Xfce-4.8pre2 was announced yesterday. Gentoo has it available already thanks to the work of Samuli (ssuominen). The pre1 version was available with 0day bumps too, that proved to have the normal beta release “issues”, there are many bugs fixed in pre2 (ChangeLog). I saw several Gentoo users participating on the Xfce bugtracker, thanks. If you are of the type to test and report bugs, feel free to upgrade to 4.8pre2 and help make 4.8 final a solid release by participating upstream ([bug tracker][3]).

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][2] can’t easily use 4.6.1 due to the xorg-server dependency. Rename plugins to match what upstream calls them.

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.

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][2]] 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.

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.