A few remarks on Xfce 4.12 on Slackware -current
 

Hi,

I've recently installed Slackware -current on a sandbox PC. For my regular work I'm running Xfce 4.12 on Slackware64 14.1. A few remarks.

1. As far as I know, Whiskermenu is now officially part of Xfce. I've been using it for quite some time now, and I think it's worth including it in the main trunk, as a replacement for the traditional applications menu. Rock solid, no glitches, and so much nicer to work with.

2. I see the Adwaita icon theme has been included to accommodate the new Xfce. I've been fiddling with a lot of icon themes, and in my not so humble opinion, the Elementary Xfce theme is not only one of the more visually appealing, but also one of the rare complete icon themes. Nothing missing.

3. Slackware -current includes Thunar 1.6.7. There have been some instability reports on that version (but not the previous 1.6.6), and as far as I know, there's already a patch available. Might want to check that out.

Here's a link to a screenshot which shows both Whiskermenu and the Elementary Xfce icon theme.

http://www.microlinux.fr/images/mled/mled_desktop.png

Here's the link to Elementary Xfce:

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14...ementary-xfce/

Cheers,

Niki

Hi,

I tried the Whiskermenu plugin and it looks good, however I still prefer the simpler default menu: after all, one can launch any application with just two clicks, one on the menu button and one on the application's icon/name (with some mouse hovering in between). On the other hand, the alternate menu is already available as a SlackBuild, so keeping it there as an option might be a fair solution IMHO.

I didn't try your elementary-xfce SlackBuild so far, but I guess that it might be kept there as well, as an optional add-on to Patrick's work?

Regarding Thunar 1.6.7, it is working well here. To which bug and patch are you referring?

Cheers,
Philip

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...sh-4175540627/
This has been included in Thunar-1.6.8 https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce...ay/000414.html

My observation is that Thunar has also developed a bug when used with lightweight window managers.
I can have hot-plugged devices (USB devices and optical disks) detected when Thunar is used within KDE and Xfce, but this has stopped working within WindowMaker and Fluxbox, unless I use 'dbus-launch thunar'. I think this is because Thunar (or thunar-volman) expects the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable to be set. It is my understanding that a process that cannot connect to D-Bus should attempt to start a new session bus or find the existing bus address, but the recent versions of Thunar do not seem to do this.

As a long time XFCE user, one thing I noticed that new window does not get automatic focus, you have to click it.

Perhaps you are using some custom init files for Window Maker and Fluxbox? I have the following test in my default '~/.fluxbox/startup', and the volume detection works fine:

However, if I comment these lines out and restart Fluxbox, then my USB devices, disks and system partitions are not detected anymore by Thunar's volume manager, as you describe. The same happens with Window Maker if I use this in '~/.xinitrc':

... instead of this, which is included by default in the file generated by WM:

I don't know if Whiskermenu is officially part of Xfce but according to the git interface Whiskermenu is part of Xfce's panel plugins meaning It's basically an option...

Well...in my case, I don't like It, I prefer the traditional menu!
As a result, I'll be more than happy that Whiskermenu remains as an option, availlable on Slackbuilds for people who likes It to consider/to install...this would spare me some time to remove the package or worse, to recompile Xfce...

I'm seeing that as well.

There's also a bug I've noticed if you click the Thunar refresh button in the address bar, the file browser starts doing various graphical glitches.

Thunar and thunar-volman now work under fluxbox.
My ~/.fluxbox/startup did not have the lines
I had been starting fluxbox from kdm, but if I had run xwmconfig, those lines would have been added. With an appropriate ~/.fluxbox/startup, Thunar and thunar-volman behave as expected.

However, the fix for Thunar in WindowMaker suggested in post #5, does not work for me. I am using the ~/.xinitrc that is provided by running xwmconfig.

The same here. And after that, when you do something to move around in the filesystem (by entering a directory in the main window, or in the side pane, or by using the navigation buttons) Thunar crashes. It also froze once, but I couldn't reproduce that.

@allend

I've had problems using the ck-launch-session dbus-launch <command> approach in the xinitrc in the past when starting window managers (especially with XDM as it had a tendency to break Xauth). What I do now is use a start script for the window manager that will do the eval dbus-launch approach and then start the window manager.

Here's what I use for my local build of dwm in case it's of any use to you:

@GazL - Thanks for the response. I was hoping you would bite on this one as I know you have been down this track before.

I think you are right about the need for an intermediate script to launch WindowMaker, as it is the difference between the .xinitrc supplied for WindowMaker and other desktop environment and window managers.

The various /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.* scripts used by xwmconfig show some variability in the use of exec and the --exit-with-session option to dbus-launch. Do you have any insights here?

@kikinovak - My apologies for the thread hijack. This diversion into a side issue with an xfce application is probably not what you wanted.

@ReaperX7 - What you describe in post #8 sounds like the issue in Thunar-1.6.7 that I alluded to in post #3.

PS - My sleeping time now. I will come back to this later when refreshed.

Thunar bug #11849: patched successfully
 

I confirm that I solved the issue in Thunar 1.6.7, described in posts #8 and #10, by applying the patch mentioned by allend in the relevant thread:

Using View Reload in Thunar 1.6.7 leads to crash

I liked the gtk3 integration seen in xfce-4.12 within Debians recent release. Tried to build xfce from their downloads page on slackware64-current but ran in to a libicule problem I couldn't solve. The slackware prebuilt options do not seem to ask for this on xint however they seem to be built using older gtk-xfce-engine from 4.10. Would be nice to either solve dep and build from scratch using gtk3 or have a way to use gtk3 on prebuilt.

Not really, no. I don't know why the WindowMaker one was never revised. WMaker was my WM of choice for many years, but I swapped to dwm a couple of years back and never looked back.

And yes, apologies to Niki for going off on a tangent on his thread.