Hi all,

This Saturday I upgraded two test machines to the latest -current version of Slackware and what I had been expecting was confirmed: KDE became too bloated for me. Example: some simple music videos started pausing on a machine with a Core2-Duo 3MHz processor and 4GB of memory. On all other desktop managers they play very smoothly.

So I decided trying xfce 4.6 that comes with the latest -current version.
I already use xfce on some older hardware and am quite used to it, but now I will use it on a daily basis on one machine.

Now I use a keyboard with several extra keys I mapped with .Xmodmap in /etc/X11/xinit/ (for all users) and some keys I map depending on the user that is logged in with ~/.Xmodmap
This works fine in KDE, Blackbox & Fluxbox, but not in xfce.
Researching a bit, I found out that the xinitrc.xfce script in /etc/X11/xinit is different from the other xinitrc scripts (like xinitrc.kde, xinitrc.blackbox, etc.) Only the one from xfce does not read the .Xmodmap from the general folder /etc/X11/xinit - just the specific user file ~/.Xmodmap

Is this by design? Or is it a bug that somehow found its way in there?
It is easy to correct, just adding a few lines to the script, but that would be overwritten by the next version of xfce.

Is it worth writing Pat about this, or does this script come directly from the upstream team?

Well, don't be too quick to draw conclusions about KDE4 in -current, because it's not ready for prime time. I run it on Arch and it's fast and solid. I'm sure it'll be fine on Slack as well when the time comes. (As it happens, I've been years away from Slack, tried -current today, hated it, replaced it with 12.2 and I think it's pretty nice, though with Fluxbox because I never liked KDE3.)

The Xfce is also a new version in -current I believe. I don't know the source of the problem, either, but I'd pass it along anyway.

The user-specific xinitrc script for xfce is installed by upstream. If there's something that it should do differently (and after confirming that I'm correct on this ), please file a bug with them and link to it here so that I can follow it.

OK, false alarm... There is no bug in XFCE after all...

What happens is the following:
- the /etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap is read correctly
- the xinitrc script also reads ~/.Xmodmap correctly (tried it with several tests)

But then I had my keyboard layout set in settings and this overrules the Xmodmap definitions, effectively ignoring all my work.
So I enabled "Use system defaults" in the layout-tab and now everything works fine

uhm, testing a bit more... I think XFCE is *not* reading /etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap - just the user-specific ~/.Xmodmap

Yesterday I thought it read the general file but I was testing the wrong way. It only works putting everything in $HOME
Maybe I'll have to file that bug report after all...