Monday, April 30, 2012

Xfce 4.10

NOTE: I've written more about Xfce since this post. This was just the first day. The blog is searchable and tagged. Also, you can add me on Google+ for relatively frequent updates about all things Slackware.

Today marks the latest stable release of Xfce, the lightweight yet full-featured desktop environment. I won't rehash all the features until I can get my fingers on them myself. If you're curious now (i.e., before I write about it), you can check out their website or your favorite Linux news source for more information.

That said, a quick look over the repos indicates that neither Pat nor Alien has compiled a version of Xfce after the 4.6 release. No, not even slackware-current has a newer build. 4.8 was released a little over a year ago, around the same time as Slackware 13.37.

I don't know if it was simply deemed unready at release time or if there is a philosophical or technical reason for not upgrading. I do know that Xfce 4.8 broke certain features for BSD users and that it began the slow march away from HAL, which Slackware still installs and presumably uses. So, for some there may have been feature regressions. I doubt that will be the case for us Linux users, the main audience for the Xfce team.

Since there aren't newer binaries available, I will attempt to build my own in the next day or two. If it succeeds, I'll give a full feature writeup and make my Slackware64 binaries available as a single txz, as Pat has it now. So, you'll only need to remove one package and install mine. If demand from my readership of several calls for it, I can probably borrow time on a Slackware (32-bit) machine to build binaries from there.

Is anyone yet having fun on Xfce 4.10?

As always, I welcome your questions, comments, and requests for future posts, whether they are related to what I've just posted or not. Also, I promise a return to the ongoing narrative and fun sometime in the near future. I just have too many projects going at once to promise a regular schedule.

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