Xfce4 Notifyd 0.2.0
Almost exactly two years after the first release of Xfce4 Notifyd, sorry for missing that, 0.2.0 is out.
Most of the work was done by Brian Tarricone, who allowed me to co-maintain this application due to his very limited free time.
The biggest change must be smart notification placement: when there are several notifications, they are placed in a grid-like way, instead of overlapping as they did with the previous version. This also comes with improved support for multiple monitors setups.
We also now support 'gauge' and 'icon-only' notifications as in Canonical's Notify OSD. Xfce4-volumed already uses this to provide a beautiful notification on volume change.
Finally, we are now compatible with the latest specification (0.9) which should fix a great number of issues which happened when applications expected us to be already doing so.
The little screencast I made a while ago:
New features of xfce4-notifyd (Jérôme Guelfucci) from Xfce on Vimeo.
Xfce at OpenRheinRuhr 2010
There will be an Xfce booth at OpenRheinRuhr 2010 on the 13th and 14th of November in Oberhausen, Germany, thanks to Enrico Tröger, Christoph Wickert, Mark Trompell and Christian Dywan.
They will be available for any information request, chit chat, technical or philosophical discussion, installation... You can also get some cool Xfce stickers or see the nice Xfce 4.8pre1 running live!
Thank you all four for this nice initiative and for others, don't hesitate to come and say hello!
Xfce alive and well: new version on its way
On 7 November, Jannis Pohlmann announced the first preview release of Xfce 4.8. The new version of Xfce, which is planned to be released on January 16th, brings much-requested features, and will close a development cycle in which the project made great strides forward.
Let’s first focus on the improvements coming in the next release of Xubuntu’s main component. Perhaps the most requested feature is support for remote filesystems. Much clamoured for, the feature required rewriting big parts of the core – something which has finally been completed.
Apart from that, the application that provides the panel(s) on your desktop has been completely rewritten, bringing a huge number of improvements, most notably in the support for multi-monitor setups, and a pet peeve of mine: the ability to drag application files to the panel to create launchers.
Also high on the wish list of many users was the ability to graphically edit the menus. Although Xfce still doesn’t ship its own menu editor, it is now possible to edit it using menu editors for other standards compliant desktops, such as Alacarte.
So, a lot has been rewritten in this release cycle – we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg above. Most important, however, are the improvements made to the release process in general, which will make the project more future-proof and will increase the speed with which new releases can be made, and lower the entry barrier to new contributors.
To start with the latter point, Xfce was one of the first of now many projects using the Transifex translation environment. Transifex makes it easier than ever for translators to help translating Xfce, as translators can now simply download the current translations and update their new translations via the web interface. I have used it myself, and it really is a huge improvement over the previous, cumbersome process. The new translation process has already attracted quite a few new translators, ensuring more of Xfce has been translated than ever, with even higher quality.
While the size of the development team has fluctuated over time (it has never been large, yet some people moved on – luckily there were new contributions as well), the team has managed to keep the desktop up-to-date with recent technologies, and has rewritten parts of the code, improving the quality to ensure it can be built on properly in the future.
Finally, the release process has been revised, now encouraging many small releases for sub-projects, as opposed to releasing all of them at once with a new version of Xfce. It is now much less work to release a new version, making that task less daunting and thus less likely to be postponed. Automatic release announcements also result in improved publicity for a new release, making it clear the project is alive and well, and more attractive for third-party contributors to help out. It also gets updated translations out faster.
All in all, the new release is shaping up to be a very solid one, closing a few big gaps in the feature set. Xfce is a truly modern desktop environment again, and what’s more important: its future, starting with the release of the new version on January 16th, is looking exceptionally bright.
In other news: as you might notice, this blog has not been updated in a while. Unfortunately, this post does not signify a change in the lack of updates. I’m really too busy with other things in my life that I’m hardly even tinkering with my computer, or actively involved with Xubuntu. So yeah, this blog is still dead. Also, it is not an official Xubuntu blog in any way, so do not draw any conclusions about the status of Xubuntu from this blog post; it is still awesome 
Xfce 4.8pre1 released!
Xfce 4.8pre1 is now available for download.
It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:
exo 0.5.4 gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0 libxfce4ui 4.7.4 libxfce4util 4.7.3 libxfcegui4 4.7.0 thunar 1.1.4 thunar-vfs 1.1.1 xfce-utils 4.7.1 xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1 xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3 xfce4-panel 4.7.4 xfce4-session 4.7.1 xfce4-settings 4.7.4 xfconf 4.7.3 xfdesktop 4.7.2 xfwm4 4.7.1
Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src
A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs
Release notes for 4.8pre1
The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release for Xfce 4.8. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project announces the feature freeze for the final 4.8 release which is set to be pushed out to the world on January 16th, 2011.
This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular) from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop. The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.
Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8 is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, udev and many more. A lot of old cruft like has been stripped from the core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still around for compatibility reasons).
Thanks to the awesome Transifex translation platform, our language teams have been able to update their translations at an incredible pace. Please include them when praising this release!
A complete list of all changes since the latest stable release is available on
http://mocha.xfce.org/documentation/changelogs/4.8pre1
Below you will find download information for Xfce4.8pre1. Please give our mirrors a few hours to synchronize. We hope you will enjoy this release, feel encouraged to blog and tweet about it! Feedback is welcome in all forms. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker as usual. We need your help to make Xfce 4.8 our best release ever!
Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release,
The Xfce development team
Some Xfce News
Documentation
Nick Schermer is working on the infrastructure for the new documentation. It will be written in Mallard and translatable using Transifex. There are already a few drafts available: Nick made one for Xfce4 Panel (git branch) and Jim Campbell made one for Xfce4 Screenshooter (Bugzilla entry). Once the infrastructure is ready, contributions will be welcome! I will keep you posted.
Xfdesktop4
This is the second BIG thing currently going on: Jannis is porting Xfdesktop4 to GIO. He expects to have it done by the next weekend, the current work is available in a git branch. This is one of the last remaining by tasks for 4.8, so this is a really good news! <bisounours>Rock on!</bisounours>
Xfce Settings Helper
For those of you who care, I implemented two little features last week. First, Xfce now remembers the state of the Numlock when closing the session and restores it on startup. Gone are the days of numlockx \o/. Moreover, for people using xmodmap, the settings helper automatically processes .Xmodmap on start up and when changing the layout/variant using the Xfce settings dialog.
By the way, since my last post about the keyboard settings improvement, I also reviewed/applied a few patches by Martin Pitt and Lionel Le Folgoc which fix some crashes/bugs in the new code.
Xfce Utils
I fixed a bunch of easy bugs/enhancement requests for Xfrun. It can now handle URLs, opens files with the default handlers, folders with the default file manager... I also fixed history loading for the "Run in terminal" check box, fixed handling of command line options and added "#" as a shortcut to read man pages. I now plan to work on auto completion for path and command.
I also reworked an old patch by Mike Massonnet to improve the look of the Xfce documentation, it looks really neat now. I will try to see if we can use it with the new documentation.
Goodies
Florian Rivoal, maintainer of xfce4-cpugraph-plugin, launched a "all your unmaintained goodies are belong to me" operation. Basically he offered to maintain a huge number of unmaintained goodies for which there are a great number of patches waiting for review in the Xfce Bugzilla. You can find more details on this thread. This heroic move should not make you forget that contributors/new maintainers are welcome! Florian will not be able to implement new things (or only a limited number) given the work it represents but only to keep those apps functional which is already awesome!
XTerm as root-tail
The idea behind this title is to use XTerm as a log viewer over the desktop, just like root-tail works. The tool root-tail paints text on the root window by default or any other XWindow when used with the-id parameter.Using XTerm comes with little advantage, it is possible to scroll into the “backlog” and make text selections. On a downside, it won't let you click through into the desktop, therefore it is rather useful for people without desktop icons for example.
We will proceed with a first simple example, by writing a Shell script that will use the combo DevilsPie and XTerm. The terminals will all be kept in the background below other windows and never take the focus thanks to DevilsPie. DevilsPie is a tool watching the creation of new windows and applies special rules over them.
Obviously, you need to install the command line tool
devilspie. It's a command to run in the background as a daemon. Configuration files with a .ds extensions contain matches for windows and rules that are put within the ~/.devilspie directory.First example
The first example shows how to match only one specific XTerm window.The DevilsPie configuration:
- DesktopLog.ds
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog")
(begin
(wintype "dock")
(geometry "+20+45")
(below)
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(opacity 80)
)
)
devilspie is running, and spawning a single xterm process:- desktop-log.sh
#!/bin/sh
test `pidof devilspie` || devilspie &
xterm -geometry 164x73 -uc -class DesktopLog -T daemon.log -e sudo tail -f /var/log/daemon.log &
To try the example, save the DevilsPie snippet inside the directory
~/.devilspie, and download and execute the Shell script. Make sure to quit any previous DevilsPie process whenever you modify or install a new .ds file.
Second example
The second example is a little more complete, it starts three terminals of which one is coloured in black.- DesktopLog.ds
(if
(matches (window_class) "DesktopLog[0-9]+")
(begin
(wintype "dock")
(below)
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(opacity 80)
)
)
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog1")
(geometry "+480+20")
)
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog2")
(geometry "+20+20")
)
(if
(is (window_class) "DesktopLog3")
(geometry "+20+330")
)
- desktop-log.sh
#!/bin/sh
test `pidof devilspie` || devilspie &
xterm -geometry 88x40 -uc -class DesktopLog1 -T daemon.log -e sudo -s tail -f /var/log/daemon.log &
xterm -geometry 70x20 -uc -class DesktopLog2 -T auth.log -e sudo -s tail -f /var/log/auth.log &
xterm -fg grey -bg black -geometry 70x16 -uc -class DesktopLog3 -T pacman.log -e sudo -s tail -f /var/log/pacman.log &
NB: You will probably notice that setting the geometry is awkward, specially since position and size are in two different files, getting it right needs several tweakings.
This blog post was cross-posted to the Xfce Wiki.
Towards an Xfce Foundation?
Jannis Pohlmann announced two days ago on the Xfce mailing lists that he started the paperwork needed to register Xfce as a non-profit organization under the German law which would be nice because, I quote:
The benefits are obvious: Xfce would become a legal entity with an official board of directors and we could raise funds in the form of donations and via supporting members in order to organize hackfests etc.
The current draft is available on gitorious. Expect more news on this in the following days and feel free to comment on our mailing lists.
Recent Xfce Settings work
Keyboard Layouts
- Use the selected keyboard layout for new sessions. Previously it was only used for the current session.
- Show full language name / description instead of cryptic codes such as fr alt-oss.
- Make the user interface consistent with the other dialogs.
- When editing a layout, the dialog is now prefilled with the layout being edited. This allows the user to change variants quickly.
- Fixed a bunch of crashes reported by Lionel Le Folgoc.
Appearance and mouse settings
- Scroll to the selected gtk|icon|mouse theme if there is a list long enough to trigger a scroll bar. That way the user knows easily which theme is active. based on a patch by Skunnyk.
Experiments, adventures, and consequences
I’ve been doing a fair amount of experimentation on my machines. Been playing with XBMC, Boxee, Ubuntu, and bleeding-edge Xfce and Freedesktop software stacks on Gentoo.
HTPC
First, I tinkered with the HTPC. It’s a Zotac MAG, dual-core Atom 330 with nVidia ION graphics. It’s just the thing for at 1080p media center. It was running an experimental community-built version of XBMC, installed back in January or February. While it was nice because it was extremely minimal, with just enough operating system to boot straight into XBMC, it was very buggy, and definitely alpha-quality.
So I wiped the disk and installed straight-up Ubuntu 10.04.1, and then installed XBMC and Boxee. I’m still tinkering with it; I need to setup the remote control I just bought, and I need to configure it to load a media center on boot, rather than the Gnome desktop. There have been a few hardware growing pains, mostly related to getting HDMI sound working correctly, and forcing 1080p output — detected my TV as a 720p device, so I had to fiddle with the nVidia utility to fix that. Also had to do a lot of tweaking in XBMC and especially Boxee to output sound over HDMI.
I’m somewhat familiar with XBMC, but I’ve wanted to try Boxee for awhile now. It’s supposed to be more user-friendly than XBMC, offering a simplified interface based on the XBMC code. It also has that whole “social media” aspect, whatever that’s about. Its real attraction is the user-friendliness; I hate having to do so much manual configuration in XBMC. I need something that my wife and I can just pick up and use; no hassle, no tinkering.
Initial XBMC impressions
It works somewhat better than the version I used several months ago. However, most of the video plugins are buggy and/or completely broken, as are some of the helper programs and utilities. All that’s supposed to change, though, with the next XBMC release. Supposedly there’s an entirely new architecture, so maybe I’ll finally get to watch my favorite shows and stream local media a bit easier, with better content scraper integration.
There are some things that don’t work — nothing on SyFy, and all too often the existing network TV plugins don’t work for all advertised shows. Mythbusters in particular is very buggy, offering only partial listings for 5 or 6 seasons, and those are extremely low-quality Flash streamed from some third-party download site. Still, my wife can watch her crime shows and 80s favorites, while I can get a fair amount of Mythbusters and other Discovery shows.
Initial Boxee impressions
Useless. Slow. Hard to configure. Totally not what I thought it’d be like. Boxee didn’t offer any of the easy internet TV watching I thought it’d have, instead offering a couple hundred useless channels for things I’ve never heard of. I expected it to have better integration with regular network TV, the same ones I can watch in a web browser. I expected a nice presentation of content, with the video wrapped in a full-screen Boxee experience. I expected hi-def streaming content; instead, the few shows I’m interested in are only available in stuttering low-quality Flash. Why bother, when I can watch The Guild in gorgeous 1080p on my Xbox?
At least XBMC has somewhat working plugins for several networks. Apparently XBMC plugins don’t work that well (or at all) on Boxee. I gave up trying to make ‘em work. All too often the shows are streamed from stuttering, blocky Flash videos. I tried using the integrated Boxee web browser to watch things like Hulu, but that turned out to be an even slower, laggier disaster.
On the hardware side, it was harder to get HDMI sound working on Boxee than on XBMC. And even though I have all the right VDPAU libraries installed, and I’m using the latest nVidia driver (195.x), nothing on Boxee seems to be accelerated. Even 720p content streamed from my LAN stutters, with the audio occasionally lagging the video. XBMC doesn’t have this problem, so I know it’s not the graphics stack.
Boxee is definitely beta. Maybe everything will work fantastically on the Boxee Box, but I don’t want to spend another $200+ dollars on essentially the exact same hardware. I want to like Boxee, I really do. But at this point, XBMC works where Boxee fails, and even though its user interface is more cumbersome, it still lets me watch videos and play music.
Initial Ubuntu impressions
Slick. Very slick. Installation from a USB key went very well. While I tried to do everything from the commandline in Gentoo, using syslinux and whatnot, none of the Ubuntu guides on creating LiveUSB media worked. I ended up just compiling Unetbootin and Qt4 on my Xfce laptop. Unetbootin worked perfectly on the first time, giving me a bootable 4GB USB stick loaded with Ubuntu 10.04.1.
Installation was simple and straightforward, with minimal user interaction. I did a bit more, because I wanted to create a custom partition layout, but otherwise the end-user part of the process was done in just a minute. The rest of the install proceeded automatically, booting me into a bright, shiny Gnome desktop. After a minute or so a few notifications popped up, advising me to install the proprietary nVidia driver and install some software updates. That took just a couple of clicks. Sweet! Oh, the joys of binary package management.
Even though the HTPC only runs a lowly 1.6ghz dual-core Atom chip with a mere 2GB RAM, the desktop still feels pretty responsive. Firefox starts up as fast or faster than my 1.5ghz Core2Duo laptop with twice the RAM. In my experience, Gnome is always pretty heavy, feeling fairly clunky and somewhat slow even when backed by speedy CPUs and gobs of RAM. Nautilus and Evolution windows always seem to load much slower than Thunar and Claws Mail, or even PCManFM and Thunderbird. Still, despite the anemic hardware, my Gnome experience in Ubuntu is surprisingly pleasant. Nothing seems particularly slow to start on a fresh login. The boot process itself could be faster, though; it takes more’n'a minute to get logged in. I need to cut that down to 10 seconds or less to get a true HTPC “instant-on” experience.
There are some quirks in most ION devices related to suspend and USB wakeups, and my Zotac MAG is no exception. I need to do some commandline hacking to get the computer to suspend every time, and to wake only when a button is pushed on the remote. And configuring LIRC is a whole ‘nother deal.
But still, I’m liking what I see. Ubuntu 10.10 will be released next month, and it promises even more improvements and nifty app integration than 10.04.
Laptop
In fact, I liked my brief experience with Ubuntu 10.04 enough to download a daily LiveCD beta of 10.10, “Maverick Meerkat.” I plan to create a LiveUSB and install it on my “Linux playground” partition. I’ve gotten just a taste of how Ubuntu works when using it as a special-purpose media center; now I want to see how it works as a mobile desktop OS.
The last time I had Ubuntu on my laptop, it was Ubuntu Studio 8.04 a few years ago. It lacked polish, lacked the cohesive desktop experience Ubuntu is known for. Its sole advantages were that it was optimized for media production, featuring a low-latency kernel and tons of preinstalled music software, with easy access to much more. I experienced numerous issues with JACK and my USB-to-MIDI adapter, though, so my plans for tinkering with music were shelved.
I’ll see how vanilla Ubuntu works on my laptop, and if it goes well, I may look into converting it into a low-latency/realtime audio production environment. I’m very interested in being able to quickly, easily use this machine to create tunes and link up with my piano. There’s been a lot of progress in the Linux audio world in two years.
Gentoo
I turned my Gentoo install into a bleeding-edge hardmasked/~arch/stable Xfce testbed. I decided to dump HAL and setup PolicyKit, ConsoleKit, udisks, upower, udev, that whole stack. Originally I wanted just to try out the experimental PackageKit features for Portage, which was a recent GSoC project. I knew that would require most of the aforementioned software stack, so I thought, “As long as it has to be installed anyway, why not dump HAL, too?”
One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had upgraded to Xserver 1.9, disabled HAL, rebuilt world a few times for USE flag changes, and pretty well screwed my system. Reconfiguring my input devices for xorg.conf.d took awhile, and I’ve been besieged by other difficulties. That’s the problem with a source-based distro, and the problem of running Xfce in particular: nothing is especially integrated, and in a lighter environment like Xfce (compared to Gnome), there isn’t much code that’s designed for a HAL-less system. Apps written for *Kit/udisks/upower are either only available in git, or still unported. A binary distro like Ubuntu would integrate all that stuff forcibly, by writing their own code if need be, so that various actions that require PolicyKit authentication would pop-up windows, prompting for passwords. None of that happens on my Gentoo system.
I ended up adding the Xfce overlay and adding several hardmasked 4.7/live versions of packages just to get udisks/upower support, which helped some. However, several bits of Xfce and other daily applications just don’t have the right code yet. So xfdesktop doesn’t display icons when drives are plugged, cameras won’t always mount and make their photos available, and not all power management options work, even when the user has the right PolicyKit credentials. That’s on top of having to reconfigure pretty much my entire working environment due to changes between 4.6 and 4.7 — everything from panel applets and their configs, to Thunar and window manager preferences. Despite USE="sound" installing libcanberra for event support, and adding sound-theme-freedesktop, event sounds cannot be enabled in the appropriate dialog, because Xfce doesn’t believe libcanberra is installed. It’s the same for Pidgin — it doesn’t believe there’s a working sound framework, either. I have to give it commands like “aplay /some/dir/foo.wav” for each kind of event.
The whole thing, is, quite frankly, a bloody mess. And all because I wanted to get some experimental Portage toys from an overlay. It’s my fault, I admit, and even after 8 hours of hacking at it, I’m probably nowhere near finished, assuming it’s even possible to get all the bleeding-edge pieces to play nicely together.
(Side note: I would like to thank my fellow Gentoo developer Samuli for taking the time to answer my numerous Xfce-related questions and do a bit of troubleshooting along the way. Thanks, man!)
So, what’s to learn from my adventures? First, trying to put everything back to its previous state would take another two days of work, if it’s even possible! Second, the price for living on the bleeding edge of *Kit integration is too high. I don’t mind running the occasional ~arch package, or using git X11 driver stacks like xf86-video-*, Mesa, and libdrm. But basic hardware abstraction stuff is nothing to be fooling around with. Not being able to use pluggable devices, enable Bluetooth, or properly adjust power management on a laptop is too high a price for being forward-thinking. I wish I’d stayed with my boring HAL system. While deprecated and a pain to configure, at least it worked reliably. More important, maintenance was nonexistent; it was simply a matter of copying several .fdi files into the right directory when I first compiled and installed my desktop. After that, I didn’t have to touch a thing.
The HAL-less desktop is supposed to be the future for every Linux distribution out there. I can only hope it is still some ways off, to give upstream coders more time to get their applications in order, so that distributions don’t have to do much patching or extensive repackaging and integration, and so that the end-users don’t have to spend hours configuring everything to their liking.
Experiments, adventures, and consequences
I've been doing a fair amount of experimentation on my machines. Been playing with XBMC, Boxee, Ubuntu, and bleeding-edge Xfce and Freedesktop software stacks on Gentoo.
HTPC
First, I tinkered with the HTPC. It's a Zotac MAG, dual-core Atom 330 with nVidia ION graphics. It's just the thing for at 1080p media center. It was running an experimental community-built version of XBMC, installed back in January or February. While it was nice because it was extremely minimal, with just enough operating system to boot straight into XBMC, it was very buggy, and definitely alpha-quality.
So I wiped the disk and installed straight-up Ubuntu 10.04.1, and then installed XBMC and Boxee. I'm still tinkering with it; I need to setup the remote control I just bought, and I need to configure it to load a media center on boot, rather than the Gnome desktop. There have been a few hardware growing pains, mostly related to getting HDMI sound working correctly, and forcing 1080p output -- detected my TV as a 720p device, so I had to fiddle with the nVidia utility to fix that. Also had to do a lot of tweaking in XBMC and especially Boxee to output sound over HDMI.
I'm somewhat familiar with XBMC, but I've wanted to try Boxee for awhile now. It's supposed to be more user-friendly than XBMC, offering a simplified interface based on the XBMC code. It also has that whole "social media" aspect, whatever that's about. Its real attraction is the user-friendliness; I hate having to do so much manual configuration in XBMC. I need something that my wife and I can just pick up and use; no hassle, no tinkering.
Initial XBMC impressions
It works somewhat better than the version I used several months ago. However, most of the video plugins are buggy and/or completely broken, as are some of the helper programs and utilities. All that's supposed to change, though, with the next XBMC release. Supposedly there's an entirely new architecture, so maybe I'll finally get to watch my favorite shows and stream local media a bit easier, with better content scraper integration.
There are some things that don't work -- nothing on SyFy, and all too often the existing network TV plugins don't work for all advertised shows. Mythbusters in particular is very buggy, offering only partial listings for 5 or 6 seasons, and those are extremely low-quality Flash streamed from some third-party download site. Still, my wife can watch her crime shows and 80s favorites, while I can get a fair amount of Mythbusters and other Discovery shows.
Initial Boxee impressions
Useless. Slow. Hard to configure. Totally not what I thought it'd be like. Boxee didn't offer any of the easy internet TV watching I thought it'd have, instead offering a couple hundred useless channels for things I've never heard of. I expected it to have better integration with regular network TV, the same ones I can watch in a web browser. I expected a nice presentation of content, with the video wrapped in a full-screen Boxee experience. I expected hi-def streaming content; instead, the few shows I'm interested in are only available in stuttering low-quality Flash. Why bother, when I can watch The Guild in gorgeous 1080p on my Xbox?
At least XBMC has somewhat working plugins for several networks. Apparently XBMC plugins don't work that well (or at all) on Boxee. I gave up trying to make 'em work. All too often the shows are streamed from stuttering, blocky Flash videos. I tried using the integrated Boxee web browser to watch things like Hulu, but that turned out to be an even slower, laggier disaster.
On the hardware side, it was harder to get HDMI sound working on Boxee than on XBMC. And even though I have all the right VDPAU libraries installed, and I'm using the latest nVidia driver (195.x), nothing on Boxee seems to be accelerated. Even 720p content streamed from my LAN stutters, with the audio occasionally lagging the video. XBMC doesn't have this problem, so I know it's not the graphics stack.
Boxee is definitely beta. Maybe everything will work fantastically on the Boxee Box, but I don't want to spend another $200+ dollars on essentially the exact same hardware. I want to like Boxee, I really do. But at this point, XBMC works where Boxee fails, and even though its user interface is more cumbersome, it still lets me watch videos and play music.
Initial Ubuntu impressions
Slick. Very slick. Installation from a USB key went very well. While I tried to do everything from the commandline in Gentoo, using syslinux and whatnot, none of the Ubuntu guides on creating LiveUSB media worked. I ended up just compiling Unetbootin and Qt4 on my Xfce laptop. Unetbootin worked perfectly on the first time, giving me a bootable 4GB USB stick loaded with Ubuntu 10.04.1.
Installation was simple and straightforward, with minimal user interaction. I did a bit more, because I wanted to create a custom partition layout, but otherwise the end-user part of the process was done in just a minute. The rest of the install proceeded automatically, booting me into a bright, shiny Gnome desktop. After a minute or so a few notifications popped up, advising me to install the proprietary nVidia driver and install some software updates. That took just a couple of clicks. Sweet! Oh, the joys of binary package management.
Even though the HTPC only runs a lowly 1.6ghz dual-core Atom chip with a mere 2GB RAM, the desktop still feels pretty responsive. Firefox starts up as fast or faster than my 1.5ghz Core2Duo laptop with twice the RAM. In my experience, Gnome is always pretty heavy, feeling fairly clunky and somewhat slow even when backed by speedy CPUs and gobs of RAM. Nautilus and Evolution windows always seem to load much slower than Thunar and Claws Mail, or even PCManFM and Thunderbird. Still, despite the anemic hardware, my Gnome experience in Ubuntu is surprisingly pleasant. Nothing seems particularly slow to start on a fresh login. The boot process itself could be faster, though; it takes more'n'a minute to get logged in. I need to cut that down to 10 seconds or less to get a true HTPC "instant-on" experience.
There are some quirks in most ION devices related to suspend and USB wakeups, and my Zotac MAG is no exception. I need to do some commandline hacking to get the computer to suspend every time, and to wake only when a button is pushed on the remote. And configuring LIRC is a whole 'nother deal.
But still, I'm liking what I see. Ubuntu 10.10 will be released next month, and it promises even more improvements and nifty app integration than 10.04.
Laptop
In fact, I liked my brief experience with Ubuntu 10.04 enough to download a daily LiveCD beta of 10.10, "Maverick Meerkat." I plan to create a LiveUSB and install it on my "Linux playground" partition. I've gotten just a taste of how Ubuntu works when using it as a special-purpose media center; now I want to see how it works as a mobile desktop OS.
The last time I had Ubuntu on my laptop, it was Ubuntu Studio 8.04 a few years ago. It lacked polish, lacked the cohesive desktop experience Ubuntu is known for. Its sole advantages were that it was optimized for media production, featuring a low-latency kernel and tons of preinstalled music software, with easy access to much more. I experienced numerous issues with JACK and my USB-to-MIDI adapter, though, so my plans for tinkering with music were shelved.
I'll see how vanilla Ubuntu works on my laptop, and if it goes well, I may look into converting it into a low-latency/realtime audio production environment. I'm very interested in being able to quickly, easily use this machine to create tunes and link up with my piano. There's been a lot of progress in the Linux audio world in two years.
Gentoo
I turned my Gentoo install into a bleeding-edge hardmasked/~arch/stable Xfce testbed. I decided to dump HAL and setup PolicyKit, ConsoleKit, udisks, upower, udev, that whole stack. Originally I wanted just to try out the experimental PackageKit features for Portage, which was a recent GSoC project. I knew that would require most of the aforementioned software stack, so I thought, "As long as it has to be installed anyway, why not dump HAL, too?"
One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had upgraded to Xserver 1.9, disabled HAL, rebuilt world a few times for USE flag changes, and pretty well screwed my system. Reconfiguring my input devices for xorg.conf.d took awhile, and I've been besieged by other difficulties. That's the problem with a source-based distro, and the problem of running Xfce in particular: nothing is especially integrated, and in a lighter environment like Xfce (compared to Gnome), there isn't much code that's designed for a HAL-less system. Apps written for *Kit/udisks/upower are either only available in git, or still unported. A binary distro like Ubuntu would integrate all that stuff forcibly, by writing their own code if need be, so that various actions that require PolicyKit authentication would pop-up windows, prompting for passwords. None of that happens on my Gentoo system.
I ended up adding the Xfce overlay and adding several hardmasked 4.7/live versions of packages just to get udisks/upower support, which helped some. However, several bits of Xfce and other daily applications just don't have the right code yet. So xfdesktop doesn't display icons when drives are plugged, cameras won't always mount and make their photos available, and not all power management options work, even when the user has the right PolicyKit credentials. That's on top of having to reconfigure pretty much my entire working environment due to changes between 4.6 and 4.7 -- everything from panel applets and their configs, to Thunar and window manager preferences. Despite USE="sound" installing libcanberra for event support, and adding sound-theme-freedesktop, event sounds cannot be enabled in the appropriate dialog, because Xfce doesn't believe libcanberra is installed. It's the same for Pidgin -- it doesn't believe there's a working sound framework, either. I have to give it commands like "aplay /some/dir/foo.wav" for each kind of event.
The whole thing, is, quite frankly, a bloody mess. And all because I wanted to get some experimental Portage toys from an overlay. It's my fault, I admit, and even after 8 hours of hacking at it, I'm probably nowhere near finished, assuming it's even possible to get all the bleeding-edge pieces to play nicely together.
(Side note: I would like to thank my fellow Gentoo developer Samuli for taking the time to answer my numerous Xfce-related questions and do a bit of troubleshooting along the way. Thanks, man!)
So, what's to learn from my adventures? First, trying to put everything back to its previous state would take another two days of work, if it's even possible! Second, the price for living on the bleeding edge of *Kit integration is too high. I don't mind running the occasional ~arch package, or using git X11 driver stacks like xf86-video-*, Mesa, and libdrm. But basic hardware abstraction stuff is nothing to be fooling around with. Not being able to use pluggable devices, enable Bluetooth, or properly adjust power management on a laptop is too high a price for being forward-thinking. I wish I'd stayed with my boring HAL system. While deprecated and a pain to configure, at least it worked reliably. More important, maintenance was nonexistent; it was simply a matter of copying several .fdi files into the right directory when I first compiled and installed my desktop. After that, I didn't have to touch a thing.
The HAL-less desktop is supposed to be the future for every Linux distribution out there. I can only hope it is still some ways off, to give upstream coders more time to get their applications in order, so that distributions don't have to do much patching or extensive repackaging and integration, and so that the end-users don't have to spend hours configuring everything to their liking.