Xubuntu Development Update August 2018
LTS Updates
Xenial Xerus – 16.04.5
This is the final point release for Xubuntu 16.04 “Xenial Xerus”. As Xubuntu has a 3-year support cycle, this release will be supported until April 2019. There have not been any major changes from the Xubuntu team for this point release, but there have been a number of other improvements and security updates for other components.
16.04.5 is expected to be released tomorrow, August 2, 2018. If you have a few moments, feel free to do some testing and make sure everything is working as well as we think it is!
Bionic Beaver – 18.04.1
This is the first point release for Xubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. At this time, users of Xubuntu 16.04 should begin receiving notifications to upgrade to this release. There have been a few updates from the Xubuntu team, and others are still on their way. Download 18.04.1 here.
Exo 0.12.2 includes performance improvements and a few minor bug fixes.
Xfce Settings 4.12.4 improves display manufacturer identification and overall stability.
LP: #1762595 (gvfs), Thunar incorrectly thinks USB storage device hasn’t finished ejecting, has been fixed!
Updates for Catfish 1.4.6 and Xfce Terminal 0.8.7.4 are making their way through the Stable Release Update process and should be available in the coming days.
Application Updates
Catfish 1.4.6
The latest release of Catfish features a greatly improved thumbnail manager and numerous bug fixes. With 23 translation updates, this is the most localized release to date! Finally, Catfish 1.4.6 is the first release as an official Xfce project. Check out my earlier blog post for more details.
Xfce4 Panel Profiles 1.0.8
Formerly known as Xfpanel Switch, Xfce4 Panel Profiles has joined the Xfce family. This application makes it incredibly easy to backup, restore, and share panel layouts with other Xfce users. The latest release improves profile management and includes a number of translations. Find out more about the latest updates on the release announcement.
Xfce Releases
There were 7 new Xfce releases in July, including the two applications listed just above. These releases feature a number of improvements and translation updates, with Xfwm4 4.13.1 featuring an astounding 81 non-translation updates!
Cosmic Cuttlefish Updates
The following components have been updated in Xubuntu 18.10 since July 1st.
Applications
Libraries
Panel Plugins
Thunar Plugins
Other Updates
Bug Fixed! LP: #1762595 (gvfs), Thunar incorrectly thinks USB storage device hasn’t finished ejecting
What to Expect in August?
With the summer months coming to a close, kids are back in school and everybody is back in front of their computers. This means more updates! Here are some things expected soon:
Updated packaging for the elementary-xfce icon theme. Work on separating this theme from xubuntu-artwork has already been completed. We are now just waiting for some sponsored uploads. The benefit of this change is that the elementary-xfce icon theme is now available in Debian!
Xfce Settings 4.13.5. There have been some improvements to the settings managers that we’ll be releasing soon. One improvement is the removal of the broken icon theme color generation. This worked great with GTK+ 2 themes, but has been pretty broken for GTK+ 3. With this removal, Appearance Settings now loads instantly!
I’ll be taking a look at the Pidgin codebase this month, hoping to improve the theme manager to support system-wide status icon and smiley theme installation. This will make it possible for us to ship the pidgin-elementary themes and further improve our desktop consistency.
There have been a few bugs reported with Thunar in Xubuntu 16.04 in regard to copying and moving files. I’ll be working to update the Thunar version in Xenial to fix these bugs and help folks transition to the latest and great Xubuntu 18.04. (LP: #1514912)
Keep up with the latest Xubuntu developments on our development tracker. Have a great month!
Xfce4 Panel Profiles (Formerly Xfpanel Switch) 1.0.8 Released
Xfpanel Switch has a new name and home. With the 1.0.8 release, the application is now known as “Xfce4 Panel Profiles”, and is a part of the Xfce family. The latest release improves profile management and includes a number of translations.
What’s New?
At Home With Xfce
Bug Fixes
- Failure to save some panel configurations (LP: #1765565)
- Crash on corrupted panel configs (LP: #1765565)
- Apply more strict logic when removing bad plugins
- Remove orphaned plugins when loading configuration
General
- Tidied up pylint notices
Translation Updates
Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Downloads
New releases of Xfce4 Panel Profiles will now be found at the Xfce release archive. Previous releases are still available on Launchpad.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Xfce4 Panel Profiles (Formerly Xfpanel Switch) 1.0.8 Released
What’s New?
At Home With Xfce
Bug Fixes
Failure to save some panel configurations (LP: #1765565)
Crash on corrupted panel configs (LP: #1765565)
Apply more strict logic when removing bad plugins
Remove orphaned plugins when loading configuration
General
Tidied up pylint notices
Translation Updates
Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Downloads
New releases of Xfce4 Panel Profiles will now be found at the Xfce release archive. Previous releases are still available on Launchpad.
Catfish 1.4.6 Released, Now an Xfce Project
It’s a great day for fans of the fast and powerful Catfish search utility. With the 1.4.6 release, Catfish now officially joins the Xfce family. Additionally, there’s been some nice improvements to the thumbnailer and a large number of bugs have been squashed.
What’s New?
Xfce Transition
Catfish has long been included with most Xfce installations. It’s lightweight, fast, and a perfect companion to the Thunar file manager. With the transition from Launchpad to Xfce, things have moved around a bit. Update your bookmarks accordingly!
- Homepage (Xfce Docs)
- Bugs (Xfce Bugzilla)
- Git (Xfce Git)
- Translations (Transifex)
Improved Thumbnailer
Based on the FreeDesktop.org Thumbnail Specification, now featuring:
- Improved error handling
- Proper permissions for thumbnail directories and files
- Logging of failed thumbnail generation
- Saving of thumbnail file attributes
- Support for relative thumbnail directories
Bug Fixes
- Added inode/directory mimetype to desktop entry (Xfce #14505)
- Disabled overlay scrollbars to improve interacting with the results list (Xfce #14487)
- Enabled launching of executable AppImage files (Xfce #14500)
- Fixed invalid date in appdata (Xfce #14502)
- Replaced stock icons with standard Mime Type icons (Xfce #14503)
- Improved handling of exceptions when parsing settings (Xfce #14491)
- Improved handling of UnicodeDecodeErrors (Xfce #14490)
- Improved handling of PermissionErrors (Xfce #14488)
- Improved support for hidden files (Xfce #14497)
- Remember window size and position between sessions (Xfce #14504)
- Xfce: Open directories with the preferred file manager (Xfce #14483)
Translation Updates
Albanian, Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian
Downloads
New releases of Catfish will now be found at the Xfce release archive. Previous versions will be added there soon. In the meantime, past releases are still available on Launchpad.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Xfce Settings 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 Released
The latest developments in Xfce Settings continue to make their way to both the stable and development releases. Both 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 include a number of improvements, and 4.13.4 is steadily marching toward the 4.14 future.
What’s New?
Bug Fixes (4.12 and 4.13)
xfsettingsd --replacedoes not replace old daemon (Xfce #14381)- Uninitialized scalar variables (CID #292062, #292063)
- Resolved warnings for
-Wcast-function-type(GCC 8) - Fixed redefinition of DISTCLEANFILES in Makefile.am
- Fixed typo in display manufacturers, “PRECISON” to “PRECISION”
Improved Display Manufacturer Recognition (4.12 and 4.13)
- Refreshed PNP IDs from hwdata
- Added support for VBX (VirtualBox)
- Standardized and shortened manufacturer names
- Updated laptop detection to include eDP in XfceRandr
Xfce 4.14 Progress (4.13 Only)
- Xfce Settings has been ported from D-Bus GLib to GDBus as of 4.13.3
- D-Bus GLib was deprecated in favor of GDBus with GLib 2.26
XRandr Display Scaling (4.13 Only)
- This new feature is equivalent to
xrandr --scaleand is used to scale the entire display area - The scale values are stored in Xfconf under
/Default/<NAME>/Scale/{X,Y} - For now, this setting can only be configured via Xfconf. If you’d like to submit a patch to add it to the GUI, we’d love to have it!
Translation Updates
Belarusian, Catalan, English (Australia), Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian
Downloads
XFCE SETTINGS 4.12.4
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
XFCE SETTINGS 4.13.4
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Exo 0.12.1 (and 0.12.2) Released
Xfce application developers rejoice! A new version of the Exo support library is now available. With performance improvements and full support for GCC 8, both users and developers should be excited for this news.
What’s New?
Bug Fixes
- Use the “user-bookmarks” icon instead of “bookmark-new” (Xfce #14243)
- Properly scale application icons in Preferred Applications dialog (Xfce #14362)
- Remove pure attribute of function that returns void (Xfce #14427)
Missing varargs init or cleanup (CID #30799)- Reverted in 0.12.2 to get rid of some unwelcome segmentation faults (Xfce #14465)
- Uninitialized scalar variable (CID #127777)
Exo Icon Chooser Dialog
- Dropped deprecated International icon context, added Stock icon context
- Increased context title max length to support long translations
- Symbolic icons are no longer populated in the icon chooser dialog, which could lead to significant performance gains with various icon themes
- Added a new test to the test suite for the GTK 3 version of this dialog
Helpers
- Added PCManFM-Qt (from LXQt) to supported file managers (Xfce #14333)
Compiler Support
- Disabled
-Wexpansion-to-definedand resolve various compiler warnings for GCC 7 - Fixed
-Wcast-function-typefor GCC 8
Translation Updates
Albanian, Amharic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), Finnish, French, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish
Downloads
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
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