Because I can't read :-)

My account is also a member of messagebus, haldaemon, plugdev, power, netdev, and scanner. That's what happens when you don't take time to review your own info. :-)

Hmmm, weird.

It would be interesting to see if things work with KDM.

So some time passed, is packages from Robbie stable enough for daily use?

Since wicd is dead, qt is dying and gnome 3 is "strange" I'm thinking using XFCE 4.8 in slackware 13.37

Well... as I wrote in another thread a few days ago,

"Xfce 4.6.2 works well, but 4.8 still isn't ready for "prime time." I was going to wait until the release of 13.37 to give 4.8 it another go, but over this last weekend I tried 4.8, yet, again. I went to, again, the trouble to un-installing all the 4.6.2 packages and deleting all references to the same. Then I re-booted and installed all your listed dependencies, the Xfce4.8 files and even the files in the /extra dictionary. End the result? Nothing has changed from the numerous times I've tried it in the past. Most plug-ins won't work, including the mixer plug-in, however I was able to get the weather plug-in to work.
The NetworkManager doesn't appear anywhere on any menu and when I've tried to run it from the command line it returns an error message... something about... a.out...
The floppy drive is invisible to 4.8 as are any external drives I plug into the computer. That gnome disk utility reports my hard drive is defective, it is not. Is there a way to disable that disk utilty?
Anyway, I'll wait until Slackware64 13.37, and do a clean install and try again. If it doesn't work any better than it does now, then it is back to 4.6.2 or KDE 4.6.1. I prefer Xfce... at least as it worked as 4.6.2."

YMMV.
I ran Kde 4.6.1 and 4.6.2, as a result of the above experiece, and they both run fine, but I've have come to prefer Xfce so yesterday I re-installed Xfce 4.6.2 and it is running perfectly.

Until wicd stops working, I think I'm going to stick with it over Network Manager. Whenever I've played around with Ubuntu, I've always dropped NM for wicd because NM always seems slow to me. Plus, I like the wicd-curses capability when I first get Slackware installed and I'm configuring everything under the console.

cwizardone, can summarize in a list your problems with xfce-4.8? I will try to reproduce them on my machine this week (it may take a few days given my schedule).

I tried XFCE 4.8 in a VM with ARCH and everything works great.
It's simple, very fast, and don't use much memory ~150 MB the all system.

Well, I've gone back read my previous posts in this thread and see I "lost my temper" with someone who suggested I do the work of the people who develop Xfce, and for that I apologize, but as a "end user" I expect a package, regardless of its purpose, to work as advertised. It would be, to me, like buying a car and then being expected to crawl under it, tools in hand, and fix the thing before I could drive it away.

As to Xfce 4.8, the problems outlined in previous messages pretty much remain.

Let's see, as mentioned before, most of the plug-ins don't work. I was able to get the weather plug-in to work.

In the past the mixer plug-in would install and remain on the panel, but was worthless, that is, putting the mouse wheel over it and moving it did nothing. The last couple of times I've installed 4.8 and the mixer plug-in, it would appear on the panel, but as soon as I put the cursor over the icon and moved the wheel the icon disappeared and an error message popped up saying something along the line of...." mixer plug-in has left the panel, etc..."

Xfce doesn't see the floppy drive or any removeable media I plug into the computer. There is no provision for mounting them manually as, as far as Xfce 4.8 is concerned, they don't exist

I can do without the mixer icon as there are keys on this keyboard (don't even remember where I picked it up) that can control the volume, but saying that reminds me that the keys don't always work.

Without being able to access the floppy or external media makes Xfce 4.8 worthless for my purposes.

Funny these things work just find in Xfce 4.62 and KDE 4.6.2.

There are a couple of other minor things that don't come to mind at the moment. A menu editor would be a nice and way overdue.
Oh, Network Manager doesn't work. Doesn't appear on any menu and when I've tried to run it from the command prompt, it returns an error message, something about "a.out." I tried various elements Network Manager from the command prompt and none of them would fire up.

With all the new dependencies Xfce 4.8 uses almost as much memory as KDE 4.6.2 to run my basic desktop (without KDE's evil triplets), but Xfce is still noticeably faster than KDE.

On the positive side, the panel is "nicer" looking and easier to "arrange" once I got the hang of it. The desktop, overall, appears a bit "crisper." I've asked this question before, but the fonts, in all the applications I use, are much better looking in Xfce 4.62 or 4.8 than in KDE. Anyone know why?
Thanks.

cwizardone,
I hate to even suggest this, since you're a regular and I like you and all that good stuff :-) but it seems to me that there are problems specific to your system and/or you. I can't reproduce any of the problems you've mentioned, and unless I've missed some reports, you're the only one having them. Any chance you can try this stuff on a clean installation? I just did a new installation last night (x86_64), and I can say for sure that the packages I've built are working fine on it (just as they were on the old installation).

* Before anyone asks, no, I didn't *need* to do a new install -- it's just that I always like to do some testing of the installer around this time of a release cycle :-)

2 members found this post helpful.

Hmmm, KDE works (4.5.5, 4.6.0, 4.6.1, 4.6.2), Xfce 4.6.2 works, Multilib works, VLC works, Libreoffice works, VirtualBox works, GoogleEarth works, the Nvidia drivers work, and a long list of other applications all work, and they are all running perfectly with the 2.6.38.2 kernel, but Xfce 4.8 does not run well on this system with any kernel.

You've missed a few, but as I've said before, when 13.37 is released I'm going to wipe the hd clean and do a fresh install. We will see.

Any tips Robbie on when your xfce packages for 4.8 will hit -current? After the release of 13.37 and post release 'rest period' of course, but I imagine soon after this?

Probably relatively soon, and at the same time that kde-4.6.x hits.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just a heads up - I had a problem building libproxy on 13.37 and the recent Seamonkey (2.1b3). Had to pull from latest svn (soon to be 0.4.7), no patches - the ones included have been reverted, then changed and re-applied - and pass LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib$LIBDIRSUFFIX/seamonkey" or libproxy fails to build looking for -lmozjs. Strange, as seamonkey is in the search path for libproxy.
Yet this same svn version fails to build against Seamonkey 2.1b2
Is there a better way?


@mlpa
We've been running 4.8 here on a few PCs, both 32 and 64bit (ranging from Atoms to Quad Cores), since Robbie provided the links. The only 2 issues we've had, have long been solved. They were - normal users unable to reboot/suspend ... and multiple gnome-keyring directories in /tmp. I have to say everything is stable, fast, and working -- as far as what we use. Network Manager works great, and IMO is a better application than WICD. Both in form and function. Our RAM footprint varies from ~100MiB on up, depends on the number and type of panel plugins we're using.

Yes, just wait a bit :-) It's a problem with the pkgconfig files and will be sorted in the next build.

This post in XFCE blog is a Aprils Fools?

Quote from the blog post you linked to:

Sounds very serious I think