The Xfce project just released the first release candidate of the upcoming Xfce 4.2 desktop environment. A whole bunch of bugs have been fixed since the last beta release and the panel window behaviour was changed slightly. A complete list of changes between 4.0 and 4.2RC1 is available here. The source tarballs and binary packages for several Linux distributions are available from the download page. Updated graphical installation wizards are available from the os-cillation website.
First release candidate of Xfce 4.2 available
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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it rocks! go leech the server and use the mirrors ;^)
I’m using XFCE 4.2 and the “Graphical Installer” is a great good surprise. Really easy to compile and install the desktop environment with no pain…:-)
Screenshot: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/0903/RedPinguim/xfce42rc1.jpg
More screenshots with semi-transparent dock please.
I used XFCE-4.1.90 and I loved it, it was a big improvement over XFCE-4.0. I’d use XFCE-4.2 had I not found Ubuntu – if there was an equivalent where XFCE-4.2 replaced GNOME-2.8, I’d use that Distro in a heartbeat – but only if it was as tightly integrated and well designed.
Either way, congratulations to the XFCE team.
Whether you like XFCE or not, the graphical installer is a brilliant idea nicely implemented. Not so much because it is graphical, but because it works. XFCE’s big brothers KDE and Gnome should take the hint and create equivalent build-from-source installers that actually work on any reasonably standard Linux installtion, not just on the installation of the guy who wrote the script. (Yes, that’s a criticism of Konstruct and Garnome.) Dependencies are an issue, but the brute force approach of stuffing all the source for everything into the installer makes more sense than emitting error messages about missing libraries and dieing. To deal with the possibility of breaking a machine by blindly installing all those dependencies, follow the apt-get model and display a list of what’s about to be installed and asked for permission to continue.
what does the namemean/stand for? I couldn’t find it in their FAQ.
XForms Cool Environment. However, it doesn’t make sense nowadays since it doesn’t use anymore…
…doesn’t use XForms anymore.
Well, check this out then: http://www.xfld.org/Xfld/en/index.html
I love XFce. It’s what I mostly use as a DE. I look forward to stable v4.2.
I’m using xfce for past 3 years, everything is nice… untill I installed 4.1. It messed up my xfce extra packages. Plugins like system, cpu, monitor,network monitors. All those plugins are gone!!! as well as I’m not even able to install them again! I’m constantly getting some errors.
Either the plugins are not compatiable with new XFCE or new XFCE is not properly tested before release for these plugins!
Using 4.1.91 here, and it’s got all the plugins…
XFCE 4.1 wasn’t a stable release; it was used for testing, as far as I understand. The last stable release of XFCE is 4.06.
Given that they’ve changed the place they put their configuration files between 4.0 and 4.2 to conform to Freedesktop.org specifications, I bet that was why the plugins didn’t get picked up, and didn’t work when reinstalled (I’m betting they were designed for 4.0’s file locations)
Using it now from the mdk Cooker packages; looks very nice. I’m not sure I like how it’s followed KDE and GNOME in picking its own font settings and disregarding the system-wide settings in /etc/fonts, though. My fonts looked a little odd till I opened up the Xfce control centre and turned on anti-aliasing, hinting and subpixel hinting, all of which I have turned on in fonts.conf. I guess having it in the control centre is nice, but how about using the systemwide settings for default?
is nice, except that if for some reason make fails on any package, all successfully compiled packages will be deleted. I experienced that with a broken installer download (14M by the way), when it failed on some of the last packages. This is NOT good.
Builds from source beautifully, very nicely packaged. I find the composite/damage manager the most reliable yet. http://www.gnnix.org/resource/screen02.jpg
works with skippy-xd:
http://www.gnnix.org/resource/screen03.jpg
Most annoying panel and filer ever though.
what happened to this distro? Fedora + XFCE + nautilus. I found it quite impressive.
I really don’t understand why Xfce isn’t more widely used. Compared to Gnome and KDE, it is really fast, seems to be more stable and looks better.
yellowdog 4 (fedora-based), xfce 4 and rox file manager. its fast and it never tells me that i can eject a cd because its in use (which kde seems to do).
one slight barrier for newbies is that it does not seem to come with a menu of all your apps (like you get in kde/gnome/win), they all had to be added manually. i think this might have been ‘fixed’ though with the freedesktop intergration
ssam
in 4.2 menu exists. you can add it as panel plugin.
I have tried XFCE 4 but I found that many functionalities were missing. For example, I wasn’t able to switch the resolution of my desktop, there was no session manager…
However, XFCE 4.2 seems to fix most of these shortcomings. I will probably give a try to the RC tonight.
You can mostly fix the panel, if you hit it hard enough. I don’t like how you can’t fix its size, though. Joe, probably because it’s still not as fully-featured as the other desktops. And, to be honest, some of it isn’t as good; its control centre looks horribly ugly and isn’t as beautiful and functional as GNOME’s stripped-down design or as customisable as KDE’s. It’s a great middleweight de though.
good work! i like and use XFCE, i kinda liked the old 3 series that looked like CDE. anyway, basing it on GTK2 is great, fonts look good; then ROX rocks and so do the other small utils, file type handling is good.
for Debian/Ubuntu users, three observation:
#it will incorporate the Debian menu at the bottom of the main menu
#to intstall it painlessly, follow the steps:
– “apt-get install aptitude” to make sure you have aptitude installed
– run “aptitude forget-new”
– add these 2 lines in /etc/apt.sources (you can leave them there for the future):
deb http://www.os-cillation.de/debian/ binary/
deb-src http://www.os-cillation.de/debian/ source/
– run “aptitude” and select the category New Packages. hit “+” to select the whole category. press “g” to install
or use the graphical install – i don’t know, never tried it.
#if you use GDM as graphical greeter, it will also apear in the list. if you don’t use a graphical manager, add to your .xinitrc file the line “exec=xfwm4”, comment out the rest.
alex