Thunar 1.8.0 Release
Good news fellow Xfce users, we proudly present a new Thunar release, our beloved easy-to-use and fast file manager!
The main highlight in this release is that Thunar, as all Xfce components, is saying goodbye to Gtk+ 2 and is now Gtk+ 3 based. Other than that, our team has addressed several critical bugs that compromised Thunar’s stability. Most of those fixes were backported to 1.6.x series and we hope our users do not experience crashes anymore.
By the way, by “our team” I mean Alexander Schwinn and myself, as well as all other developers which contributed to the project, specifically Jonas Kümmerlin, without his work we wouldn’t get here.
We picked up where Jonas left off, his initial port saved us a lot of work, with few adjustments we got Thunar to run under Gtk+ 3. But so we discovered this was no easy job, let’s just say Gtk+ migration path was far from a smooth experience. Besides fixing bugs and regressions, new features were introduced. Not to mention the wonderful work done by translators in promptly updating translations.
What Thunar 1.8.0 has to offer?
- A completely revised pathbar
- Buttons next/previous/up/home added
- Click on the right filler opens path as editable string
- Here’s a comparison between the old pathbar and the new one
- GObject Introspection support for thunarx
- It paves the way to new language bindings
- Thunarx-python has already been updated
- Minor improvements:
- Show file size as well in bytes
- Add systemd user unit for D-Bus session services
- Make it possible to assign accelerators to custom actions
- Enable Thunar UCA (User Configurable Actions) for remote locations
- Refreshed tray icons for file transfer
- Improved various styling details
While moving to Gtk+ 3 it was necessary to replace parts of the Thunar Plugin API (thunarx). It means that to update to Thunar 1.8.0 one should also update all installed thunar-plugins and xfdesktop to their latest versions, see the compability matrix for more details.
A complete list of added features, bug fixes and translation changes can be found in the NEWS file.
That’s it, we hope you enjoy the new Thunar.
Thunar 1.8.0 Release
Good news fellow Xfce users, we proudly present a new Thunar release, our beloved easy-to-use and fast file manager!
The main highlight in this release is that Thunar, as all Xfce components, is saying goodbye to Gtk+ 2 and is now Gtk+ 3 based. Other than that, our team has addressed several critical bugs that compromised Thunar’s stability. Most of those fixes were backported to 1.6.x series and we hope our users do not experience crashes anymore.
By the way, by “our team” I mean Alexander Schwinn and myself, as well as all other developers which contributed to the project, specifically Jonas Kümmerlin, without his work we wouldn’t get here.
We picked up where Jonas left off, his initial port saved us a lot of work, with few adjustments we got Thunar to run under Gtk+ 3. But so we discovered this was no easy job, let’s just say Gtk+ migration path was far from a smooth experience. Besides fixing bugs and regressions, new features were introduced. Not to mention the wonderful work done by translators in promptly updating translations.
What Thunar 1.8.0 has to offer?
- A completely revised pathbar
- Buttons next/previous/up/home added
- Click on the right filler opens path as editable string
- Here’s a comparison between the old pathbar and the new one
- GObject Introspection support for thunarx
- It paves the way to new language bindings
- Thunarx-python has already been updated
- Minor improvements:
- Show file size as well in bytes
- Add systemd user unit for D-Bus session services
- Make it possible to assign accelerators to custom actions
- Enable Thunar UCA (User Configurable Actions) for remote locations
- Refreshed tray icons for file transfer
- Improved various styling details
While moving to Gtk+ 3 it was necessary to replace parts of the Thunar Plugin API (thunarx). It means that to update to Thunar 1.8.0 one should also update all installed thunar-plugins and xfdesktop to their latest versions, see the compability matrix for more details.
A complete list of added features, bug fixes and translation changes can be found in the NEWS file.
That’s it, we hope you enjoy the new Thunar.
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
Xfce Settings 4.12.2 Released
Xfce has been steadily heading towards it’s GTK+ 3 future with Xfce 4.14, but that doesn’t mean our current stable users have been left behind. We’ve got some new features, bug fixes, and translations for you!
What’s New?
New Features
- Default monospace font option in the Appearance dialog
- Improved support for embedded DisplayPort connectors on laptops
- Show location of the mouse pointer on keypress (as seen in the featured image)
Bug Fixes
- Leave monitors where they were if possible (Xfce #14096)
- syncdaemon not starting with certain locales
- division by 0 crash from gdk_screen_height_mm()
Translation Updates
Arabic, Asturian, Basque, 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
The latest version of Xfce Settings can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 4.12.2 from the below link.
http://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/xfce4-settings/4.12/xfce4-settings-4.12.2.tar.bz2
- SHA-256: af0e3c0a6501fc99e874103f2597abd1723f06c98f4d9e19a9aabf1842cc2f0d
- SHA-1: 5991f4a542a556c24b6d8f5fe4698992e42882ae
- MD5: 32263f1b704fae2db57517a2aff4232d
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
On Xfce’s translation status in early 2018
As you might know I’m quite active translating Xfce to German. Furthermore I’m stepped up to take care for Xfce’s translations in general a while ago. Today I had a deeper look at the statistics of our Transifex dashboard and wanted to share the current state with you. This is both to appreciate the work done but so many volunteers but also to motivate you for helping out a bit.
Overview
In the end of 2017 we restructured the whole i18n process a bit, got rid of unused infrastructure and tried to lower the barrier for new translators to get into it. You can have a look at the corresponding wiki page if you’re interested.
As the whole translation work is pointed towards the ongoing development I will only cover the master branch. Parts of 4.12 and 4.10 are still available in Transifex but don’t get updated as they are already officially released.
NameNumbers dropping
Xfce’s translation team offers and takes care for 106 languages and variants all in all. There are 17 languages which are nearly fully translated, only missing 50 strings or (way) less. Five languages are at 100% at the time of writing: French, German, Malay, Polish and Russian. Looking at how active development is (yes, really!) and how much translatable strings the overall Xfce project has this is really impressive! People are doing an awesome job there and really deserve some praising words. Thank you!
Helping hands needed
Quite a handful of languages are on their best way towards offering full localization. At the time of writing they have a few hundred strings yet to do, so if you’re a native speaker or confidently speaking one these
Italian (it) 152 strings to translate
Danish (da) 273 strings to translate
Dutch (nl) 319 strings to translate
English (Australia) (en_AU) 373 strings to translate
Norwegian Bokmål (nb) 352 strings to translate
Serbian (sr) 387 strings to translate
Slovak (sk) 384 strings to translate
Bulgarian (bg) 460 strings to translate
Catalan (ca) 405 strings to translate
Croatian (hr) 523 strings to translate
Indonesian (id) 607 strings to translate
Japanese (ja) 605 strings to translate
Thai (th) 596 strings to translate
Furthermore there are languages a bit desperately missing help. Many of them are local variants which is why the translator teams are smaller. Nevertheless, they’re as important as any other language. Getting Free Software in general and Xfce in particular to less-spoken languages is one of it’s many strengths!
But how to get started?
The good thing with translation work is that it doesn’t need much time per default. Of course you can extend your efforts to many hours per day. But donating just half an hour every week helps a lot! Just imagine how many strings consisting of 2-3 words you could get done in that time.
Furthermore as mentioned earlier, translating has no technical entry barrier. When I started using Linux soon I wanted to contribute something. But being no developer I had to take a look around where to help. Doing translations was my first stop solution as it’s totally easy and intuitive. Now, nearly 15 years later, I’m still here and love doing this work.
To get into the language business is easy as one-two-three: make yourself familiar with the i18n docs, sign up at Transifex, request to join the Xfce team – done! It helps if you sign up at our mailing list and introduce yourself briefly, but it’s not necessary.
If you have questions feel free to ask on the mailing list or dive into IRC (#xfce-dev, Freenode). If you prefer you can also email or xmpp me directly, I’ll do my best to help you out.
Exo 0.12.0 Stable Release
With full GTK+ 2 and 3 support and numerous enhancements, Exo 0.12.0 provides a solid development base for new and refreshed Xfce applications.
What’s New?
Since this is the first stable release in nearly 2.5 years, I am going to provide a quick summary of the changes since version 0.10.7, released September 13, 2015.
New Features
GTK Extensions
- Added
exo_gtk_dialog_get_action_area - Added
exo_gtk_dialog_add_secondary_button - Added support for the “insensitive” state in
exo_cell_renderer_icon(GTK+ 3)
Helpers
- WebBrower: Added Brave, Google Chrome, and Vivaldi
- MailReader: Added Geary, dropped Opera Mail (no longer available for Linux)
Utilities
exo-csource:Added a new--outputflag to write the generated output to a fileexo-helper:Added a new--queryflag to determine the preferred application
ICONS
- Replaced non-standard gnome-* icons
- Replaced non-existent “missing-image” icon
BUILD CHANGES
- Build requirements were updated. Exo now requires GTK+ 2.24, GTK+ 3.22, GLib 2.42, libxfce4ui 4.12, and libxfce4util 4.12. Building GTK+ 3 libraries is not optional.
- Default debug setting is now “yes” instead of “full”.
DOCUMENTATION UPDATES
- Added missing per-release API indices
- Resolved undocumented symbols (100% symbol coverage)
- Updated project documentation (HACKING, README, THANKS)
Release Notes
Downloads
The latest version of Exo can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.12.0 from the below link.
https://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/exo/0.12/exo-0.12.0.tar.bz2
- SHA-256: 64b88271a37d0ec7dca062c7bc61ca323116f7855092ac39698c421a2f30a18f
- SHA-1: 364a9aaa1724b99fe33f46b93969d98e990e9a1f
- MD5: 724afcca224f5fb22b510926d2740e52
MenuLibre 2.1.5 Released
With improved support for Budgie, KDE, and MATE desktop environments, MenuLibre 2.1.5 continues to provide one of the best menu editing experiences for the Linux desktop.
What’s New?
New Features
- Added support for the Budgie and KDE Plasma desktop environments
- Improved support for the MATE desktop environment (LP: #1529406)
- Window identification for the StartupWMClass key
General
- Added manpage for the recently added menulibre-menu-validate command
Bug Fixes
- Fix icon used when creating new directory (LP: #1744594)
- Use ‘applications-
other’ instead of ‘application- default- icon’ for better icon standards support (LP: #1745840) - Ensure categories are saved in the model when updated (LP: #1746802)
- Fix incorrect display of newly created directories
Desktop Environment Support
MenuLibre is a FreeDesktop.org compliant menu editor for desktop environments implementing the Desktop Entry Specification. Some desktops are improperly configured and do not export the expected variables, and patches are included to infer the running environment in other ways. Some older desktops, such as IceWM, do not implement this specification and handle their menus in other ways.
MenuLibre has been tested with and known to work with the following desktop environments: Budgie, GNOME, KDE (Plasma), LXDE, LXQt (limited support, LXQt does not allow for non-alphabetical menu ordering), MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce. It is known not to work with IceWM and others that do not implement the Desktop Entry Specification.
If you come across an environment that should be supported but does not work as expected, let me know! It may require some additional patches to properly detect the environment and menu prefix.
Development Status
With this release, MenuLibre 2.1 is now in feature and string freeze for the 2.2.x series. I’m hoping for a stable 2.2.0 release sometime this month. This means two things.
- Translators, now it’s your time to shine! There’s been quite a few changes in the past few releases and it looks like some localizations could use a bit of a refresh. Make your way over to the MenuLibre Translations page to get started or pick up where you left off.
- Everyone else, take MenuLibre for a spin, and report bugs! If you are able to conclude that one of the existing bug reports has actually been resolved, leave a comment on the bug report so we can clean it off the list. Check out the MenuLibre Bugs page for more.
Window Identification Demo
Downloads
The latest version of MenuLibre can always be downloaded from the Launchpad archives. Grab version 2.1.5 from the below link. Debian Unstable and Ubuntu Bionic users should expect to see this latest version land in the archives sometime this week.
https://launchpad.net/menulibre/2.1/2.1.5/+download/menulibre-2.1.5.tar.gz
- SHA-256: ef05b2722bab2acb7070d6c8ed0e7bd58bd4a4540bf498af9e889944f9da08b5
- SHA-1: e380478a369a3a45eafc6bb9408366bc41972d16
- MD5: efc7edb49bb0e5fea49e158b40573334