Xfce 4.8.0

[SamuliSuominen]

edit: 4.8.0 is in stable now, if you have hardware (suspend/hibernate/shutdown/mounting) problems, see this thread instead:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-85 ... ight-.html

[krinn]

i don't use it, but my point of view would be

- unmasking it will just push it to ~
- an ~ user should know risk & all, but even it's good to not release hell even it's ~ for certain package (gcc,glibc), i would say i really prefer it released and leave the ~ user decide to mask the package himself.

Earlier days, ~ was a real unstable branch (some would say, way too much), now ~ looks more like a : "it's stable, but we didn't test it enough" branch.

So without wishing to create a discuss again on "should ~ be unstable but fresh at all costs" and considering your pros/cons for that package, i think you are way too shy on that case.

An ~ xcfe user should be real happy to see that gentoo offer him to try it. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, just mask it and keep going. But if it work, yeah, it pay to use ~

And the devs shouldn't have to query ~ users to test something like that, release it to ~, let them be surprise and (happy/unhappy) but finally the dev will get what ~ should provide him: users feedback by the mass.

[SamuliSuominen]

krinn: I agree, but Xfce4 is so widely used I'd liked get some pre-unmasking feedback in case there's something we can improve before unmasking.
So, I'm a bit careful here, admitted.

[Anon-E-moose]

I may try it, I've been running the dev (9999) version for a while, and it's been stable for everything that I do.

Thanks

[SamuliSuominen]

I may try it, I've been running the dev (9999) version for a while, and it's been stable for everything that I do.
Thanks

I hope you are not running the overlay (from layman) for Xfce4, it's completely unmaintained and passes random ./configure flags to random packages. I'm suprised it if works at all, maybe out of fluke. So let me rephrase: Don't use the overlay, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.

Unless you maintain your own overlay with 9999 ebuilds, of course... that'd be a different thing.

[Anon-E-moose]

I may try it, I've been running the dev (9999) version for a while, and it's been stable for everything that I do.
Thanks

I hope you are not running the overlay (from layman) for Xfce4, it's completely unmaintained and passes random ./configure flags to random packages. I'm suprised it if works at all, maybe out of fluke. So let me rephrase: Don't use the overlay, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.

Unless you maintain your own overlay with 9999 ebuilds, of course... that'd be a different thing.

I hear you about the overlay, they almost bit me back in April of this year when they deleted many ebuilds from the overlay one night.

I have good copies of the *9999 ebuilds that I've kept in my local directory.
It's been working well, as it is my only desktop interface (I don't use either gnome or kde)

Anyway, I'll be looking at it sometime this week.

[96140]

--

[SamuliSuominen]

I voted no.

I recently performed a HAL-ectomy on my systems, moving to the mix of 4.7/4.8 packages. That's when everything broke. I didn't like not having desktop icons for mounted devices (which is critical for a multiuser system shared by techie and non-techie alike), and anything power management/hardware management-related failed to work. Shutdown, reboot, restart, suspend, hibernate . . . none of it worked with the PolicyKit/ConsoleKit/Upower/Udisks frameworks that were supposed to replace 'em. I read dozens and dozens of howtos, but none of them got my system completely working for all users. I gave up and reverted back to HAL-based desktops. Maybe this sort of thing works better in Gnome; I've had good experiences with Ubuntu 10.10, which is HAL-less. All I know is that Xfce is not yet ready for the HAL-less desktop. It's useless without HAL.

Wait until more packages have the required HAL-less functionality, then move them into ~arch.

Make sure ConsoleKit is running:

# /etc/init.d/consolekit start

"exec ck-launch-session startxfce4" in ~/.xinitrc and startx

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xfce-config.xml

And make sure all of pambase, shadow and consolekit are up to date:

dev-libs/dbus-glib-0.88
sys-apps/dbus-1.4.0
sys-apps/shadow-4.1.4.2-r6
sys-auth/consolekit-0.4.2-r4
sys-auth/pambase-20101024

[Etal]

I've been using it since it was put in portage, and everything seems stable.

The only HAL-related functionality that I care about is the battery monitor, and it works.

[SamuliSuominen]

I've been using it since it was put in portage, and everything seems stable.

The only HAL-related functionality that I care about is the battery monitor, and it works.

xfce4-power-manager-1.0.1 is upower/udisks and thus udev based, nothing to do with hal
xfce4-battery-plugin doesn't use either one of them, it queries the kernel /sys (or /proc) directly for information

so I'm wondering what HAL-related functionality are you referring to?

there's even app-laptop/batti, also upower/udev based alternative

[Etal]

Sorry, by that I meant the functionality that HAL might provide (for example, in KDE you can't see the battery charge without HAL running). That is, unlike others, whether device icons appear on my desktop or not does not concern me.

[rh1]

I voted yes. I've been trying it out for awhile on my laptop, haven't had any major issues. I don't like desktop icons, prefer them in the panel so I'm okay without them.

Minor annoyance of Logout button showing twice in the menu.

Terminal, Web Browser, File Manager, About Xfce, and Run Program also appear twice in my menus, but like you said, only minor annoyance.

[psycho]

krinn: I agree, but Xfce4 is so widely used I'd liked get some pre-unmasking feedback in case there's something we can improve before unmasking.
So, I'm a bit careful here, admitted.

thank you. like many others i run ~ "testing" systems for everyday use, and i appreciate every possible effort being made to ensure that we are indeed "testing" finished software that's already as stable as it can be prior to testing. yes, it's easy enough to mask broken packages, but it's also easy enough to *un*mask not-quite-ready packages or even grab the source and test bleeding-edge software in a local overlay or installed to /usr/local or whatever. the difference is that everyone who deliberately installs bleeding-edge unstable code to test it is *choosing* to do so, whereas many of us regularly emerge -uD world just to keep things up-to-date and secure: the occasional breakage is to be expected in ~, but major breakage involving rebuilding lots of packages is inconvenient and not something to be inflicted on users lightly. i appreciate your being careful.

[rh1]

I also noticed that the hibernate/suspend options don't appear when I click logout any more, only options are logout, restart, and shutdown.

[SamuliSuominen]

I also noticed that the hibernate/suspend options don't appear when I click logout any more, only options are logout, restart, and shutdown.

That will need sys-power/upower installed and consolekit running ( /etc/init.d/consolekit ). In fact, 4.7.0 even has the old HAL support. If you have polkit installed, the output should look something like this:

$ pkaction -h |grep upower
org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
[ .. unrelated lines .. ]
org.freedesktop.upower.suspend

If you have xfce4-power-manager installed, it should print something like this:

$ xfce4-power-manager --dump
[ .. unrelated lines .. ]
Can suspend: True
Can hibernate: True
Authorized to suspend: True
Authorized to hibernate: True

and Consolekit's output should look something like:

$ ck-list-sessions
Session1:
[ .. unrelated lines .. ]
active = TRUE
is-local = TRUE
[ .. more unrelated lines .. ]

^^^ Notice there "active" and "is-local" needs to both be TRUE, otherwise something went wrong...

And if you're using polkit, it's good idea to install also gnome-extra/polkit-gnome, it saves you a lot of trouble of manually configuring stuff. Although, it will pull some gnome deps with it.

That said, there's 2 separate threads about getting this stuff working:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-83 ... nager.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-84 ... nager.html

More advises there. Although I'm suprised these are even needed, all I had to do was 'exec ck-launch-session startxfce4' in .xinitrc and startx and it all just worked.

[Gef]

I performed the damn upgrade one week ago. Most of the features seems to be ok. However, I still experience some breakage, but the overall experience is ok, at least for some non-released software. A little of structured braindump:

• I had to redo all my panels configuration from scratch, because it keep segfaulting on startup. Turned out the issue was xfce-extra/xfce4-weather-plugin. No progress made on the later, I removed it from my panels. Worth noting that now the panels configuration is stored by xfconf, so xfce4-settings-editor can come handy in several occasions.
• There is a setting broken in xfce4-panel-4.7, grouping tasks in "Window Buttons" panel app. Already reported upstream apparently.
• I had to allow my user to interact with org.freedesktop.udisks.* and org.freedesktop.upower.*

  [Local Users]
  Identity=unix-user:ali
  Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.*
  ResultAny=yes
  ResultInactive=no
  ResultActive=yes

  [Local Users]
  Identity=unix-user:ali
  Action=org.freedesktop.upower.*
  ResultAny=yes
  ResultInactive=no
  ResultActive=yes

  (on a multi-seat system, these settings are probably too loose).
  (thanks to ssuominen for that hint on another topic)
• udev-mounting wise, the new Thunar-1.1 is great. I haven't had a chance to try a luks encrypted external drive. Luks-encrypted filesystem-in-a-file fails to mount in Thunar with "Authentification required" despite being provided with the correct passphrase (so pam_mount it will be until this is solved).
• Power-management wise, well pretty much everything *looks* fine:

  user@host ~ $ LC_ALL=C xfce4-power-manager --dump
  ---------------------------------------------------
  Xfce power manager version 1.0.1
  Without HAL support
  Without policykit support
  With network manager support
  With DPMS support
  ---------------------------------------------------
  Can suspend: True
  Can hibernate: True
  Can spin down hard disks: True
  Authorized to suspend: True
  Authorized to hibernate: True
  Authorized to shutdown: True
  Authorized to spin down hard disks: True
  Has brightness panel: False
  Has power button: True
  Has hibernate button: True
  Has sleep button: True
  Has LID: True

  On the logout window of xfce4-session, I have 3 buttons: Logout, Reboot, Shutdown. Nothing related to suspend/hibernate. Xfce4-power-manager has those suspend/hibernate buttons in the system tray tool. Haven't tried them yet (I prefer to go with hibernate-script).
• I use slim as my login manager with a mere "login_cmd exec /bin/bash -login ~/.xinitrc %session" and the following:

  exec startxfce4

• Only thing that bugs me is he brightness panel reported as "False". Thus the brightness panel app reports "No device detected". It worked perfectly well with xfce-4.6.2, and /sys/devices/virtual/backlight/acpi_video0 is present and allows me to set the brightness manually (not a big loss as the video driver and/or acpi recognize Fn+F5/6 keys, so brightness can easily set using keyboard).
• Even dual screen with nvidia+twinview works perfectly well.

tl;dr: definitely not ready for prime-time, but giving it a good testing with plenty of feedback for upstream tiny dev team might be the way to go.

Edit:
sys-auth/consolekit-0.4.2-r1 (pam policykit)
sys-auth/polkit-0.96-r2 (nls pam)
sys-fs/udisks-1.0.1-r2 (nls)
sys-power/upower-0.9.5 (kernel_linux)
xfce-base/xfce4-session-4.7.0 (xfce_plugins_logout)
xfce-extra/xfce4-power-manager-1.0.1 (xfce_plugins_brightness)

[rh1]

@ssuominen
Thanks for the advice. I checked all those things and everything looks fine. I launch xfce from the command line with startxfce4.

On the logout window of xfce4-session, I have 3 buttons: Logout, Reboot, Shutdown. Nothing related to suspend/hibernate. Xfce4-power-manager has those suspend/hibernate buttons in the system tray tool. Haven't tried them yet (I prefer to go with hibernate-script).

That's exactly how mine is. I tested the hibernate in the xfce4-power-manager system tray tool and it works fine on my system.

After switching back to the console I did notice the following messages which appear every time I open the logout window:

Code: Select all

(xfce4-session:4080): xfconf-WARNING **: Error check failed at xfconf_channel_get_internal():441: Property "/general/PromptOnLogout" does not exist on channel "xfce4-session"

(xfce4-session:4080): xfconf-WARNING **: Error check failed at xfconf_channel_get_internal():441: Property "/shutdown/ShowSuspend" does not exist on channel "xfce4-session"

(xfce4-session:4080): xfconf-WARNING **: Error check failed at xfconf_channel_get_internal():441: Property "/shutdown/ShowHibernate" does not exist on channel "xfce4-session"

[vivaceious]

ummm just out of curiosity, we're talking about unmasking something that will depend on a masked version of xorg-server ? I see 1.7.7-r1 as the latest stable xorg, and my understanding (maybe wrong???) is that xorg 1.7.7-r1 still relies on hal?

[rh1]

ummm just out of curiosity, we're talking about unmasking something that will depend on a masked version of xorg-server ? I see 1.7.7-r1 as the latest stable xorg, and my understanding (maybe wrong???) is that xorg 1.7.7-r1 still relies on hal?

We're talking about unmasking packages for ~arch, not for stable. Latest unmasked version in portage is xorg-server 1.9.

[Etal]

"Unmasked" means it's going to come out as an update to all users of unstable (~x86/~amd64/etc.) without needing to add it to /etc/portage/package.unmask.

[vivaceious]

oh! thanks for answering my silly question

[Gef]

Anyone luckier than me with the following packages:

• =xfce-extra/thunar-media-tags-plugin-0.1.2-r1
  "Kill"s Thunar as soon as I right click on an audio file
• =xfce-extra/xfce4-weather-plugin-0.7.3
  Reported to have shutdown unexpectedly by xfce4-panel

?

thanks in advance,

[Ant P.]

This is annoying, my logout window reboot/shut down buttons have become disabled and I have no idea why. Suspend still works fine. Trying to figure out what's going on...

[Gef]

Probably related to [bug=342291][Bug 342291] sys-auth/consolekit-0.4.2-r3: is-local and active set to FALSE (?)[/bug]
(I had the very same issue a couple of hours ago. Solved with Samuli's help, see last comment on the bug).

[Ant P.]

I've been using the sudo method... I notice the path to xfsm-shutdown-helper has changed, but fixing that in the sudoers file doesn't fix anything.