December plans and recent Xfce developments
I’m currently planning the last few things for my trip to the UDS Jaunty, taking place in Mountain View, California from December 8th to 12th. It looks like Brian will pick me up at San Francisco International on the day of my arrival. We’ll probably have something to eat before he drops me off at the hotel. What could possibly be more awesome than that? I’m very excited to say at least. I’ve also received my hotel reservation already and it looks like I’ll have a twin room on my own for half of my stay.
Ok, back to some Xfce related topics. Last week I submitted our FOSDEM devroom request. We’ll be notified before 2008-11-30 whether we the request is accepted or not. Five days left until we’ll know more - keep your fingers crossed if you haven’t already!
Nick and I have recently started to fix bugs in Thunar. So far we’ve managed to fix and close about a dozen bugs I think. We’re forced to do this due to Benny’s absence but I have to say it’s actually quite a lot of fun to fix bugs in other people’s code! In the end we’ll both have better understanding of how Thunar works. This will soon give us the possibility to push things forward. Not only am I planning to replace thunar-vfs with GIO/GVfs after 1.0 is released along with Xfce 4.6; there are more things that need to be done: adding support for xfconf might be worth considering as Thunar is now one of the last components that still stores its configuration using XfceRc. Also, we could think about using libxfce4menu for detecting installed applications which was actually one of the most important use cases of it that we had in mind before I started writing that library. And of course the list of possible features and cleanups doesn’t end here …
I also have some bad news. It looks like we’re having a bit of a problem with our 4.6 release schedule again. Due to the delay of the second beta, we were forced to delay the third beta as well. Maybe we can sort of fix that by leaving out the third release candidate but we still have to discuss how to handle this.
Prospective work on Xfce
As Xfce 4.6 is coming it might be good to throw updates for the panel plugins I maintain at the same time.The panel plugins I maintain are:
- The notes plugin
- The FS guard plugin
- The clipman plugin (this one is prolly the most wanted)
For the notes plugin I got already most features I was thinking of in, except formatting (which I doubt that I will work on), so the release going on here will be minor.
For the FS guard plugin I was asked to reverse the progress bar so that it shows the capacity remaining and not the free space... well something like that :-) Now I'm confused and don't remember what it really displays.
The clipman plugin needs a rewrite. To my taste it features too many options, and I will split most none-obvious options to an "Advanced..." tab. The first release will most probably be the rewrite, than will follow another release for a long asked feature that is action on pattern matching — open a web page automatically, display a menu, and so forth.
Other than plugins I maintain applications.
The applications I maintain are:
- Xfmpc
- Eatmonkey
Sadly for Xfmpc — a client for MPD — I no longer run MPD to listen to my music, so this hacking is freezed at the moment. My current favorite player is Audacious.
Eatmonkey is a small application where I learn to use new frameworks. There won't be an official release before very long.
Hopefully I will get the clipman plugin out before end of December!
Ubuntu from your flash drive – easier than ever before
As you have probably noticed, new versions have arrived of Ubuntu, Xubuntu and other derivatives. One of the most exciting new features has received far less publicity than it deserves – the ability to “install” it onto your USB flash drive with just a few clicks.
The advantages are obvious: just plug your flash drive into a computer and run your favourite operating system. What’s more, everything you do — installing applications, saving documents, editing preferences — will be saved to your flash drive and will be available to you every time you run it!
The best news is that it’s astoundingly easy: all it takes is a few clicks.
Of course, there are a few requirements. First, you can only run it on computers that support booting from a USB flash drive – this is the case for most computers nowadays. Secondly, you must have a CD or a CD image. The latter can be downloaded free of charge – I, obviously, downloaded Xubuntu. Third, you’ll need to install usb-creator, the new application that is readily available in version 8.10 but which you can also download and install on version 8.04 (with Windows and Qt versions planned). And, last but not least, you’ll obviously need to have a USB flash drive.
Once installed, you can find it in your menu as Create a USB startup disk (on Xubuntu it is located under Applications->System, in Ubuntu this would be System->Administration, IIRC).
The first thing you’ll need to do is to insert the flash drive you’re planning to use. Usb-creator will then detect the drive – if multiple flash drives are inserted, you can pick from a list which one you want to use, and if the drive isn’t formatted yet usb-creator will give you the option to do so (note that this will destroy all files on it!).
The next step is inserting the appropriate CD into your CD drive, or loading the CD image you downloaded before by clicking Other….
Finally, you’ll need to configure whether you want all your documents, settings and applications to be discarded on shutdown (i.e. act as a regular LiveCD) or if you want to save them to your flash drive (this is called persistency, or persistent mode). If you pick the latter, you’ll also be able to select how much space you want to reserve for this.
Do note that usb-creator will not overwrite existing files on the drive – thus, if you want to use your entire drive, you’ll first have to delete all existing files.
Now, with everything configured, click Make Startup Disk, and sit back and relax while usb-creator prepares your flash drive.
You can do something entirely different now, like reading the rest of this blog, viewing all my screenshots of usb-creator, whatever you like. Once usb-creator is finished, it will notify you that it’s done. All that’s left now is to boot your computer from your flash drive and have fun 
Troubleshooting
If persistency does not work, you might need to edit the file text.cfg in the syslinux folder on your flash drive. Just replace the line default livewith the following lines, adding a new Start Xubuntu option to the boot screen the next time you boot. Note that you might want to replace occurences of “Xubuntu” with the name of the distro you’re using. This has been tested with Xubuntu 8.10;
default persistent
label persistent
menu label ^Start Xubuntu
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash persistent --
Second beta, German translations, FOSDEM
Just in case some of you are wondering already – yes, we’re late with releasing the second beta of Xfce 4.6 by a few days. It’ll probably be released this weekend, so we won’t fall behind the schedule too much.
On Wednesday we had a very productive IRC meeting with the most active German translators being present. Plans we made on that evening include to clean up the team’s wiki page so that it only contains rules and hints that are directly useful for everyone. We also decided that we need a better communication channel than private mails or the Xfce i18n mailinglist, so we’re probably going to have a mailinglist focused on German translations. Other teams might have the same need, so we’d like to do it public and encourage other teams to do the same, maybe officially hosted on foo-projects.org.
Another idea was to take a look at some of the distributions shipping Xfce. Do they have a translation system on their own? Are there potential translators among the users/developers of these distributions? How can we motivate more people to take part in the translation process so that everyone is happy with the result?
We’ve decided to have another German team meeting next Wednesday at 21:00 CET (20:00 UTC). Feel free to join if you’re interested and your German is good.
Today, we had a little discussion about the upcoming FOSDEM in February 2009. Several of us have expressed an interest to go there. With 4.6 out of the door and 4.8 ahead February is a pretty interesting date for Xfce as a project. I’m sure we could come up with several nice presentations and discussions about the future if we were to apply for a developer room. Xfce has been part of FOSDEM in 2005 already but since then a lot of things have changed and many new developers have joined the project, so it would be a great opportunity to finally meet everybody and have a few pints together.
We haven’t decided on whether Xfce is going to apply yet as we’re planning to get the second beta released before. Deadline for developer room applications is 11/22, so we still have some time. Even better, the deadline for the schedule itself is three weeks before the actual event. Enough time to prepare some decent speeches.
I’m pretty excited about all this. There’s a quite a lot of movement in the Xfce community at the moment (and also, related to this movement, a lot of exciting things are happening for me, with UDS and all that). I feel that things are improving constantly in terms of development as well as organization and communication. Now all we need is a proper goal – and FOSDEM might be exactly what we need to discuss things like that.
2AM, time for bed. Have a nice day (or night).
Xfce Commit Messages on IRC
This is a little dumb, but kinda fun. A week or 2 ago I set up a CIA bot in #xfce-commits on Freenode. If you have nothing better to do with your life than watch Xfce commit messages scroll by, feel free to join and idle with the rest of us losers.
Xfce Commit Messages on IRC
This is a little dumb, but kinda fun. A week or 2 ago I set up a CIA bot in #xfce-commits on Freenode. If you have nothing better to do with your life than watch Xfce commit messages scroll by, feel free to join and idle with the rest of us losers.
Xfce Commit Messages on IRC
This is a little dumb, but kinda fun. A week or 2 ago I set up a CIA bot in #xfce-commits on Freenode. If you have nothing better to do with your life than watch Xfce commit messages scroll by, feel free to join and idle with the rest of us losers.
Devhelp assistant for VIM
Yesterday I came across a blog post by Richard Hult. He imported something called “assistant” into Devhelp in trunk. This assistant is a small window displaying documentation for one function, class/object or macro. He also wrote some code so Emacs would automatically update this window while the user is typing/coding. I thought it would be nice to have this for VIM, so I hacked on a small plugin for it. You can see a demo here. I haven’t uploaded the source code yet, but it’ll either end up in Devhelp or on vim.org as soon as it is finished.
Edit: After some positive feedback, I have now filed a feature request for the plugin to be added to devhelp. If you’re interested in testing, go grab it from there. Please let me know about your ideas or bugs you have found.
Edit: The code has been imported into devhelp trunk.
Xfce Commit Messages on IRC
This is a little dumb, but kinda fun. A week or 2 ago I set up a CIA bot in #xfce-commits on Freenode. If you have nothing better to do with your life than watch Xfce commit messages scroll by, feel free to join and idle with the rest of us losers.Xfce 4.6beta1 Released
Hey all… we just released the 1st beta leading up to 4.6. Go check it out. Full list of changes here.