Inspirated

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to Xfce!”

Screensavers like glmatrix have long been used by *nixers to woo people by showing them customizable animations as desktop wallpapers. Users of desktop environments such as Xfce have to however use xwininfo to determine and use the window IDs of their desktops (as the “-root” option stops working when the root window is overlayed by respective desktop managers e.g., Xfdesktop). For those who want to automate the startup process of XScreenSaver wallpapers in such environments, here’s a quick command you can use:

$ /usr/libexec/xscreensaver/glmatrix -window-id $(xwininfo -name "Desktop" | grep 'Window id' | sed 's/.*\(0x[0-9a-z]*\).*/\1/g')

Results:

(Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.)

Apple fans have Dashboard. KDE folks have Plasma. Gnome/Xfce people have, er.. tough choice.

Everyone likes desktop widgets. They’re pretty, and can prove to be really helpful with careful setup. Over the past few years, I have tried a few different widget frameworks and it’s kind of a strange phenomenon that all of them died the slow open-source death. adesklets, gDesklets and now Screenlets have bitten the dust. Screenlets, however, deserves special mention because of being the most recent among the deceased.

People behind Screenlets deserve credit for providing an easy-to-use framework for desktop widgets, which wasn’t the case with adesklets or gDesklets. Nevertheless, the compliment is in a way reserved for the basic framework and not the screenlets themselves. While it was fun and easy to write new widgets in Python, the existing ones were broken more often than not. There must be 100+ screenlets available online right now; pick any recent vanilla distribution and a considerably many will fail to work properly on it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the package never made it into Fedora repositories. The base product had significant potential, but the end-results built upon it were — in the greater picture — largely a disappointment. Before the situation improved however, Screenlets passed away quietly. Without even an obituary on Wikipedia or the project page itself. People like me who were waiting for a stable release kept finding out through Launchpad comments that development has split and moved to a new project called Universal Applets.

UA is still in early development stages, and does not offer even all the features present in Screenlets’ last version (such as widget zoom). But at least among all the remaining Gtk+ widget frameworks, it remains the only one with active development going on. While I wish its developers good luck for what appears to be a more promising framework than any of the ones mentioned above, I can only hope that it doesn’t disappear into obscurity like its ancestors — resulting in a Yet-Another-Widget-Framework. Meanwhile, I’m sticking with Screenlets’ last release since it works reasonable well once you’ve sorted individual widgets’ kinks out.

Sometimes, migrating to Qt doesn’t sound all that bad of an idea.

In past, I had always struggled to find the “correct” way of launching Compiz Fusion while starting Xfce. For a while, I had resorted to the easiest — and not perhaps the prettiest — way of launching Fusion Icon with the desktop autostart files. The problem with this method lied in the fact that Xfwm was launched before Fusion, and the most glaring workaround was to write my own xinitrc files for X startup, which was just uglier anyway.

Xfce’s own documentation is as bare as my memory while running it, so the right way was not actually obvious until I was fiddling around my configuration directory a few days ago. There, I found an interesting file named xfce4-session.xml. To truly exploit this lovely thing, I first copied it into my home configuration directory:

[krkhan@orthanc ~]$ cp /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml

And then edited the file with a text-editor, making it look something like:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<channel name="xfce4-session" version="1.0">
  <property name="general" type="empty">
    <property name="FailsafeSessionName" type="string" value="Failsafe"/>
    <property name="SessionName" type="string" value="Default"/>
    <property name="SaveOnExit" type="bool" value="false"/>
  </property>
  <property name="sessions" type="empty">
    <property name="Failsafe" type="empty">
      <property name="IsFailsafe" type="bool" value="true"/>
      <property name="Count" type="int" value="5"/>
      <property name="Client0_Command" type="array">
        <value type="string" value="fusion-icon"/>
        <value type="string" value="--force-compiz"/>
      </property>
      <property name="Client0_PerScreen" type="bool" value="false"/>
      <property name="Client1_Command" type="array">
        <value type="string" value="xfce4-panel"/>
      </property>
      <property name="Client1_PerScreen" type="bool" value="false"/>
      <property name="Client2_Command" type="array">
        <value type="string" value="Thunar"/>
        <value type="string" value="--daemon"/>
      </property>
      <property name="Client2_PerScreen" type="bool" value="false"/>
      <property name="Client3_Command" type="array">
        <value type="string" value="xfdesktop"/>
      </property>
      <property name="Client3_PerScreen" type="bool" value="false"/>
      <property name="Client4_Command" type="array">
        <value type="string" value="xfce4-settings-helper"/>
      </property>
      <property name="Client4_PerScreen" type="bool" value="false"/>
    </property>
  </property>
  <property name="splash" type="empty">
    <property name="Engine" type="string" value=""/>
  </property>
</channel>

Lines 13-15 initially referred to Xfwm’s commands, but replacing them with the Fusion Icon ones worked like a charm. This way, Fusion is always guaranteed a launch, which actually wasn’t the case with other workarounds.

Among many of freedesktop.org’s vital contributions to GUI computing on POSIX platforms, a divine one has been the uniform specification for automatically launching programs at initiation of a desktop session. Informally put (or theoretically at least), it means that you can add programs to startup in the appropriate settings, and they will be launched automatically at initiation of your session regardless of which desktop environment you use.

It’s been about 4 years since I migrated to Xfce for everyday work and it does come with a basic tool for managing startup entries (accessed through Application Menu > Preferences > Session and Startup). Still, if you need anything more than rudimentary addition/deletion of the entries you’re pretty much out of luck. For example, I wanted to start the applications in a particular order. I don’t know whether GNOME or KDE have the feature yet, but Xfce lacked the support for maintaining any such arrangement. The proper way to deal with the issue would have been to code the feature in the session manager myself, but since I barely get time to even read fortune-mod these days I instead had to rely on an ugly workaround. If you’re in the same sticky situation, here it is: Go to the autostart directory (usually ~/.config/autostart), open the startup script you’re concerned with, and edit the Exec line like this:

Before:
Exec=awn-autostart

After:
Exec=bash -c "sleep 3 && awn-autostart"

The ugliness arises from the fact that the new Exec line is merely launching the program with a delay of 3 seconds. Now, you can add another program with a delay of 4 and it will almost be guaranteed to start after the 3 seconds’ one across all desktop environments. I really hope that the specification itself would be revised soon to provide a uniform way of setting the startup order. But until that gets done, I can thank sleep for making my life simpler.

Xfce is a light-weight desktop environment which, in my opinion, balances the resources vs. features graph in the best possible way. Until last week, the latest stable version of Xfce was 4.2, while 4.4 release candidates had been rolling out since mid-2006. The 4.4 version promised some very exciting features, such as the new Thunar File Manager but was, not surprisingly, never incorporated in mainstream distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Fans continued to compile it from source or install unofficial builds on their distributions, but there was no significant increase in its usage over this period as the general expectations of a modern desktop environment were lifted due to relatively shorter stable release cycles of Gnome and KDE. The situation should be changed now that Xfce has finally released the much awaited stable upgrade.

Xfce was one of the first desktop environments to include its own compositing manager with its default window manager. The whole thing was quite sexy without taking huge chunks of memory either. In my experience, an Xfce desktop can look really cool while using only 80-100 MB of RAM. Back in the days when I had Xfwm4 as my default window manager, the setup shown in the following screenshot ran quite smoothly on a 733 MHz P3 with 128 MB of RAM!

Xfce 4.4 RC2 on Fedora Core 6

(No one can deny the fact though that once someone uses Beryl/Emerald, all other window managers of the universe start to look ultra-boring. That’s why my normal setup consists of both Beryl and Xfce, and it’s quite a treat.)

I’ll be reviewing the 4.4 release as soon as I get back to my PC in February. It’s really hard being away from your beloved C2D processor that compiles a whole kernel in 20 minutes, and using a P3 processor which compiles the same thing in approximately two hours. It’s like going to a movie with a talkative nauseous wife after having seen the same thing with a gorgeous taciturn girlfriend on the night before!