Fix bitmap^Whorrible fonts

January 19, 2009
Mike Massonnet

You have horrible fonts in Firefox and don't know how to fix it? It is fairy simple:

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
cp ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf .

And this is it. Restart X.

FOSDEM schedule and graphical 4.6 installers

January 18, 2009
Jannis Pohlmann

The FOSDEM schedule has been published. You can find the Cross Desktop room schedule here. There will be two talks about Xfce. Short descriptions are linked from the schedule. We’re also mentioned in the press release.
We will be a fairly large group of people (around at dozen at least, with most of the core developers being present) so it’ll definitely rock!

On the Xfce mailing list people have been asking about graphical installers for 4.6. I’m currently preparing them and there should be installers for Xfce 4.6 RC1, RC2 and the final release. The main installer is already working except for one thing that’s bugging me. Should be able to fix it though.

FOSDEM schedule and graphical 4.6 installers

January 18, 2009
Jannis Pohlmann

The FOSDEM schedule has been published. You can find the Cross Desktop room schedule here. There will be two talks about Xfce. Short descriptions are linked from the schedule. We're also mentioned in the press release.

We will be a fairly large group of people (around at dozen at least, with most of the core developers being present) so it'll definitely rock! On the Xfce mailing list people have been asking about graphical installers for 4.6. I'm currently preparing them and there should be installers for Xfce 4.6 RC1, RC2 and the final release. The main installer is already working except for one thing that's bugging me. Should be able to fix it though.

./jamendo-player

January 9, 2009
Mike Massonnet

I was enough bored from my (small) music collection that I wanted to listen to something new, without actually caring what it is. I know Jamendo has a big load of music with artists uploading music under creative commons licence. So I went on their website to have a look, and they have "widgets". They are a small flash application not bigger than 200x300, but I actually didn't find any link to open such a widget inside an external window, except some lost links on some pages. In conclusion it was enough annoying to get an external player that I fired up vim and wrote a 20 lines C program.


/* gcc `pkg-config --cflags --libs webkit-1.0` main.c -o jamendo-player */

#include <gtk/gtk.h>
#include <webkit/webkit.h>

#define URL_FORMAT "http://widgets.jamendo.com/fr/playlist/?playertype=2008&playlist_id=%s"

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  GtkWidget *window;
  GtkWidget *webview;
  gchar *url;
  gchar *playlist_id = argv[1];
  if (argc < 2)
    {
      playlist_id = g_strdup ("65196");
      g_message ("Loading the default playlist %s", playlist_id);
    }
  url = g_strdup_printf (URL_FORMAT, playlist_id);
  gtk_init (&argc, &argv);
  window = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
  g_signal_connect (window, "delete-event", G_CALLBACK (gtk_main_quit), NULL);
  gtk_window_set_icon_name (GTK_WINDOW (window), "multimedia-player");
  gtk_window_set_title (GTK_WINDOW (window), "Jamendo Player");
  gtk_window_set_resizable (GTK_WINDOW (window), FALSE);
  webview = webkit_web_view_new ();
  gtk_widget_set_size_request (webview, 200, 300);
  gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (window), webview);
  webkit_web_view_open (WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW (webview), url);
  gtk_widget_show_all (window);
  gtk_main ();
  return 0;
}

The result is pleasing, the flash application has nice colors, and is something I would never be able to do with GTK+ :-)

If you like the code, feel free to extend it and send patches, I will enjoy any contribution. For now I will just leave a desktop file inside my applications directory to open it when I am bored again of my music :-p

Update: I hacked a little on the program to handle the links inside the Flash application. This means it is possible to change the playlist, which was one the thing that started to annoy me very much.

However, this update requires WebKit 1.0.3 and GLib 2.16.

This time I'm making the code available here instead of pasting it as it has grown up to 120 lines.

Topics raised at UDS

December 24, 2008
Jannis Pohlmann

Ok, this post is long overdue and has been around as a draft for more than a week now, so here it is. As readers of this weblog already know, I was at the Ubuntu Developer Summit from December 8th to 12th. We had quite a few discussions on topics I’m interested in outside the scope of the official sessions held at UDS. Let me just list them here in random order:

Arnaud Quette told me about Buildbot which can be used to test your repository for compilation errors on various systems. I suppose it can be a real time saver if you want your project to compile on a variety of distributions and UNIX flavors and want immediate response as to whether compilation is going to succeed on these. That way you don’t have to wait for packagers and users to report compilation errors back to you and don’t have to enter that typical ping pong developer-reporter dialog. Buildbot not only catches compilation errors but is also capable of sending notification emails and provides detailed information about the compile log and so on. It’s implemented based on a server/client concept where each client tests compilation on one system and the server collects data from the clients. By using virtualization you can set up server and clients on the same machine. This would be very nice to have for Xfce but I suppose it would require another dedicated server just for running all these compilations. If anyone is interested in looking in to that, I’d be happy to establish contact to someone from Buildbot to provide you with more information.
As a funny coincidence, FrÃ©dÃ©ric PÃ©ters recently announced build.gnome.org which is a great example of Buildbot usage.
I talked to Christian Kellner about GIO/Gvfs a bit in order to get information on how remote/virtual filesystems work. One thing I’ve thought about is how to allow for a list of user-defined remote/virtual filesystems which show up in the side pane of Thunar. There are different approaches to that. One is to use bookmarks which seems to be what, according to Christian, Nautilus does right now. While this seems to work quite well it seems to confuse users a bit. Personally, I’d like to see them separated from bookmarks. There has been a proposal for Nautilus to make the side pane look better by using sections. One thing I could imagine would be to have a “Virtual Volumes” section listing the user-defined filesystems and provide some sort of GUI for creating/removing/editing these. From what I’ve heard there also is a third approach, which is to make remote filesystems to appear as fake volumes in HAL or DeviceKit. I’ll have to look into that in order to decide what the best way to go is, I guess.
PulseAudio and GStreamer: We discussed the limited PulseAudio backend for GStreamer in a group of up to five people and agreed that it really needs improvement (as in more tracks have to be added to the GstMixer interface) if we don’t want users to be able to control PulseAudio through the mixer applications they know. PulseAudio-specific applications like pavucontrol are not really what we want them to use.
Xubuntu remix for netbooks: During one of the Xubuntu sessions I talked to a member of the Ubuntu Mobile team about Xfce in general, the modularity of Xfce and the dependencies it has. He seemed to be very interested in it but he was also worried about Xfce becoming less lightweight, eating up more memory and disk space. It wasn’t the first time during UDS that someone mentioned LXDE and asked me about my opinion on it. Two main reasons for Xfce being lightweight always were the small number of dependencies and applications which you could call the Xfce stack. With more and more applications and libraries being added, Xfce naturally feel less lightweight, even if these applications are not considered a part of the core desktop. You always have to keep that in mind. It seems like the high modularity of Xfce compensates parts of that and is why people are interested in Xfce in the context of mobile devices. Despite being modular and somewhat lightweight, Xfce also has improved in terms of user experience lately. I think we can push this even further. Giving accessibility more attention might also be worth considering. Usability is something I don’t really see in LXDE (yet). That’s what I usually tell people if they ask me for my opinion on it.

Topics raised at UDS

December 24, 2008
Jannis Pohlmann

Ok, this post is long overdue and has been around as a draft for more than a week now, so here it is. As readers of this weblog already know, I was at the Ubuntu Developer Summit from December 8th to 12th. We had quite a few discussions on topics I'm interested in outside the scope of the official sessions held at UDS. Let me just list them here in random order:

Buildbot

Arnaud Quette told me about Buildbot which can be used to test your repository for compilation errors on various systems. I suppose it can be a real time saver if you want your project to compile on a variety of distributions and UNIX flavors and want immediate response as to whether compilation is going to succeed on these. That way you don't have to wait for packagers and users to report compilation errors back to you and don't have to enter that typical ping pong developer-reporter dialog. Buildbot not only catches compilation errors but is also capable of sending notification emails and provides detailed information about the compile log and so on. It's implemented based on a server/client concept where each client tests compilation on one system and the server collects data from the clients. By using virtualization you can set up server and clients on the same machine. This would be very nice to have for Xfce but I suppose it would require another dedicated server just for running all these compilations. If anyone is interested in looking in to that, I'd be happy to establish contact to someone from Buildbot to provide you with more information. As a funny coincidence, FrÃ©dÃ©ric PÃ©ters recently announced build.gnome.org which is a great example of Buildbot usage.

Thunar and GIO

I talked to Christian Kellner about GIO/GVfs a bit in order to get information on how remote/virtual filesystems work. One thing I've thought about is how to allow for a list of user-defined remote/virtual filesystems which show up in the side pane of Thunar. There are different approaches to that. One is to use bookmarks which seems to be what, according to Christian, Nautilus does right now. While this seems to work quite well it seems to confuse users a bit. Personally, I'd like to see them separated from bookmarks. There has been a proposal for Nautilus to make the side pane look better by using sections. One thing I could imagine would be to have a "Virtual Volumes" section listing the user-defined filesystems and provide some sort of GUI for creating/removing/editing these. From what I've heard there also is a third approach, which is to make remote filesystems to appear as fake volumes in HAL or DeviceKit. I'll have to look into that in order to decide what the best way to go is, I guess.

PulseAudio and GStreamer

PulseAudio and GStreamer: We discussed the limited PulseAudio backend for GStreamer in a group of up to five people and agreed that it really needs improvement (as in more tracks have to be added to the GstMixer interface) if we don't want users to be able to control PulseAudio through the mixer applications they know. PulseAudio-specific applications like pavucontrol are not really what we want them to use.

Xubuntu Remix for Netbooks

During one of the Xubuntu sessions I talked to a member of the Ubuntu Mobile team about Xfce in general, the modularity of Xfce and the dependencies it has. He seemed to be very interested in it but he was also worried about Xfce becoming less lightweight, eating up more memory and disk space. It wasn't the first time during UDS that someone mentioned LXDE and asked me about my opinion on it. Two main reasons for Xfce being lightweight always were the small number of dependencies and applications which you could call the Xfce stack. With more and more applications and libraries being added, Xfce naturally feel less lightweight, even if these applications are not considered a part of the core desktop. You always have to keep that in mind. It seems like the high modularity of Xfce compensates parts of that and is why people are interested in Xfce in the context of mobile devices. Despite being modular and somewhat lightweight, Xfce also has improved in terms of user experience lately. I think we can push this even further. Giving accessibility more attention might also be worth considering. Usability is something I don't really see in LXDE (yet). That's what I usually tell people if they ask me for my opinion on it.

Backlight Change Notification?

December 15, 2008
Brian Tarricone

Is there a decent (non-polling) way to get notified when a laptop panel’s backlight brightness changes? HAL exports methods to set and get the brightness level, as well as query the number of possible levels, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to get notified if the level changes. Calling org.freedesktop.Hal.LaptopPanel.GetBrightness() every five or [...]

Licensing Suckage

December 15, 2008
Brian Tarricone

I just got an email from a developer who works on the nifty cairo-dock application, pointing me to a thread about licensing issues. A bunch of months ago, he’d emailed me asking about how to best use code from my Xfce Mailwatch Plugin in cairo-dock to add mail-checking capabilities. At the time, I was pretty [...]

Benchmarks: gtk+ engines

December 14, 2008
Josh Saddler

Here are some fast and dirty benchmarks of various gtk+ engines installed on my system, using app-benchmarks/gtkperf-0.40.

Notes on the hardware:

CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4600+
Graphics: nVidia 7600GT, DVI 1440x900 @ 60Hz
RAM: 4GB DDR2-667
Mobo: ASUS M3N78-VM

Notes on the testing environment:

OS: Gentoo Linux (duh)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r2 #3 SMP PREEMPT x86_64
nvidia-drivers: 177.82
CFLAGS: -march=athlon64 -O2 -msse3 -fomit-frame-pointer
DE: Xfce 4.4.3
- Xfwm4 with Composite enabled, effects: drop shadows & transparency
- Open applications: 1 instance each of www-client/mozilla-firefox, app-editors/gvim, xfce-extra/terminal
- Cairo: 1.6.4, compiled with glitz support. Not all engines use Cairo, but those that do should benefit from a small speed increase.

The gtk+ engines are all available in Portage. If you're not on Gentoo, look in your distribution's repositories or check here. Custom themes are noted with *. These are personal themes I've made, nothing more than simple color modifications of an existing freely available theme. No additional images are used, so rendering time should not be affected.

All tests were conducted 3 times, using a Test Round setting of 100. I picked the best score of the 3, as I was looking for best-case usage conditions. The results are ranked in order from fastest to slowest.

Engine: Mist
Theme: Mist

GtkEntry - time: 0.01
GtkComboBox - time: 0.53
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.47
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.09
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.13
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.06
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.24
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.28
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.13
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.35
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.16
---
Total time: 3.07

Engine: Xfce
Theme: Xfce

GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 1.12
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.50
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.04
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.14
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.07
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.06
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.27
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.17
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.35
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.16
---
Total time: 3.56

Engine: Rezlooks
Theme: Blue Ink*

GtkEntry - time: 0.07
GtkComboBox - time: 0.95
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.65
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.28
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.28
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.39
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.34
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.15
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 4.31

Engine: Industrial
Theme: Industrial

GtkEntry - time: 0.08
GtkComboBox - time: 1.52
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.04
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.12
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.05
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.59
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.35
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.39
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.39
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.21
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 5.86

Engine: Glider
Theme: Glider

GtkEntry - time: 0.04
GtkComboBox - time: 1.93
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.62
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.42
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.02
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.25
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.19
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.32
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.37
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 6.59

Engine: Pixmap
Theme: Elegant Autumn*

GtkEntry - time: 0.09
GtkComboBox - time: 1.64
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.34
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.24
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.17
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.52
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.48
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.89
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.69
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.22
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.26
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 7.37

Engine: Clearlooks
Theme: Glossy

GtkEntry - time: 0.08
GtkComboBox - time: 1.93
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.45
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.40
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.29
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.61
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.50
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.59
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.41
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.32
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.35
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.18
---
Total time: 7.68

Engine: Candido
Theme: Graphite Light

GtkEntry - time: 0.08
GtkComboBox - time: 2.10
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.86
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.17
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.26
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.63
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.53
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.60
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.48
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.25
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 8.05

Engine: Aurora
Theme: Aurora

GtkEntry - time: 0.47
GtkComboBox - time: 3.78
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 3.50
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.96
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.31
GtkToggleButton - time: 1.53
GtkCheckButton - time: 1.29
GtkRadioButton - time: 1.66
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.58
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.46
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.38
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.32
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.19
---
Total time: 15.73

As you can see, the older engines are generally the fastest, with the more modern Rezlooks engine coming in close behind. Though they're generally not as attractive, the old Mist and Xfce engines turn in very respectable rendering times. The Pixmap engine actually doesn't score too well, coming in at the lower middle of the pack. This is despite many reports I found via Google that suggest it's one of the best-performing engines out there. Not so much; it's about average.

But by far the worst performing engine is Aurora. Now, to be fair, Aurora does many graphical tricks the other engines do not. It came along some time after old engines like Pixmap, Industrial, Mist, and Glider. It features animated scrollbars, gauges, and many possible styles of dropdowns and arrows. In short, it's fully loaded. Yet it also doesn't seem to be optimized; at 15.73 seconds, it's almost twice as slow as the nearest contender, Candido.

The results for the Aurora engine were so dismal that I re-ran gtkperf another 3 rounds, thinking something was amiss. Every result turned in times between 15 and 16 seconds. Clearly, Aurora isn't the engine to use if you're on old hardware.

Conclusion:

Remember, these are down and dirty benchmarks. Cherry-picking the best time out of 3 runs may not be the most fair way of measurement, but since no single result varied more than 2 seconds either way, it can be considered pretty well representative of the engine's overall capabilities.

If you're on less capable hardware, the Mist and Xfce engines will go far. If you want something prettier, stick with Rezlooks. I have several screenshots of Rezlooks-based environments in my devspace. It's quite flexible, and it's still in the top three fastest engines, despite including goodies like subtly animated progress bars and gauges.

But even on my fairly powerful workstation, newer engines like Candido and Aurora were noticeably slower, suggesting they might not be a good fit for older hardware. Clearlooks and Pixmap are middle-of-the-road choices; neither has much of an advantage. It comes down to which engine you think has prettier themes.

Me? I stick with Rezlooks. And occasionally Clearlooks (the Glossy theme makes for a good wintry desktop foundation), and very occasionally I'll find a decent Pixmap theme that's worth modding for my system. Otherwise, it's Rezlooks all the way.

Original post from Planet Gentoo.