FredPod Episode for 110704 Show Notes – Fedora 15 XFCE Spin

This episode was produced on July 4^th, 2011—Independence Day in the USA. And today’s topics will include:

• Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora Linux project.
  

• The Latest from FredLUG.
  

• Today’s feature is the Fedora 15 XFCE spin.
  

• And we’ll close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
  Bravo, Max!, entitled Kiss.

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FredPod by Mark Caldwell Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Here are some recently updated items in yum at the Fedora project:

Name : cheese
Description : Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It can also apply fancy graphical effects.

Name : emacs-git
Description : Git version control system support for Emacs.

Name : gitk
Description : Git revision tree visualiser.

Name : gitweb
Description : Simple web interface to track changes in git repositories

Name : git-all
Summary : Meta-package to pull in all git tools
Description : Git is a fast, scalable, distributed revision control system with an unusually rich command set that provides both high-level operations and full access to internals. This is a dummy package which brings in all subpackages.

Name : gnome-tweak-tool
Summary : A tool to customize advanced GNOME 3 options
Description : GNOME Tweak Tool is an application for changing the advanced settings of GNOME 3.
            : 
            : Its Features include:
            : * Install and switch gnome-shell themes
            : * Switch gtk/icon/cursor themes
            : * Switch window manager themes
            : * and Change the following things:
            : * The user-interface and titlebar fonts
            : * Icons in menus and buttons
            : * Behavior on laptop lid close
            : * Shell font size
            : * File manager desktop icons
            : * Titlebar click action
            : * Shell clock to show date
            : * Font hinting and antialiasing

Name : gtksourceview3
Summary : A library for viewing source files
Description : GtkSourceView is a text widget that extends the standard GTK+ GtkTextView widget. It improves GtkTextView by implementing syntax highlighting and other features typical of a source code editor.
            : This package contains version 3 of GtkSourceView. The older version 2 is contained in the gtksourceview2 package.

Name : ibus
Description : IBus means Intelligent Input Bus. It is an input framework for the Linux OS.

Name : report
Description : A generic problem/bug/incident/error reporting library, that can be configured to deliver a report to a variety of different ticketing systems.

Name : rsyslog
Summary : Enhanced system logging and kernel message trapping daemon
Description : Rsyslog is an enhanced, multi-threaded syslog daemon. It supports MySQL, syslog/TCP, RFC 3195, permitted sender lists, filtering on any message part, and fine grain output format control. It is compatible with stock sysklogd and can be used as a drop-in replacement. Rsyslog is simple to set up, with advanced features
suitable for enterprise-class, encryption-protected syslog relay chains.

Name : tzdata
Summary : Timezone data
Description : This package contains data files with rules for various time zones around the world.

Name : usbutils
Summary : Linux USB utilities
Description : This package contains utilities for inspecting devices connected to a USB bus.

Name : yelp
Description : Yelp is the help browser for the GNOME desktop. It is designed to help you browse all the documentation on your system in one central tool, including traditional man pages, info pages and documentation written in DocBook.

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You can find additional information on these, and many other recently updated packages, by typing yum info recent at the command line.

FredLUG has moved the location of the “last-Saturday-of-the-month” meetings to the England Run library branch. A Google-maps link is in the show notes.

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=CRRL+england+run&hl=en&cid=7228995606117168324

At the recent FredLUG meeting on Saturday, June 25^th, Paul Frields shared the presentation he gave at the Southeast Linux Fest entitled “Graduating to GUI—PyGObject for Beginners.” PyGObject emphasizes object oriented programming with Python, and using XML to define the GUI elements.

Paul also introduced PulseCaster, which is a simple PulseAudio-based tool for making podcast interviews. PulseCaster is intentionally bare-bones—focusing primarily on basic recording of VoIP calls. You can yum-install PulseCaster on your Fedora Linux machine, and I’ve already done so on mine.

Links to both the PyGObject presentation and PulseCaster are in the show notes.

http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/presentations/self-2011/

https://fedorahosted.org/pulsecaster/

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• You can find the Fredericksburg Linux Users Group email list at http://calypso.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/fredlug. Feel free to join the list.

• Besides the FredLUG email list, you’re also welcome on the IRC channel pound FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

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Feature

Today’s feature is the XFCE spin of Fedora 15. Linked in the show notes are the Fedora project page for the XFCE spin, and the XFCE main website. I’ll cover what the project pages say about the XFCE desktop, and then how I’ve implemented it on my Fedora 15 computer.

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/

http://www.xfce.org/

The Fedora project describes Spins as alternate versions of Fedora—tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations. The Fedora Xfce spin showcases the Xfce desktop, which aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.

Xfce is a full-fledged desktop using the freedesktop.org standard.

Xfce is further described as a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.

Their main website states that XFCE embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. It consists of a number of components that provide the full functionality one can expect of a modern desktop environment. These are packaged separately, and you can pick among the available packages to create the optimal personal working environment.

Another priority of Xfce is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org.

Xfce can be installed on several UNIX platforms. It is known to compile on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin and Mac OS X, on x86, PPC, Sparc, and Alpha architectures.

Xfce contains a number of core components for the minimum tasks you’d expect from a desktop environment:

The Window Manager

Manages the placement of windows on the screen, provides window decorations and manages workspaces or virtual desktops.

The Desktop Manager

Sets the background image and provides a root window menu, desktop icons or minimized icons and a windows list.

The Panel, or additional panels you can add, as I’ll describe later

Panels Switch between opened windows, launch applications, switch workspaces and menu plugins to browse applications or directories. The panel is a bar which allows you to have at all times program launchers, panel menus, a clock, a desktop switcher and more. I like the “at all times” feature, which was a major consideration in choosing XFCE.

The Session Manager

Controls the login and power management of the desktop and allows you to store multiple login sessions.

The File Manager

Provides the basic file management features and unique utilities like the bulk renamer.

The Settings Manager

Provides Tools to control the various settings of the desktop—like keyboard shortcuts, appearance, display settings, and similar things.

Beside the basic set of modules, Xfce also provides numerous additional applications and plugins so you can extend your desktop the way you like—for example a terminal emulator, text editor, sound mixer, application finder, image viewer, iCal based calendar and a CD and DVD burning application. You can read more about the modules of Xfce on their projects page.

There also are

Xfce Libraries, which provide additional functions and widgets that ease the development of applications.

Essential Utilities and Scripts that Provide a credits and license dialog, a dialog for launching applications and several important scripts.

A modern terminal emulator, featuring tabs and transparent backgrounds.

There’s also The Mixer, which is a volume control application for the Xfce Desktop Environment. It provides both a volume control plugin for the Xfce Panel and a standalone mixer application. The Mixer supports all audio systems supported by the GStreamer project.

XFCE also has Midori, which is a lightweight web browser. Midori includes

• Full integration with GTK+2.
• Fast rendering with WebKit.
• Tabs, windows and session management.
• Flexibly configurable Web Search.
• User scripts and user styles support.
• Straightforward bookmark management.
• Customizable and extensible interface.
• Extensions written in C.
• Custom context menu actions.

See the XFCE Goodies Project, for other software to add to your XFCE desktop.

What I’ve done to customize the XFCE desktop on my computer is to create a second Panel. Both panels are 25 pixels wide, so they don’t take up much screen space.

One panel is at the top of the screen. On the far left of that panel is the equivalent of a Start button, which is identifiable by the lone icon of a mouse in front of an X—I’ve removed the words to save space. I also keep the launchers for terminal, the mousepad text editor, and the log out dialog in the upper left corner also. In the upper right corner, are the switchers for four separate desktops, the clock displaying digital local time in 24-hour format, and the Network Manager status.

The panel at the bottom of the screen has launchers for my frequently used applications. I launch most everything I use from LibreOffice to Virtual Machine Manager using that customized bottom panel.

One thing about XFCE that might be unexpected for those who’ve never used it before is the location of the user configurations. Instead of dot files in the user’s home directory, XFCE keeps the desktop settings in a directory in /etc/xdg. Therefore, if you want to be able to restore your panel settings and other desktop tweaks, you need to backup the /etc/xdg sub-directories as well as your home directory.

Even with all the discussion about the different desktop environments, one thing remains constant—the command line functions the same in all of them.

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Today’s podcast will close witha Creative Commons licensed work by

Bravo, Max!, entitled Kiss, from music.mevio.com. Enjoy.

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