multihead goodness
jasper rightly pointed out that i haven’t posted here in over a month, so i suppose i’m overdue.
my latest big improvement to xfdesktop is multihead support (not xinerama yet, unfortunately). xfdesktop can now handle multiple screens grouped under a single X display. you can set the backdrop, color, etc. independently for all screens. i’ll probably add an option to use the screen 0 settings on all screens if you’re too lazy to set different stuff for each. anyway, doing the multihead stuff was fun – i learned a lot about how X handles that sorta stuff. thanks to danny for a lot of testing and bug-hunting help.
another cool new feature is that you can set the backdrop to a color gradient. françois put up one of my screenshots displaying the feature, with a semi-transparent image sitting on top. mmmm, i love gradients…
the new multi-screen required a bit of a redesign to the backdrop settings dialog. soon i’ll be adding some global menu preferences to the dialog as well.
from a request on the mailing list, i just added the ability to add directories of image files to image lists. you can either do multi-select in the file chooser, or drag and drop a directory from xffm (and probably other filemanager; i haven’t tested).
in other news, i did some libxfcegui4 work as well. olivier wasn’t too happy about the backported gtk 2.4 code i stuffed in there, since it was causing a bunch of binary compatibility problems. i ripped all that stuff out, and created some less-functional wrappers for gtk 2.2 users. in the process, i also created XfceFileChooser, which is a thin wrapper over gtk 2.4’s GtkFileChooserDialog and gtk 2.2’s old GtkFileSelection. this enables xfce apps to use either the newer or older dialog, depending upon which version of gtk was used to compile libxfcegui4.
unfortunately, xfdesktop is still making some apps crash when launched from the desktop menu. olivier and i have done a lot of bug-hunting in the past couple days, but we can’t figure out what’s causing it. olivier can reproduce the problem using panel launchers as well, which leads him to believe the problem isn’t restricted to xfdesktop. i’m not so sure (as i can’t reproduce it that way), but i can say that so far we’re pretty stumped as to how to fix it or what the root cause could be.
whew, i guess that’s it for now.
Autohide bug fixed and some other panel improvements
Hello,
after some hilarious bugfixing yesterday evening Jasper and I identified the “Is the panel at the edge”-function to be the ’cause of the autohide bug that shows with the combination of GTK 2.4 and the CVS head panel. As the function was really a mess anyways we decided to rip it out and let the panel stick to whatever edge is the nearest. You may still alter it’s position by dragging it around but you just cannot move it into the open on your desktop. After a short discussion we agreed upon the fact that a panel in the middle of one’s desktop isn’t really likely to happen anyways.
So now all the autohide related bugs are fixed and we’re moving on to d’n’d bug reported by Francois and maybe improving the new (really well designed) add item dialog.
In general I really enjoy the presence of Jasper again .. he’s been really busy and finally has the time to get on some work or just have a good conversation on the IRC :-)
Keep it up!
Thats it for me ..
Moe
New add item dialog
I changed the panel to use a dialog instead of a submenu to add a new item. This looks a bit better IMO and is more easily extendible to show extra info.
Also, someone really needed to add another entry to this blog, in case people start wondering if this project is still alive ;-)
commenting, anyone?
a quote i saw on slashdot that i (and perhaps others) should think about a bit more often:
“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”
–John F. Woods
gtk menu shadow ported to gtk 2.4.0
Well, not much to add…. Point your browser here for more info.
Olivier.
another milestone in xfdesktop reorg…
last night i released my latest patch that moves all of the menu code into a dynamically loadable library. the patch is basically finished, minus a small amount of trivial functionality i forgot to implement/reenable.
the patch also includes a new xfce4-panel plugin that is a button that can display the desktop menu.
please test this if you are able (remember to run autogen.sh after patching). assuming i get good feedback, i’d like to put this in CVS asap so i can move on to other things.
i still don’t have a solution for the app-crashing problem xfdesktop exhibits when it runs some threaded/gconfed gnome apps. i _have_ been able to narrow the problem down to xfdesktop itself rather than in the new menu code, as the panel plugin appears to load apps fine. i have a couple ideas of things to look at, but if they don’t pan out, i guess it boils down to figuring out what’s different between 4.0.4 and CVS head…
Panel mcs settings fixed
Aah, finally got to do some coding today. From the CVS commit message:
* change deprecated functions to xfce_* replacements
* change atoi to strtol
* fix mcs settings
* remove libxml dependency of mcs dialog
* use new icon from Nikola Pizurica
* add atomic saving for panel settings
If you are or have been experiencing problems with global settings you should log out of X (or kill xfce-mcs-manager), remove ~/.xfce4/settings/panel.xml and log back in.
xfce session for gdm fix in cvs head
While trying to get the gtk shadow patch for gtk 2.3.6, I ended up with gdm being totally unusable because of the gtk upgrade;
As the version I used was fairly old, I went and got a more recent (2.4.4.7) version. That indeed fixed my problem with gdm not starting (so I could at least log onto the system), but I was a bit disapointed when I realised that my xfce session was gone and I could not get it back.
While digging into the issue, I found that gdm now uses .desktop file in $sysconfdir/dm/Sessions to describe the available sessions. With that in mind, I created a xfce.desktop file in xfce-util package so that xfce is now compatible withe recent gdm versions.
That should prolly explain (and fix the issue that caused) the few messages on the ML from people not being able to get xfce in the list of gdm available sessions.
Cheers,
Olivier.
gtk menu shadow ported to gtk 2.3.6
I took some time to port the gtk menu shadow patch to gtk 2.3.6. You can grab it from the shadow patch page or directly from sf.net as usual.
It should apply to gtk+-2.4.0 once it’s released. For the moment, I just provide a patch (which applies cleanly though ;) ), I might eventually provide a “prepatched” tarball once 2.4.0 is out.
Enjoy!
Olivier.
dbguin sweating!
well now that we have the unfortunate event of a lunar iso release and an xfce release, the server’s NIC is buckling under the load. After migrating most of the ISO traffic away as far as possible I’m now temporary redirecting the screenshots, in the hope that the main site doesn’t get slashdotted ;^)