Hi,
Look and feel
------------
The default panel has a mixer and trash applet in it now. I wanted to
change the panel layout a bit, remove the desktop icons or add a
transparent border (which are relatively simple settings) but that
hasn't been done yet.
We are using the Nodoka colors currently but since Xfce cannot use
Metacity themes directly, we are sticking with the upstream default till
Nodoka gets ported or we pick a better one if needed. If anyone is
interested in porting Nodoka, take a look at
http://www.xfce.org/xfwm4-theme-howto/
Autostarted application entry in the menu doesn't have a icon yet. Just
a upstream cosmetic issue.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442804
Package Changes
---------------
http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/spins/livecd-fedora-9-xfce.ks
http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/list
One of the major reasons I kept the package list small in Fedora 8 was
to retain even the x86_64 image under CD size. Since the default
multi-lib policy has changed in yum now to not install both 32-bit and
64-bit libs, I have added more useful (hopefully) packages. The total
size in x86 arch is 608 MB and additional 20 MB or so for x86_64. I
haven't tried it under PPC. Any testing there would be very welcome.
---
Evince has been added instead of epdfview
GIMP and Inkscape
xscreensaver-base - Base screensavers
setroubleshoot - Desktop applet for SELinux troubleshooting
drivel desktop blog client
liferea RSS feed reader
seahorse gpg keys manager
cups-pdf provides a virtual pdf printer. Small but useful utility
bluez-gnome for bluetooth phones
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio and libflashsupport along with integration of
PulseAudio by default.
gnome-power-manager - We don't have a hard dependency on this anywhere
but will take advantage of it if it exists. The intended plan is to
autostart this by default if installed
The newly added Totem-xine backend has been removed. We are sticking
with the gstreamer backend as it was in the previous release.
Xfce considerations
-------------------
We have been considering staying close to upstream Xfce as much as
possible and have evaluated different Xfce programs:
Xfce spin is still using Mirage as the image viewer instead of Ristretto
which is a Xfce image viewer since we are still working with upstream on
some issues which are being discussed in the review request with
upstream at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=351531
We looked at using squeeze instead of Xarchiver and ran into similar
stability issues at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=433174
Settings
-------
Since mime settings in Xfce (and apparently GNOME too.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=217311#c8 ) are determined
by the order of package installations and Xarchiver is installed before
gnome-packagekit in Xfce spin, RPM gets associated first with Xarchiver
and instead of initiating a package installation on double click, you
end up opening it as a archive instead. A temporary workaround has been
committed that removes the RPM associated with Xarchiver. This means
that the user has to open up a RPM file as a archive by select open with
in the context menu. Slightly tedious but since we don't want to break
the more common case of package installation, we are going with this
option for now. Rel-eng still needs to tag the new build due to the
freeze but that is expected to happen shortly. The long term fix for
this probably would be to have a method that does ordering not just
based on which package was installed first. I believe we need to take
this to xdg list in freedesktop.org and discuss changes in the shared
mime specification. If other desktop environments are handling this
differently, I would like to know more about that first.
PolicyKit-gnome has removed the OnlyShowIn=GNOME entry from the desktop
file. This makes polkit-gnome-authorization more accessible from the
menu in Xfce (and KDE) too. That's important because PackageKit uses
PolicyKit and you might want to tweak the authorizations on occasions
using this program.
GDM has been rewritten and doesn't support autologin for the current
release. We could do a timed login at zero seconds which loads the
greeter and then immediately logs in which is effectively the same thing
but only slower. Instead we have chosen the same settings as desktop
live cd which does a 60 seconds timed login. This will allow you to pick
a language before logging in assuming we add some language packages.
That brings us to the next item.
Xfce upstream has pretty much no support some of the common tasks like
suspend/resume, power management or fast user switching. While we have
added some support for power management via gnome-power-manager, we
still need to look into integrating some of the other features and
coordinate with upstream.
L10N
----
We have dropped all the language packages and removed some of the
associated fonts for now. Since we have some space, we could add a few
of them selectively back based on feedback. I didn't get any feedback
last time and I am not going to arbitrarily add anything back unless I
get good suggestions.
Credits
-------
Thanks to Kevin Fenzi (for maintaining the main packages) and Christoph
Wickert (for all of the many additional utilities and plugins) and
collectively for their input and feedback
Feedback
--------
Any feedback and suggestions most welcome.
Rahul
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