Fedora 9 Xfce Spin - Progress Report

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi,


Fedora 8 Xfce Spin included almost all the Xfce utilities and plugins, 
all the languages that Fedora supports and retained the upstream Xfce 
layout. There has been some progress and some things we would like to 
get more feedback on certain things. The entire list of things being 
considered is documented in

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/XfceLive

The latest kickstart file is available at

http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/spins/livecd-fedora-9-xfce.ks

I am highlighting some specific changes below

Look and Feel
-------------

We did not get default Fedora 8 background in the Fedora 8 Xfce spin 
(due to a bug) and icon theme was rodent which is the default icon set 
for upstream Xfce  You can see some screenshots in

http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=Fedora%208%20Xfce%20Spin

The new default look and feel for Xfce in rawhide is this:

http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/Rawhide20080303xfce.png

As you can see, Xfce now inherits the same default background as GNOME 
and KDE and uses the Mist icon set which is also the default in GNOME 
currently. The hard dependency on xfce-icon-theme from xfce4-panel and 
Thunar has been dropped in rawhide. I believe we are supposed to be 
getting the Nodoka theme but that doesn't appear to be the case yet. 
There has been some discussions about the default panel layout and there 
is a lot of different possibilities including a GNOME like layout but we 
are likely to go ahead with some changes by including the trash, mixer 
applet in the default top panel. If there is a preference for a specific 
layout, let us know what (include screenshots preferably) and explain why.

Tracker
-------

I have also made some changes to the kickstart file so that tracker 
desktop search isn't started by default while running as a live cd. I 
don't believe that this is going to affect performance much especially 
with the new tracker in rawhide which suspends itself while the system 
in busy but I saw a few complaints on this and have fixed this now.

Package Changes
---------------

I have dropped all the language packs temporarily and I am hoping to add 
a select few where upstream and Fedora translations are more complete 
and based on demand. There are a number of other package changes 
including the addition of transmission, GIMP, replacement of Evince with 
epdfview etc and these are not final yet. The current kickstart file 
produces a nearly 600 MB image on x86 architecture. Any testing and 
feedback is most welcome. I intend to continue sending progress reports 
on a regular basis whenever we make major changes.

Rahul