Jasper decided to open the design process for the new panel for general discussion. He’s using the Xfce Wiki for this purpose. The most important part is the Panel Plugin API. So, in case you are a panel plugin writer or plan to write a plugin in the future, I suggest you enter the discussion.
Jasper presented his ideas for the new Panel at FOSDEM 2005 (slides available).
os-cillation now offers an embedded linux platform with Xfce as graphical interface for control units, appliances and other embedded applications. The system boots from a flash file system, which can be customized to fit the customers needs. The system itself offers 4 RS232 ports, 4 USB ports, 1 IrDA port and up to 16 GPIO pins, which makes it well suited for system control in the industry.
Once again Xfce demonstrates its power as all-around desktop, which also supports small setups, like embedded systems, very well.
I just uploaded new Debian packages to the os-cillation repository, including the update to Xfce 4.2.1, the new Xfmedia 0.7.0 release and a few goodies. In addition the xfld-desktop package does no longer depend on xnetcardconfig, which enables Ubuntu users to easily install xfld-desktop now.
The xfce4-panel in the latest Xfce 4.2.1 release contains a bug: It does not save its configuration on session logout. The Xfce Debian package already contains a fix for this bug, so you don’t need to worry about it. If you have installed from the graphical installer or plan to install from the graphical installer, follow these steps to fix the bug:
This also fixes a possible crash in xfce4-session when testing a splash engine. Now follow the usual installation instructions from the installer documentation.
In case, you installed Xfce 4.2.1 from source, untar the xfce4-panel-4.2.1.tar.gz file again, download the patch xfce4-panel-4.2.1-store-config.patch, cd xfce4-panel-4.2.1, patch -Np1 < /path/to/xfce4-panel-4.2.1-store-config.patch and afterwards run configure, make and make install as usual.
Mickael and Juha are doing a great job at improving xfcalendar recently. I’m pretty sure that Xfce 4.4.0 will ship with a very nice and very useful calendar application. Xfcalendar can already schedule appointments (tho it’s still very rough on the edges), it currently looks like this:
Once the technical part is done, the user interface should be revised, and xfcalendar should probably drop the dependency on the MCS manager. It would be so much easier (and better for the future when we drop MCS) to just store the 3 settings into a resource file (XfceRc is your friend). There’ll only run one xfcalendar instance per session anyways, so no concurrent write access problems.