Xfce Diary: Xfce 4.4 Release Candiate 1

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Xfce 4.4 Release Candiate 1

Another step forward to 4.4.0. Get it while it's hot!

24 Comments:

I hope to see the sooner possible a ebuild for Gentoo :D

By LastHope, at 3/9/06 20:48
Created all needed ebuilds for xfce 4.4 rc1, please erase all previous ones if possible, this shouldn't be needed but wise...
Available at my dev space: http://dev.gentoo.org/~moloh/ebuilds/
Be aware that these ebuild are unofficial ones.

By moloh, at 4/9/06 07:41
I hope this fixes the segfault xfdesktop is giving me when I select File/launcher icons.

By oKtosiTe, at 4/9/06 13:48
Excellent work. I have it up and running on my laptop now. ;)

Fedora development rpms available at:

http://www.scrye.com/xfce-4.4rc1/development/RPMS

By Anonymous, at 4/9/06 19:00
Nice, but i still cant disable right click menu icons, like i did on xfce 4.2, is there any hidden option to remove them?

By Anonymous, at 4/9/06 23:39
using ebuilds from "moloh"... os far everything is cool.

By synack, at 5/9/06 03:36
xfdesktop crashes when I remove a file in the desktop and when I use some certains gtk themes...

Why is that happening?

By Anonymous, at 6/9/06 02:53
I have the newest exo and thunar installed, everything seems to work okay except rubber band selection in detailed list view. It just does the same drag-select thing it used to. Any help?

By Anonymous, at 6/9/06 06:28
Rubberband selection in detailed list view requires GTK+ 2.10.

If xfdesktop is crashing that's a bug, please file a bug report.

By Benedikt Meurer, at 6/9/06 11:20
Would love to test it, but would like simple binaries for Debian.

I use grml.org linux (Debian) which has the very latest kernel, X.org and all that.

It is proving non-trivial to use your graphical installer. As you know Debian never puts the latest thing in even the "experimental" repos. So XFCE should put them up somewhere. I could make XFCE work but need an easier way to install to user systems than this ... the graphical installer doesn't really help me, it's just a build wrapper and fails the same. Frankly with my users I don't have time for builds.

It's also annoying that none of us can read xfce forums without signing up first. None of this is major but it adds up fast.

Noticed that XFCE drags in tons and tons of GNOME/GTK+ stuff, VTE was particularly thorny. Please bundle the whole mess together with an RC binary build for Debian i386 or i586.

By Anonymous, at 6/9/06 22:36
Nice, clean, fast. I like it a lot. Thank you. I saw that you designed the trash feature to follow the freedesktop.org spec. kudos! This creates Trash incompatibility problems with Gnome applications though. For example, gThumb thumbail viewer moved deleted files to .Trash. I was puzzled why they didn't appear in Thunar but then I remembered the freedesktop spec and realizied Gnome is still moving files to .Trash. This is a little confusing since I have to monitor the .Trash directory to remove Gnome application deleted files. This is asking a lot but possibly Thunar could monitor the .Trash directory and display those file names also to clean up Gnome's mess. My current work around is a shortcut to .Trash in Thunar's sidebar panel - Klugey but it works.

By Anonymous, at 7/9/06 07:48
as usual a stable and fast rc_1, thanks for the work ;)

By Guglie, at 7/9/06 15:02
The bounding box Gnome feature makes it difficult to drag files out of Thunar. I noticed the other day if I clicked a file in thunar and attempted to drag it to XMMS instead a bounding box started to appear. If I clicked the file first in thunar, released the mouse button and then dragged the file it would correctly drag and drop instead of creating a bounding box selection. Can the bounding box feature be backed out until it works well with drag and drop?

By Anonymous, at 9/9/06 04:07
It works correctly in Thunar, tho it may take some time to get used to: When you press the mouse button on a selected row, a drag will be started, otherwise rubberband selection will be started.

BTW: This has nothing to do with Gnome.

By Benedikt Meurer, at 9/9/06 11:16
"It works correctly in Thunar" Selecting rows works correctly by dragging across them but it conflicts with drag and drop *outside* of Thunar for a single file. For example, open Thunar and point it to a directory of music files. Attempt to drag a music file to an audio player such as xmms. Rows become selected and a bounding box appears. To get drag and drop to work correctly you will have to click a file and release the mouse button then click the file again and drag it outside of Thunar to xmms. It is awkward to have to click on the file twice to drag it out of Thunar.

One other small thing I noticed in the shortcuts side pane. If you remove a device such as a flash drive and then plug it back in Thunar will not show the device in the shortcuts pane. If I close down Thunar and reopen it the device appears in the side pane. Possibly Thunar will need to rescan HAL for devices when the view is reloaded. View->Reload and Ctrl + R possibly could also reload the shortcuts pane to pickup new devices the user has added such as mp3 players, flash, etc.

By Anonymous, at 10/9/06 00:59
So, it does indeed work correctly. If you would read the release notes and the ChangeLog, you would know that rubberband selection in GtkTreeView doesn't work with GTK+s Drag'n'Drop mechanism and that there was a need to work-around this. And since the drag distance detection is not available from outside GtkTreeView, the only way to work around it, is to use rubberband if the row is not yet selected, and drag if the row is selected. If you feel like complaining about this, file a bug report to GTK+.

Concerning device detection: That's either a bug in HAL or thunar-vfs. If HAL reports a new volume, that will be displayed in Thunar. There's no need to explicitly reload anything. It's simply a bug. File a bug report.

By Benedikt Meurer, at 10/9/06 01:10
Benedikt, thanks for your reponse I will file bugs on the problems or search to see if they have already been filed. One last quick request. Would you consider adding tooltips to the shortcuts? I added a lot of shortcuts and some are very similar in name it would be nice to rollover and see the path. Thanks again.

By Anonymous, at 10/9/06 13:57
That should be doable. Tho, tooltips may be annoying. Maybe a statusbar text instead. File a feature request.

By Benedikt Meurer, at 10/9/06 14:00
btw, if you have the desktop folder in ~, change xfdesktop setting to "no icons" on the desktop, remove the "desktop" folder, it gets removed from the shortcut pane aswell (so far it's correct). but when you chose "file/launcher icons" while thunar is still open, the desktop folder is not created in the shortcut pane again. here a restart of thunar fixes this again.

(thought about that reading the problem with the HAL devices)

By Anonymous, at 10/9/06 20:01
for the anonymous, who is searching debian packages:

the debian maintainer of xfce has build some packages in his private repository:
deb http://xfce.corsac.net/ sid main

these are build for debian sid/unstable, but should work on debian-clones too, as far the dependencies are ok (this should be the case, if you are using some 4.4 beta)

i think these packages should hit unstable soon, as everybody loves to see xfce 4.4 final in etch in december

By Zhenech, at 11/9/06 10:17
OK, I am enjoying 4.4RC1 under grml.org linux and it is *very* nice.

Bugs: test 4.4RC1 with a "blank" Debian to see what happens. Blank means no previous install of GNOME, GTK, KDE, etc. Just console text Linux with X.org.

Example, run Synaptic in 4.4RC1. It works OK. But when you read the Terminal output you see messages like

"Unknown frontend: gtk"
"debconf: Unable to initialize frontend: Gnome"

This happens for lots of different packages, I lost count.

Also, the Help viewer does not work (XFCE menu or program help). It feeds to the tty screen (behind the X session). Awful - took me a while to realize the diagnosis.

So when I log out of XFCE, I don't see a nice simple console prompt when X quits. A queue of "xfce help" requests made during the X session piled up into multiple instances of w3m text browser.

Workspaces: consolidate all related settings into one control settings dialog. They are scattered across several in 4.4RC1.

The orage calendar is good. Needs a "year view" like the text-based cal program (type "cal 2006" for example).

By Anonymous, at 18/9/06 11:53
Fixing Help was easy. Top of /usr/bin/xfbroswer4 put BROWSER=firefox. Grml.org uses w3m (text browser) for this shell var, regardless of user's .bashrc file setting.

Of course, my opinion: xfhelp4 should not use a bash script to pick a browser. Help is too important!

From inside the X session I have set the default browser to Firefox. XFCE help should pick up on that, not use the BROWSER shell variable.

By Anonymous, at 18/9/06 12:28
I recently switched from Windows to Xubuntu which uses Xfce. However I find that I am not able to paste files directly onto the Desktop, ie without using the filemanager. This is one feature of Windows that I really miss. Is there some setting that can be changed to enable this?

By Mathew, at 6/10/06 13:35
Has XFCE any SAMBA browser?

By Anonymous, at 8/10/06 19:20

Xfce Diary

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Xfce 4.4 Release Candiate 1

24 Comments:

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