@cwizardone, I also had the same problems with the logout screen, but the recent updates have fixed that. Are you starting xfce from runlevel 3 or 4 (I'm starting from runlevel 3 with startx)? Do you have a customized xinitrc? I believe Robby has suggested earlier in the thread that it's a good idea to always rerun 'xwmconfig' to be sure that you are using the correct xinitrc that comes with his updated xfce packages.

I'm still having problems mounting USB drives as a regular user. Is anyone else having this problem? I haven't been able to track down what is causing it.

...A caricature of, really :). Just 5 mins ago I asked help from the XFCE devs because I couldn't figure out how to fill in an empty git repo (the one for playercontrol).

The 4.8 plugin api supports the 4.6 api, so all plugins should theoretically work after a recompile. But sometimes unexpected things happen. In the case of XMMS, the 4.6 plugin initialization function used to have a boolean return value and this breaks the compile in 4.8 (as a fix I converted it to static void type, that's all).

From, http://www.xfce.org/about/news/?post=1295136000

"...Our panel application has been rewritten, thereby improving positioning, transparency, item and launcher management. It also introduces a new menu plugin to view directories. Its plugin framework remains compatible with 4.6 plugins..."

For your plug-ins, I tried building them with the latest releases. Most of the activity for these at git.xfce.org are translation updates, so it doesn't look like much coding has been done to make them compile against xfce-4.8. Here are my results:

Weather - Compiles and installs on my install of 4.8, but it fails to run.
Wavelan - Does not compile on my install of 4.8.
System Load Monitor - Compiled, installed, and running on 4.8 with no problems.
Sensor - Does not compile on my install of 4.8.
Network Monitor - I didn't test this one.
Mail Watcher - Does not compile on my install of 4.8.

clipman - Does not compile on my install of 4.8 (complains about exo)
verve - Compiled, installed, and running on 4.8 with no problems.

@cwizardone:

Yes, they mean the new panel plugin interface is API compatible with the previous one, but it is not the same as ABI (i.e. binary) compatibility. Slackware packages are binaries and will only work in an ABI compatible XFCE release. API compatible means you can recompile the same source code in the new environment and it will work.

Thank you for taking the time. Greatly appreciated!
:hattip:

Ah so... Thank you for the information.

From what I've been reading over at the Xfce Forum and from what I saw when installing ZenWalk 7-Beta (in VirtualBox), it would appear Xfce is becoming increasingly dependent upon Gnome and will become even more so in the future.
Is that a valid observation?

Thanks, again.
:)

I rebuilt Xfce commenting out the do_not_start_ssh_and_gpg_agents.diff patch - and well - I end up with gnome-keyring and the default gpg/ssh agents running :). Think I'll keep it in. I'm sure I could completely remove gnome-keyring, or even stop it from starting, but I really like Network Manager, and it's just something I'll have to live with.

Things don't feel heavier on a P4m 1.8 with 512MiB, nor a PIII 850 with 576MiB.

IF you are using the newest releases of plugins which have been ported, and they fail to build, fail to run, http://bugzilla.xfce.org/
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.d...71/focus=19077

Not being an XFCE core developer I don't consider myself qualified enough to answer this, but let me share my thoughts: I also felt a bit upset when I saw the long list of new dependencies and particularly the gnome stuff. On the other hand, having the name "gnome-something" does not necessarily mean that the application needs all the other gnome bloat. For example I'm using the gdm login manager (Slack 13.1) but it is mostly a Gtk+ application. Once upon a time gnome and Gtk+ were almost the same thing but, after swallowing the features once provided by [gnome] external software, Gtk+ has now enlarged to a more feature-complete framework, thus it can now do many more things without requiring gnome desktop tools.

I haven't made an extensive research on this but the gnome-keyring stuff is probably there to handle LUKS encryption. The Gtk+ toolkit has already been recently extended to include a volume management infrastructure (I mean GIO). I hope gnome-keyring or a similar library also gets swallowed into Gtk so that we don't have to rely on external software for password management needs.

Despite the name, gnome-keyring should be something like gdm, that is, something actually gnome-independent. Another example I can think of is Gnome Network Manager. Sounds strictly gnome, right? But it is the default networking backend in Pardus 2011, which is a KDE distribution.

About the bloat vs. performance issue I can't comment. At the moment I'm running XFCE 4.8 only in Xubuntu which is installed to a virtual machine. My eeePC's Intel Atom N280 processor doesn't give you a very fast experience with that :).

@disturbed1 - You are right, I missed seeing the latest version of the weather plugin.

But wavelan not compiling on your end is not a good sign. Nor the others. I'm sure Florian and Nick would like to be informed about it. Here's the bug report about wavelan. It was tagged as fixed, and a new release was pushed in mid December http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6615

Thank you, Ilgar. Greatly appreciated.

Rmjohnso,
Yes, I always use runlevel 3 and xwmconfig.
:)
Thanks for the response.

Well, I started from scratch, again, and this time had better results. Built the weather plug-in using the script from SlackBuilds and it is working. There is now a settings manager and the ability to log on or off or shut down, reboot, etc.
However, there is no system tray, which makes things a bit difficult. The volume/mixer icon still doesn't work with the mouse wheel.
That is all. Back to 4.2 for now.

I really do think it is most unfair of you to blame XFCE for all your problems with 4.8.

The other day you threw the ball back into XFCE's court, sniffily declaring that you hoped the "gentlemen" at XFCE would sort all the problems with 4.8 out.

Now it appears that you have solved half these problems yourself by doing what you should have done at the outset, which is to test the new release on a clean slate. I really don't see how you can expect 4.8 to work properly when you mix-n-match -current, multilib, 4.6.2 plugins and God-knows-what-else on your system. At the very least I would expect you to hold fire on the accusations until you are certain XFCE are to blame. This latest post of yours suggest the blame for your non-functioning 4.8 is not entirely the fault of the developers. Perhaps next time you should count to ten before suggesting it is?

I have had no problems with 4.8 on Zenwalk Beta.