Jeremy's Weblog

We are cleaning up the XFCE ebuilds via a new eclass. The current eclasses do not make maintenance any easier, like they should. Some other things on the TODO list include:

• Remove xfce-4.4 from the tree. 4.6.1 has long since been stable. Caveats: We promised mips that they could have a ~month to keyword 4.6.1. Gentoo Prefix can’t easily use 4.6.1 due to the xorg-server dependency.
• Rename plugins to match what upstream calls them. For example, what Gentoo calls xfce-extra/xfce4-cpu-freq, upstream calls xfce4-cpufreq-plugin This is true of all plugins.
• Remove the meta extras package, xfce-base/xfce4-extras.

The last bullet point is where I would like to gain input on how to provide the best user experience for xfce users on Gentoo. We are contemplating on removing the meta package because: it is tricky to add new plugins to it (requires more arch team work via rev bumps). Renaming plugins will require more work because of the meta package. And finally, what is the point of this meta package (some would ask) – outdated, etc.

So some possible options:

1. Remove the meta package completely and let the user emerge what they want. We are leaning towards this one.
2. Provide an USE flag for xfce-base/xfce4 to emerge all these extras, since it is a meta package anyway. This allows arch teams to mask the use flag if they don’t want to deal with all the plugins. Not a good option though, in my opinion.
3. Revbump the meta package everytime there is a new plugin added to the tree.
4. Other option that I haven’t thought of?

So, what is it? What would provide the best XFCE experience on Gentoo?

The release of Xfce-4.6.1 was announced approximately 36 hours ago on the xfce-announce mailing list. It is my pleasure to say that it is now in the Gentoo tree as well. You can find a shiny 4.6.1 bugfix release upon your next –sync.

Due to the number of bugfixes by the Xfce team upstream, the Gentoo Xfce team has decided to remove 4.6.0 related ebuilds and focus on bringing 4.6.1 to the stable tree. As always, please test and report bugs. Upstream issues should goto the Xfce bug tracker.

The advantage of Open Source is not the price, it’s its open nature. Knowledge is freedom and Open Source is all about freedom, no closed source alternative can match that. But this not something so obvious when you’re new to Open Source.  –Oliver Fourdan (Creator of Xfce) [source]

Yup, sounds right. Explains why even in this global economy, people will still buy closed source products (ie. more expensive). They are comfortable with them and don’t care to learn otherwise. It is too bad really.

Quick tip:

Problem: When installing Gentoo, Xfce4 on my new amd64 laptop, the fonts were extremely goofy compared to my old installation on x86. Meaning that terminal fonts looked ok, but gtk based fonts were large and small. I couldn’t figure this out and finally found a solution on XUbuntu’s blog post. I will reiterate it here for my future reference and maybe help someone else with this same problem.

Solution: In ~/.config/xfce4, append to the Xft.xrdb file (or create the file):
Xft.dpi: 96.

Then, log out and log back in. The fonts look normal sized again. I’m not sure what Xfce4 defaults to but whatever it was, it was clearly incorrect for my laptop.

Update: nightmorph, a fellow Gentoo developer, explains how to use the Xfce GUI to change the DPI setting as well. Please see the comments of this post.