The second beta of the upcoming XFce 4.2 is now available for testing.
XFce 4.2 beta 2 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The second beta of the upcoming XFce 4.2 is now available for testing.
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why not link to Xfce homepage which has the whole information (eg graphical installation wizard). Does gnomefiles.org really needs those extra hits?
Eugenia, why must you keep linking to Gtk applications via gnomefiles? It’s starting to get rather annoying and I can imagine that the developers of the applications would find it so too. They created their project pages to have an impact on the viewer and show them what the project is all about. When you link by proxy of gnomefiles this is missed out upon unless the user clicks through to the project homepage. Please do it in moderation when neccessary, not all of the time – it becomes irritating.
I like the fact that they have made an installer.
Xfce 4.2-beta2 is the first desktop environment to ship with an easy to use graphical installation wizard, which takes care of compiling and installing Xfce and contributed packages on your computer.
BTW is it possible to minimise windows the old way, which was more like CDE?
>Why not link to Xfce homepage which has the whole information
The last time we did, the XFce server was not ready, we had received an email from its admin.
Does anyone have experience with the new installer? How well it works, with various flavors of Linux or BSD?
As very few distributions ship with XFce included out of the box so far, an installer like this makes sense, and could increase XFce’s popularity too.
(and yep, the link should point to XFce home page instead of gnomefiles.org…)
No, you cannot minize to desktop unless you use ROX pinboard.
The installer has been tested with FreeBSD, NetBSD and several Linux distributions so far. Its still BETA like Xfce itself and therefore we depend on user help/feedback to make it the perfect installation tool. 🙂
Wow… Gnome take note!!
Well, I have no problem with Eugenia linking to gnomefiles, she’s supporting her site, which is ok IMHO. But it would be nice if a direct link to xfce.org would be included as well.
Debian packages available in os-cillation.de. See:
http://www.os-cillation.com/article.php?sid=37
Didn’t Ximian provide a graphical installer for Gnome (Ximian Desktop)?
Ximian provides Binary installers for Gnome, limited to a few linux distributions.
with every Window Manager, I can send to WM with Rox Filer. Only XFCE handles the Root window different.
Is this now fixed? So I have the right context menu from Rox-Filer over icons and a nice context menu from xfdesktop over the background?
I think, only this way it feels perfect? Or is it only me?
Thx!
Just one question, and apologies to all that hate
it being asked, but we may as well get it out at the
start of the thread. Does it import the Start menu items
from other DE’s like the later version of Gnome and KDE ?
Do these run standalone on an X server or do they require a host DE/WM? If the latter is the case then it seems pretty pointless imo, since it can only be installed in the pretty graphical way by those who had the knowledge to install a previous DE a la command line =
Yes, the desktop menu picks up application starters from your system in the usual way as used by KDE and Gnome as well.
A plain Xserver does the job (tho a window manager would be helpful of course :-). A curses frontend for the installer is planned, but this will take time to finish. It’s not a big deal either, since nearly every linux/unix systems installs a graphical environment by default (atleast twm is nearly always installed :-), which can then be used to install Xfce using the installation wizard.
1st – Ubuntu
2nd – Windowmaker 0.9
3rd – XFCE with this wow realese
4th – Suse 9.2
What more??? Will Fedora, beat in performance Ubuntu??
How can I assign shortcut keys for window manager actions and menu items in XFce? Is there a GUI utility for this or do I need to edit some config file?
Very cool. Sort of breaks package management though. What if I want to upgrade just one part of xfce? What ever happened to autopackage? It seemed like it had a lot of momentum to finally solve the package management problem on linux but they have been pretty quiet lately. It is great that xfce guys are doing this but at the same time it is really unfortunate that they have to.
Also, the distinction between the gtk+ and normal xfce installer is not very clear from the installer web site.
Yes, Xfce includes a shortcut editor. Just open the settings manager, choose Window manager settings -> Keyboard.
Has ANYONE ever had luck building this on Fedora Core 2 64-bit?
The installer has its own, light-weight package management (it installs package information into $prefix/etc/i2t-packages/xfce4/). The goal of this lightweight package management is to allow for tools to transform the installed component into a native package (RPM, deb, BSD pkg, whatever) later on without being dependent on a specific packaging system. It is planned to have an option in the installer that allows the user to choose, whether he wants to register the Xfce installation with the local package database.
On the different installers: The ‘Xfce Installer’ contains the core Xfce desktop with all the required components, which can be installed to virtually every directory in your system. The ‘Gtk+ Xfce Engine Installer’ contains the Xfce Gtk+ Engine and Themes, which must be installed in the same prefix as Gtk+ to work properly. Thats the reason why two installers exists.
Build failed because of missing howl-devel package and then I had to start from the very beginning. Lame. Oh well I guess this *is* a beta and a first releast so I should shut up.
Very cool in any case and very cool that ultimately it will be possible to integrate with rpm (or whatever) backends.
yes
Uhm, I don’t see why `howl-devel’ should be required to build Xfce. From what I know, howl is a Rendezvous implementation for unix/linux.
Graphical installers for GNOME :
– Dropeline Gnome, Ximian Gnome.
Linux distros :
1’ST Ubuntu (indeed)
2’ND Slackware (such a clean and easy distro – religious issues posted on the forums made it fall into the nerd side)
1’ST Linux commercial software : VMWare
2’ND Linux commercial software : Cedega + CrossoverOffice
Favourite:
3D – Maya4Linux
2D – Gimp+Sodipodi+Inkscape
IDE : KDevelop
Widget : DiaCanvas(2) + Scintilla
Language : Python
Library : wxWidgets(c++,python,c#)
Tool : ANTLR
Ar you content enough ?
– Just one tool needed in this space : Macr. Flash like IDE for linux.
And the award for the best couple :
Slackware + Dropeline.
Yeah, I don’t really know why either. But, it does. The xfce session manager requires it.
cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora Core release 3 (Heidelberg)
runs smooth like Heidelberry-Softice 😉
It’s time to forget XFCE and KDE for me, because Gnome’s feature of mounting/unmounting with udev/dbus/hal is really really great!
Great, after middle of november I’ve a full featured Fedora 3 at my Desktop when the rest from freshrpms comes out 🙂
>It’s time to forget XFCE and KDE for me, because Gnome’s
>feature of mounting/unmounting with udev/dbus/hal is really
>really great!
???
That’s not a Gnome feature — it’s Freedesktop’s work. And BTW, preliminary HAL support has gone into kde cvs last week.
boohoo. Can I kiss you goodbye? *Sigh*
I like it. I have installed a while ago the 1st beta in SuSE 9.1. This is a wonderful desktop.
the Utopia stuff is really meant to be desktop-independent, though GNOME is currently most advanced in implementing it. MDK 10.1 uses some of the Utopia components to do auto-mounting in KDE as well as GNOME.
Really. Man the file manager is annoying. I double click on the folder in the tree view on the left and the pane on the right doesn’t follow. They are both tree views? WTF? Seems, a) bad ui, b) doesn’t really work.
The installer was cool though. And xfce is fast. I’ll admit that. Gnome, even though it is #1 in my book, has so many issues that it is ripe for someone to eat gnome’s lunch. Unfortunately I don’t think that “someone” is going to be xfce. What posessed them to create a CDE knockoff? Clue: CDE sucks. Weird.
I’ve been using 4.2 beta 1 now since it was released (on and off between my main desktop environment which is KDE)…it’s nice…very nice. Very impressive, very fast. Looks fantastic. Only thing stopping me from going across is the lack of desktop icons…sorry, but I really like my desktop icons! It’s not something i’m prepared to part with. Other than that XFCE gets top marks.
Dave
that kind of double-panel file manager is a classic design. It makes working with two folders very easy, though it has other drawbacks. Personally I think it was best suited to the DOS days, but hey. Some people love it.
Hi,
CDE does *not* ‘suck’…*grrrr*. Seriously, on SolExpress, I prefer it over Gnome for the 1. consistency, 2. lightweight, and 3. somebody actually bothered to put some thought into UI design, layout, structure etc.
Bye,
Victor
Replace xfterm4 with aterm and xffm with xfe and you’ve got a very attractive desktop in XFce4. The only thing I’m really missing are the funny sounds for window manager actions from XFce3. I’ve saved the XFce3 sound files and now I use them in Window Maker. :p
The last one I tried was xfce4.02 on debian found this story and someone posted the deb servers for the beta. I installed it and all i can see is holy moly batman! I love this new look, fonts, clean and the speed of it. It is so nice. Great work XFCE team keep it going please.
Has the file manager recieved much love, and if so, how is it?
I found the file manager in 4.0x to be pretty awful, and ended up really just making use of ls, mv and rm and occasionally mc instead.
KDE and Gnome should have such wonderfully easy ways to install
Beeing a long time XFCE user I must admit that the filemanager shipped with XFCE4 is its weakest point for the following reasons:
1. Its bad UI (this is subjective yes, but honestly it really is bad – the UI mimics nothing familiar)
2. Its more than a file manager, its also a network browser (which also makes some annoying requirements, nmblookup etc.)
3. Has some predefined items such as “Book” ?? Why this in a file manager? What if I also wanted “Fish” for my fish files?
All in all I think that the XFCE4 team should reconsider the design layout of the “file manager”, and also reconsider what constitutes a “file manager” because xffm4 seems too bloated at the moment. Currently they would be better off not including xffm4 as it is looking now in my opinion.
Keep it simple, it should be _just_ a filemanager managing files via an intuitive UI.
Do you have “Fish” files???? I have electronic books… never saw an electronic fish (well, just a screensaver)
“3. Has some predefined items such as “Book” ?? Why this in a file manager? What if I also wanted “Fish” for my fish files?”
I guess this is bookmarks 🙂
I used to use XFCE 4.0 exclusively before KDE 3.2. And then I found that I can happily use KDE with prelinking enabled and all eyecandy turned off (including wallpapers and K menu picture). I really can’t see any difference in speed (besides launching times, which are not bad too thanks to the prelinking) — and this is on Celeron 266 with 128M RAM! But the gain in functionality is significant.
The main reasons why XFCE loses IMO compared to KDE are the following:
* Panel functionality. As much progress as XFCE has made with 4.2, the panel stays basically the same: you have to open a dialog that creates an application launcher and then manually enter information in it. I think in the 21 century it’s become pretty standard to be able to drag-n-drop a launcher on the panel from the application menu.
* Application Menu. I understand that this is the first implementation, but the way it exists today, application menu in XFCE is extremely messy compared to KDE’s or GNOME’s.
* Desktop icons. Those who say that desktop icons are bad believe usually that they exist for launching apps, and for this kind of use they are indeed useless. But desktop is NOT a kind of launcher panel! To me, it is a special filemanager window that is accessible by one click (the Show Desktop button) and DOES NOT TAKE SPACE ON THE TASKBAR! This is the location where you put all the stuff you haven’t yet decided where to put, and for such a purpose desktop icons make perfect sense.
I heard though that the panel is going to be rewritten in the future (probably in the 4.4 version), so maybe it will invalidate some of my complaints…
I agree fully. I honestly find it practically unusable while the rest of XFCE is _amazing_. You’d think they’d wonder why Cobind (for example) ships with Nautilus as opposed to XFFM.
They really should do something like navigational mode Nautilus. Have a bar at the top with Back, Forward, Reload, Home buttons etc. Then also have a sidebar like Nautilus, with a dropdown menu with the following views: information (on the selected file), search (and make it optionally plug into some metadata system, perhaps libextractor + libdoodle?) and history. Sure, it may not be particularly innovative, but it would work.
…and one of the views would tree view, so it was like Windows Explorer, like in Nautilus.
Last time I tried XFce (4.0), I liked all of it except for the file manager: is it the same one? is it easy to integrate Rox instead of xffm?
rehdon
In my experience, ROX-Filer works very well with any WM/DE, including XFCE. I haven’t tried ROX’s desktop icons combined with xfdesktop, though. If I wanted desktop icons and this combo didn’t work, I would disable xfdesktop (actually, I did that last time I tried xfce4 anyway because i prefer setting my wallpaper with something like Esetroot and xfdesktop didn’t really add any value)
No matter what environment I try switching to, I always seem to end up back with Openbox + Rox, though.
I was just wondering whether the startup load time improved with this beta2? The first thing I notice with beta1 was that it was significantly slower to load, compared to the 4.06 version. I tried to disable the session manager by unchecking it, which i thought might improve the time, but had no effect.
thanks
Disable the splash screen.
with every Window Manager, I can send to WM with Rox Filer. Only XFCE handles the Root window different.
Is this now fixed? So I have the right context menu from Rox-Filer over icons and a nice context menu from xfdesktop over the background?
I think, only this way it feels perfect? Or is it only me?
Thx!
Addon: how can I set other sizes for panel than small, normal, big etc, eg. 32,33,34.. pixels?
If I set it to small, the panel is to small and if I set it to normal the panel is to big and for eg, logout/lock buttons does have 2 rows instead of 1 row. It’s to much wasting space.
Also I think, the sound properties size is always to small on a small panel and to big on a big panel size.
Please have look at KDE, Gnome, etc…-Panels to compare and know what I mean.
Thx again!
It can’t be ‘fixed’ because it isn’t broken. It simply cannot work together because the designs are mutually exclusive.
Both ROX and xfdesktop (and GNOME, and KDE) use a fullscreen window as desktop background.
You either have to convince ROX to add an application menu, or wait for Xfce to add icons on the desktop (it will happen, eventually).
Yes, i disabled the splash screen too
Both ROX and xfdesktop (and GNOME, and KDE) use a fullscreen window as desktop background.
Not true. Rox doesn’t use a fullscreen window for the pinboard any more. It did ages ago, but that’s history. I’ve used it with Openbox’s, WindowMaker’s and a few other WMs’ root menus and it works just great.
As I mentioned before, I haven’t tried it with xfdesktop because I didn’t use that part of XFCE4.
Both ROX and xfdesktop (and GNOME, and KDE) use a fullscreen window as desktop background.
Not true. Rox doesn’t use a fullscreen window for the pinboard any more. It did ages ago, but that’s history. I’ve used it with Openbox’s, WindowMaker’s and a few other WMs’ root menus and it works just great.
Sure it does. It forwards events to the X root window, which are picked up by the window managers you mention.
Xfce is designed differently, using xfdesktop and a fullscreen desktop window and as a consequence what you want can not work for Xfce. Sorry.
Jasper, you’re right. I was too sure that I had set my wallpaper with a setroot-style program and at the same time used Rox’s pinboard. I just checked; adding a pinboard made the root-window invisible.
I never said that Xfce wasn’t different from *box, wmaker and so on, though.
I never said that Xfce wasn’t different from *box, wmaker and so on, though.
Heh, no you didn’t. I was trying to explain why it does work with WindowMaker and Openbox and not with Xfce 😉
Hi
I have installed the taskbar plugin for xfce 4.2beta2. No I can get a taskbar in the panel, but cannot disable the original taskbar
I have FC3T3, up to date, and can not seem to disable xftaskbar4
Done it! just type ‘pkill xftaskbar4’, and save session when logging out!
I got the original plugin from here: ftp://www.os-cillation.de/installers/ as the source would not compile for me, and the other plugins from here:http://xfce-goodies.berlios.de/
I used the gui source install for XFce4.2beta2
(Extra info if other n00bs have problems as well.)
I notices that i cant see any standard-icons, neither in the startbar nor in setup