Xfce 4.8
 

Hi everyone, the first release of XFCE is out there.
You can read the announcement here.

Has anyone tried to build this.

Looks interesting, but I'll only check it out after is has been released (Jan/11). :)

Read about this a couple days ago. Sounds like a lot of nice new changes apart from still not having a native menu editor again :(

This is in the announcement:
I never felt need for a menu-editor, but it seems they have been listening to users. :)

Thanks. I'm looking forward to 4.8 when it hits -current in the future. Good news indeed. :)

XFCE used to be seen as a lightweight alternative to gnome, but they're increasingly using gnome components: glib, and now gio, Is there really much difference left between them and the basic gnome environment any more?

Gnome still uses more system resources than XFce. Xfce runs faster on my systems than Gnome.

There's also the fact that XFCE doesn't suck quite as bad as gnome does... although it's close. Can't change your default file manager, WTF...

I agree that Xfce has somewhat bloated recently, but before gio there was Thunar-vfs, and these days you have to have something of that sort to create a useful DE, I think. So gio doesn't bring in extra bloat, it only replaces something. But bare Gtk+ apps are getting heavier with these inclusions, of course. While I'm not too happy about it, I understand that this had to be done, especially for keeping Gtk as a competitive alternative to Qt. I haven't tested 4.8 but so far, the bloating speed of Xfce has been well behind the average increase in processor speeds, thus I'm not too worried. I used to be quite fond of lightweight systems but these days I find, say, fluxbox needlessly primitive on an average computer.

I have an old PIII 667 MHz IBM 300 PL in my basement gathering dust that runs Fluxbox very well without swapping too much. But, I'm like you, I prefer a WM/DE that has a few bells and whistles. KDE and Gnome use too many system resources for my liking. XFce has the right blend of functionality and speed for me.
I'm pretty-much sold with XFce.

I think I'll let Robby work out all of the Slackware specific issues before I try it out.

I am actually in the process of building it for my laptop. If I happen to get it done before someone else does I'll post back. This is my first attempt at really building something this big for Slackware, so it's taking me a bit longer than I expected but I am definitely learning a lot.

I'm currently running the 4.8 prerelease stuff, and it's all quite nice. The main drawback is that there are a *lot* of new deps required, and quite a few of them are a bit intrusive - enough so that it's going to be a new adventure in keeping my tradition of releasing packages for it :/

Once the next set of updates hit the -current tree, I'll have more of the prerequisites for all of this in place, so at that point, I'll look into packaging up some stuff for folks to try. Until then, you'll just have to be patient :)

Can't be any worst that KDE 4.xx, can it? :)

How is it going to work with PolicyKit? Are we gonna have to patch Xfce or is polkit going to be added?

What are the new dependencies of XFCE?

plus the changed libraries I guess. Doesn't it also pick up upower?

xfce4-session now has polkit support, so no hacks needed in that regard.

Hey Robby with this batch of updates in current some of the dependencies of XFCE 4.8pre1 are fulfill?

Not really, no, but it *does* give me a more stable base upon which to build :)

Robby, do you have a build order that you could post? I've been playing around with making some modifications to your xfce-4.6.2 SlackBuild script, but I keep bombing out with xfce4-panel. I think my problems are coming from my build order, but I'm not having much luck figuring it out.

Well...

I may as well post a build order and everything else while I'm at is, so: http://connie.slackware.com/~rworkman/xfce-4.8.0/

The NOTES file has build order and a few other miscellaneous notes, and the only other useful tidbit of information I can give you is to remove any existing xfce package before attempting to build this. I don't recall details now, but the 4.6.2 stuff on the system will screw around with building 4.7.x.

Hey robby I was looking the dependencies of XFCE 4.8 and in you folder is notification deamon. Does XFCE 4.8 don't provide xfec4-notifyd?

Yeah, it does provide xfce4-notifyd. I'll be moving back to that, but for now, it doesn't support the newest libnotify spec.

Mr. Workman,
Will any of the 4.6.2 plug-ins work with your new 4.7 package?
Thanks.

Maybe. At the very least, they have to be recompiled before they'll work. Some of them are fine, but others don't work. YMMV. :)

Robby, thanks again for posting what you have pulled together so far. I managed to get everything up and running, and here is some of my feedback for your NOTES file and just my overall experience with 4.8 so far.

1. At the bottom of your NOTES file, you mention building media-player-info, but it's not listed in the build order above it. It might be helpful just to include it in the list so someone doesn't miss it, even if it is flagged as optional.

2. I added libimobile, which also requires usbmuxd, libtasn1 (already in the list), and libplist. I saw it was an optional component.

3. As I went through the build process, I found that there were some newer versions of some of the deps, but since I'm on another machine right now, I don't have a list of all of them. I do remember that I had problems building upower-0.9.7 and the latest gnome-disk-utility, so I dropped back to your versions.

4. When building xfce, I had to uncomment the make install line. Otherwise, many xfce components could not find the earlier components. I tried manually pointing to the xfce-build-dir with some configure options, but this is not an area I'm very good with.

My overall impression is that there are some nifty new features in 4.8. However, my panel is EXTREMELY unstable. It routinely disappears, and it does not always save the items that I've added to it. I tried clearing out all of my xfce settings .config and .local with no luck. The notification area item also seems to have some problems with themes, even some of the stock xfce themes.

Since I can't keep the panel with a stable setup, I'll probably drop back to 4.6.2, but at least I have all of the new deps installed. Since I'm planning on keeping the deps around, I can always reinstall in case anyone on this thread would like me to test something out.

Perhaps :)

Absent some compelling case of "we really need this," I probably won't add these.

Newer polkit is needed for upower >= 0.9.6, so we can't do that yet.
It looks like gnome-disk-utility-2.32.0 is going to require libnotify-0.6.1 or greater, so that's out of the question for now. libnotify-0.5.x requires a notification daemon that supports the latest notification spec (hence the use of notification-daemon instead of xfce4-notifyd here), while libnotify-0.6.x and 0.7.x seem to have a hard requirement on gtk3 (I know that they do not actually *have* it, but configure errors out saying that they do, and until now, I didn't care enough to try to figure out why - I guess I don't have much of a choice now).

Yep, definitely you need to comment out the 'make install' line - my mistake on that. I always build in a virtual machine, and install the resulting package on my real systems. Then I can rebuild/upgrade without the 'make install' lines.

Those panel crashes shouldn't be happening - they were present in some of the older releases, but fixed in a newer one. I'll double-check to make sure I have the newest releases of everything - maybe I missed one. Alternatively, see if you can reproduce the crashes with my packages.

Robby, I installed your packages, from the xfce core package to the other xfce extras (keeping my built deps). The panel crashing issue is gone now, which makes me wonder what went wrong with my build. However, the theme issues are still present with the panel, especially for some of the custom themes that I tried. The notification area, mixer, and window button list are the worst offenders here.

I've attached a screenshot of my notification area showing how the far left icon is always cut in half, even when using the stock themes. If you use a darker theme, the mixer icon never has its background updated. [edit] In the screenshot that I attached, my panel is 32 pixels tall. If I change this to 24, the cutting off issue goes away. Strange. [/edit]

I also brought up a terminal, killed the panel, and then relaunched it to see if any errors cropped up. Below is what comes up, but I'm not entirely sure if it is referring to the xfce session manager or not.

I also just noticed that I've lost the ability to reboot or shutdown from the logoff button. I also don't have options like suspend (see attachment). I double-checked the groups that my personal account is in, and everything looks correct. I didn't have this problem in 4.6.2.

The icon issues are, iirc, known bugs - still some nits in there.
The reboot/shutdown issue is polkit related - run "ck-list-sessions" and see what shows up.

Are you coming into xfce from gdm/kdm or some such or from a console using startx? If from a console, make sure you have re-run xwmconfig since upgrading.

I'm coming in from a console with startx. I ran "ck-list-sessions" (both as my normal user and as root), and it didn't return anything. I also re-ran xwmconfig just to be sure everything was correct there, but it looks like I still have the reboot / shutdown issue with polkit.

If ck-list-sessions is not returning *anything* then there's a problem somewhere, but I'm not sure where it would be - you should have been having issues even in your old environment before upgrading xfce.

I edited /etc/X11/xinit/xinit.xfce as such (emphasis with the bolded line):

"ck-list-sessions" now returns session information, and I can reboot and shutdown from within xfce. I still don't have an option to suspend, even though "xfce4-power-manager --dump" says I have the option and that I'm authorized. Suspend is an option if I'm logged in as root.

I never really use suspend, so I'm not losing anything, but it does make me wonder what is still screwed up. I don't do a lot of extreme customizations (except playing around with this new version of xfce), so I'm not sure either why all of this is a problem with 4.8pre1 and was not a problem with 4.6.2.

You should not have to do that (in fact, it's emphatically discouraged as being "wrong" now) since xfce4-session knows how to talk to consolekit on its own.

Does xfce4-session only know how to talk to consolekit if the XDG_SESSION_COOKIE is set? If so, then it's not being set when I run 'startx', unless I have 'ck-launch-session' in the xinit.xfce script.

Just to test something out, I grabbed the latest source for xfce4-session from git, and now I can see standby in the logout menu.

With the latest updates to -current, I was able to do a few more bumps:

I was playing around with these update last night as well. It looks like the new xfce4-panel fixes the notification area / systray icon issue, though, I'm not fond of their solution. Scaling the icons in the tray to be smaller when more than two or three icons are there is not really what I was looking for.

With the latest -current and xfce updates, I still haven't found a solution to my consolekit issue, so I'm having to stick with the hack above.

I found the problem; it will be corrected in the next build (I'm working on 4.8.0pre2 now).
The systray still isn't quite right, but Nick is working on it.

Will XFCE 4.8 get to current? For what I understand have a lot of dependencies new to Slackware, special Gnome Stuff.

Almost surely not this time - the current plan is to wait for the next round.

You found which problem? :)

The consolekit issue you hit.

I should read the whole changelog next time. :)

I used to love blackbox . . . then again, in those days my systems were incredibly under-powered compared even with my cell phone now. Nowadays, fluxbox and such don't really appeal to me. More recently, if I'm running a big, resource-intensive application, like a new game under WINE, I'll just go with twm.

Honestly, the functionality increase from twm to fluxbox doesn't even seem worthwhile to me anymore.

XFCE is a whole other story. It may be "feature creeping" just a tad, but to try and liken it to KDE or GNOME is ridiculous.

Really, comparing anything to KDE is not fair. It is in a class all its own for unnecessary feature bloat. For how much processor and GPU it consumes, the experience of using it isn't even all that great. It may be apples and oranges, but I've even found Windows 7 with Aero to be a better trade-off in terms of utility for processor use than KDE; not the underlying OS, mind you, just the GUI. Windows 7 in VirtualBox running alongside XFCE actually seems smoother and faster than KDE on my machine.

I love XFCE, and based on what I've read, XFCE 4.8 will be a nice incremental improvement.

dude we need'nt smack0talk gnome, as it is the greatest thing for linux ever.

What exactly is that program?
Does it have a website?

I installed pre2 last night, and I played around with alacarte. I ended up having to blow away my xfce settings because xfce decided I didn't have any menu entries.

Overall, pre2 seems much faster to start than pre1, but the notification tray is still a little wonky.

I just noticed that I can only run Thunar as root. If I run Thunar from a command line as my normal user, it just seems to sit and run in the background with no errors printed to the screen. Has anyone run into this problem?

Are you using the rworkman packages, or did you build it yourself?