Fedora 9 Xfce Spin - Progress Report, Update

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sat Apr 19 04:35:27 UTC 2008


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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