put together an awesome stable release soon.

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Xubuntu users (18.04, 18.10, and 19.04) can grab the package from the Xubuntu QA Experimental PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/experimental
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xfce4-screensaver

Remember to also remove or exit light-locker and start xfce4-screensaver (or log out and back in) and add support for xfce4-screensaver to the xflock4 script.

Thanks and enjoy!

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released

  • November 25, 2018
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

Features

  • All available configuration options are now available in the Preferences dialog, boosting the easily accessible options from 4 to 13!
  • Idle time is now based on the X11 Screensaver plugin instead of the GNOME Session Manager.
  • Xfce Screensaver now respects the xdg-screensaver state, inhibiting the screensaver when using apps like Caffeine or watching a fullscreen video.
  • Screensaver and lock screen functionality can easily now be toggled separately.

General

Preferences

  • Dropped unused configuration options [1, 2, 3]
  • Renamed all Xfconf properties for improved clarity and easier maintenance [1, 2]

Bug Fixes

  • Replaced Help link with a link to the Xfce Docs (Xfce #14877)
  • Added /usr/lib and /usr/libexec as trusted engine paths, enabling local installs on Linux with access to existing screensavers (Xfce #14883)
  • Fixed screen blanking and locking on FreeBSD and OpenBSD (Xfce #14846)
  • Fixed lock screen crash on laptop lid-close events (GTK #1466)
  • Fixed daemon crash when scrolling through available themes
  • Improved window size resizing for smaller displays
  • Renamed included screensavers to avoid conflicts with MATE Screensaver
  • Reduced flicker rate when multiple keyboard layouts are available (still not fully fixed, but greatly improved)

Build Improvements

  • Silenced warning: ar: ‘u’ modifier ignored since ‘D’ is the default
  • Fixed warning: Target given more than once in the same rule

Code Quality

  • Applied cpplint fixes and added cpplint configuration file
  • Cleaned up unused variables, trailing spaces, and deprecated code
  • Glade templates were cleaned up and organized for easier maintenance

Translation Updates

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released

Albanian, Basque, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Malay, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Turkish

Screenshots

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Screensaver Settings
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Lock Screen Settings
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Xfconf Properties
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 Released
Documentation

Downloads

This is the first beta release of Xfce Screensaver. While still not recommended for production machines, this is a great time to test and report bugs so we can put together an awesome stable release soon.

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Xubuntu users (18.04, 18.10, and 19.04) can grab the package from the Xubuntu QA Experimental PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/experimental
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xfce4-screensaver

Remember to also remove or exit light-locker and start xfce4-screensaver (or log out and back in) and add support for xfce4-screensaver to the xflock4 script.

Thanks and enjoy!

Adventures in primary display land

  • November 12, 2018
  • Simon Steinbeiß

As some may have noticed I have lately patched “Primary Display” support into a few of our components. It all started with the display settings dialog… But let me start right at the beginning.

“Primary” is a setting of X11’s RandR extension that “is expected to be used by desktop environments to mark the screen that should hold the primary menu bar or panel” (quoted from the specification). So in short: the “Primary Display” should hold your panels, your desktop icons, your notifications, potentially your presenter’s screen (if you use LibreOffice) etc. in a multi-display setup.

In 2016 I started by introducing a hidden setting in xfce4-notifyd. This meant your notifications wouldn’t pop up during presentations on external displays anymore (because the default setting before was to follow the mouse pointer’s location). I personally needed/wanted this and it felt like an easy fix.

In 2017 I added the feature to xfce4-panel. Before that you had to either hard-code the location of the panels or use the “Automatic” setting, which always puts your panels at the left top part of the screen (x=0, y=0). In combination with the display settings option this provided an easy way of moving the panel around and keeping it on certain displays even when connecting new additional ones.

In late 2018 I started working on the big missing piece of the puzzle, which is xfdesktop. At the time of writing, my patches are still in review in this bugreport (testing welcome!), but things work ok or at least well enough to give me hope that we will see this in the next development release.

Display Settings Primary information

In parallel to the xfdesktop patch I also picked up the display settings dialog again after gathering some input from friends at work and decided to pull in all the information about the usage and configuration of the “Primary Display”, as its settings are spread across several components and dialogs. The point of this popover is to show the current configuration status as well as adding a shorthand for accessing all those settings dialogs.

I also went with a new way of highlighting which display is configured as “Primary Display” that is hopefully more easily understandable than the panel I added in the 4.13.5 release. The star is shown both in the displays widget as well as in the properties list of each display, so users can easily visually match which display is primary and what that means.

Enjoy!

Xubuntu Development Update November 2018

  • November 1, 2018
  • Sean Davis

Aaaaaaaaaaaand, we’re back! After skipping last month’s development update, there’s a lot of new developments to unpack for the previous 2 months. Let’s get right to it.

Xubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish”

We wrapped up development on Xubuntu 18.10 throughout September and October, landing the following changes in the last month and a half of work.

This release includes 6 new GTK+ 3 Xfce components, giving users a snapshot of the Xfce 4.14 development. More information about the release can be found in the release notes.

Upcoming Fixes

Since the 18.10 release, we’ve identified fixes for two of our documented bugs. We’ll be pushing these fixes to our users via the stable release updates.

  • Panel: Window buttons are not clickable at the top pixel of the screen (LP: #1795135)
    • Resolution: Export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = 1 (Xfce Git)
  • Settings Manager: Mouse fails to scroll embedded panels (LP: #1653448)
    • Resolution: Export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = 1 (Xfce Git)

Xfce

September New Releases

October New Releases

4.14 Roadmap Updates

The Xfce development team has worked on tidying up the Xfce 4.14 roadmap over the last few days. Statuses have been updated, pending work has been moved to the top of each section, and completion percents have been adjusted to better reflect each project’s progress. With these updates, we can now see that…

Xfce 4.14 is now approximately 83% complete.

Of course, we need all the help we can get to get this milestone out the door. Check out the Xfce Contribute page to find out how you can help.

What’s Next?

With the 18.10 release now behind us, and the 19.04 cycle starting today, it’s time to get back to work! No release goals have been determined yet, so stay tuned to the Xubuntu Development mailing list for updates about Xubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” development.

Xfce Screensaver 0.1.1 Released

  • November 1, 2018
  • Sean Davis

The second release of Xfce Screensaver is now available! Featuring a number of bug fixes, translations, and general improvements, this release is a big step forward for the newest Xfce application.

What’s New?

General

  • Added support for color settings from Xfdesktop 4.12 and 4.13
  • The black fallback color has been replaced with the Xfdesktop default
    • #152233 or super dark blue
  • The interface files for the preferences dialog and lock screen are now compiled and included in the binaries
  • The warning displayed as the root user is now an InfoBar to make it more visible
  • Screensaver Preferences can now be embedded in the Xfce Settings Manager

Bug Fixes

  • Fix crash when no background placement is configured (Xfce #14769)
  • Redraw the screensaver on monitor configuration events (Xfce #14796)
  • Automate detection of PAM configuration, add a new flag to override (Xfce #14779)
    --with-pam-auth-type=<common|system>
  • Notify the user when Xfce Power Manager has an incompatible configuration and include a button to resolve it (Xfce #14782)
  • The unlock dialog is now correctly drawn with the Adwaita GTK theme
  • Fix builds on OpenBSD, build status can now be tracked on the Xfce Build Bot

Translations (All NEW!)

Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

Packaging

With just a single release, packaging for the new screensaver is starting to appear all over the place! If you know of any other places it’s been packaged, drop me a line. 🙂

Screenshots

Downloads

Please be aware that this is alpha-quality software. It is not currently recommended for use in production machines. Please continue to test it, report bugs, provide feedback, and submit patches so we can make the best screensaver and locker possible for Xfce.

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Xubuntu Development Update November 2018

  • October 31, 2018
  • Sean Davis

Xubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish”

We wrapped up development on Xubuntu 18.10 throughout September and October, landing the following changes in the last month and a half of work.

This release includes 6 new GTK+ 3 Xfce components, giving users a snapshot of the Xfce 4.14 development. More information about the release can be found in the release notes.

Upcoming Fixes

Since the 18.10 release, we’ve identified fixes for two of our documented bugs. We’ll be pushing these fixes to our users via the stable release updates.

  • Panel: Window buttons are not clickable at the top pixel of the screen (LP: #1795135)

    • Resolution: Export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = 1 (Xfce Git)

  • Settings Manager: Mouse fails to scroll embedded panels (LP: #1653448)

    • Resolution: Export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = 1 (Xfce Git)

Xfce

September New Releases

October New Releases

4.14 Roadmap Updates

The Xfce development team has worked on tidying up the Xfce 4.14 roadmap over the last few days. Statuses have been updated, pending work has been moved to the top of each section, and completion percents have been adjusted to better reflect each project’s progress. With these updates, we can now see that…

Xfce 4.14 is now approximately 83% complete.

Of course, we need all the help we can get to get this milestone out the door. Check out the Xfce Contribute page to find out how you can help.

What’s Next?

With the 18.10 release now behind us, and the 19.04 cycle starting today, it’s time to get back to work! No release goals have been determined yet, so stay tuned to the Xubuntu Development mailing list for updates about Xubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” development.

Xubuntu Development Update November 2018

  • October 31, 2018
  • Sean Davis

Xubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish”

Xubuntu Development Update November 2018

We wrapped up development on Xubuntu 18.10 throughout September and October, landing the following changes in the last month and a half of work.

This release includes 6 new GTK+ 3 Xfce components, giving users a snapshot of the Xfce 4.14 development. More information about the release can be found in the release notes.

Upcoming Fixes

Since the 18.10 release, we’ve identified fixes for two of our documented bugs. We’ll be pushing these fixes to our users via the stable release updates.

  • Panel: Window buttons are not clickable at the top pixel of the screen (LP: #1795135)
    • Resolution: Export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = 1 (Xfce Git)
  • Settings Manager: Mouse fails to scroll embedded panels (LP: #1653448)
    • Resolution: Export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = 1 (Xfce Git)

Xfce

September New Releases

October New Releases

4.14 Roadmap Updates

The Xfce development team has worked on tidying up the Xfce 4.14 roadmap over the last few days. Statuses have been updated, pending work has been moved to the top of each section, and completion percents have been adjusted to better reflect each project’s progress. With these updates, we can now see that…

Xfce 4.14 is now approximately 83% complete.

Of course, we need all the help we can get to get this milestone out the door. Check out the Xfce Contribute page to find out how you can help.

What’s Next?

With the 18.10 release now behind us, and the 19.04 cycle starting today, it’s time to get back to work! No release goals have been determined yet, so stay tuned to the Xubuntu Development mailing list for updates about Xubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” development.