jeromeg glob

The current git version of Xfce4 Screenshooter is starting to be in a pretty good shape and I think it is almost ready for a new release. Unfortunately, a lot of things changed during this release cycle so the documentation needs a major refactoring. I need your help for this !

I think this is a good opportunity for someone willing to start contributing to Xfce, I'm ready to provide all the help needed to build the git version of Xfce4 Screenshooter, to explain how the documentation system works and to cooperate to get the documentation ready as soon as possible. I see this as an opportunity to attract new contributors (this task does not require any particular skills, just time, will and a good English level).

Feel free to contact me by mail.

I was recently reminded of two Thunar features which are useful and not very well known.

First, Thunar comes by default with a fancy mouse gesture feature. The mouse gestures must be done with a middle click, if you don't have one, it can often be emulated by pressing the left and the right button at the same time. To perform a mouse gesture, press the middle button without releasing it, move the mouse in the direction required by the gesture and release the button. The following gestures are available:

• Moving the mouse up moves to the parent directory of the current directory.
• Moving the mouse down reloads the current folder.
• Moving the mouse left moves to the previous directory in the browsing history.
• Moving the mouse right moves to the next directory in the browsing history..

The second tip I recently discovered is that drag and dropping a file using the right mouse button opens a contextual menu which provides the following options: copy here, move here and link here. Link here is particularly cool, I used to launch a terminal and use ln... To use this right click drag and drop, you need to be faster than the traditional contextual menu: right click on the file/folder and start moving your mouse before the normal contextual pops up; once you release your mouse, the über-cool context menu will pop up.

This is just a short post with what happened recently in Xfce.

• Xfce4 Power Manager 0.8.0 was released. I did not have time yet to test it, but it looks promising.
• Jannis Pohlmann and Stephan Arts drafted a release process for Xfce. It still needs to be discussed, but it already looks great. Expect some progress on this once the migration to git is done.
• Brian Tarricone worked a lot on the git migration, things are almost settled.
• Jannis Pohlmann is making some awesome progress on Thunar. He developped Tumbler, a D-Bus thumbnailing service based on the thumbnail management D-Bus specification, to replace the old thumbnailing code. A video shows how his first experimental implementation behaves.
• Nick Schermer made a lot of progress on Xfce4 Panel, fixing and lot of bugs and improving performances. His code can be found on git.xfce.org.
• Stephan Arts has improved the git version of Ristretto a lot: it works, supports basic printing and features a new improved user interface.
• It seems that Colin Leroy will be the maintainer of Xfce4 Weather Plugin from now on. Welcome!
• Mike Massonnet rewrote Xfce4 Notes Plugin in Vala, and improved and lot of things at the same time. Expect a release soon.
• Ali Abdallah, the developper of Xfce4 Power Manager, added a new Goodie to the SVN. Parole is a Gstreamer based media player. I did not test it, so I cannot say more...

I was quite busy during the last few days but I found some time to work on Xfce4 Screenshooter. It is now able to upload screenshots to ZimageZ, a free image hosting solution. At the beginning, I was planning to use Imageshack, but the API they provide is not easy to use. Meanwhile, I discovered ZimageZ which I really like: it provides galeries, a clean interface and an XML-RPC API which allowed me to implement the image upload stuff almost easily.

At the moment, things are a bit raw. A(n ugly) dialog pops up asking for your ZimageZ user name and login, an image title and a comment; once you validate it, the upload starts. No progress indication yet. I still need to make everything look more beautiful, to improve the error handling and to document this stuff!

I won't implement any other new features for this release. From now on, I'll focus on getting things usable and good looking.

Stephan Arts started to tag Xfce 4.6, this bug fix release should be available in the next few days.

This release fixes a lot of bugs introduced in Xfce 4.6 and also comes with updated/improved translations.

Having Xfce translated into as many languages as possible and maintaining translations of high quality is essential. People will not use a desktop environment that they do not understand! The Xfce i18n Project is in charge of this task and always needs new contributors. You do not need any particular skill, except understanding English, writing your own language correctly and motivation.

Let's see how you can contribute to this project.

First step: contact any existing translators for your language

Reference: the Language Maintainers page on the Xfce i18n Wiki.

Their might already be contributors to the translation of Xfce into your language listed on this page. If this is the case, you should get in touch with them and ask them how you can help. If the page is not up to date, you should warn us or update it yourself.

Let's see how to translate an application or to update a translation now.

Second step: download the translation files

The applications are translated using pot files, with a 'po' extension: those files basically contain each English string and its translation. There is also a template for creating a pot file for a new translation: it is the file which has a 'pot' extension. Every time a developper changes a string in the application, he will update the pot files and the translation will have to be updated accordingly.

Those files are located on the Xfce SVN to ease cooperation and distribution. We will use a script to ease the downloading of those files, this script will also allow you to update your pot files easily. This script requires Subversion to work.

Download the script and move it to a folder where you want to store the pot files. Then run the following command in this directory to make the script executable:

chmod +x xdt-i18n

Then, use this command to get the pot files for the core applications for the first time:

xdt-i18n init xfce/trunk

And for the goodies:

xdt-i18n init goodies/trunk

You should always make sure that you are using the latest pot files when starting to translate a project. This command allows you to update the pot files quickly:

xdt-i18n update

Third step: start translating

The script above downloaded the latest translation files and put them in separate folder. Go to the folder of the application you want to translate or or of the application whose translation you want to improve. The translation files will be available in a po folder. If there is a file for your language, you will be able to start translating directly. If not you will have to create a file for your language by copying the pot file and renaming it to your_locale_identifier.po. To find the locale identifier, you can use this page.

To translate, open the po file using your favorite text editor. You will see a main header composed of likes similar to this:

"Project-Id-Version: Thunar\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2009-01-11 00:20+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2009-02-11 13:20+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Mike Massonnet <mmassonnet@gmail.com>\n"
"Language-Team: French <xfce-i18n@xfce.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n > 1);\n"

Update the PO-Revision-Date field with the current date and time and the Last-Translator field with your name and your email so that the next translator can contact you if he has some questions. After that you can start the real translation job.

Every sentence already translated is displayed in the po file as the following one:

msgid "Invalid file name"
msgstr "Nom de fichier non valide"

Untranslated strings are displayed as this one:

msgid "Only local files may be renamed"
msgstr ""

Some strings may also be marked as fuzzy, which means that the original sentence has changed a bit and that the translation is not totally wrong but still needs to be checked and/or fixed. Make sure to remove the '#,fuzzy' after fixing the string.

#, fuzzy
msgid "Screenshot.png"
msgstr " Screenshot"

msgid allows you to identify the original string and msgstr to identify the translated strings. Modifying the msgid strings will have no effect, if you see a typo in one of them, file a bug. To translate a string or update a translation, just modify the text between the "" in the msgstr field.

Some strings may contain slashes or weird characters such as "%s" or "%i". You should always make sure that those characters are also present in the translated string in the same order, or the application will be broken in your language. To check if your translation is valid, the xdt-i18n script offers a check option which will check all po files for your language:

xdt-i18n check your_language_code.po

If it displays any warning, you must fix it before sharing your translation.

You can also use this script to see the stats for a given language, that is to say the number of translated messages, the number of fuzzy and untranslated ones:

xdt-i18n stat your_language_code.po

You can also use Poedit to modify the po files. It updates the po headers automatically, sorts the strings by category (translated, fuzzy and untranslated) and provides a friendly interface.

Fourth step: get your translation in

Once you are done with your translations, go to the root of your xfce/trunk folder or goodies/trunk folder and use the following command to create a patch named my_language.diff containing your translations:

svn diff > my_language.diff

If there is a maintainer for your language, you should send him this file asking him politely to review it and get it in. If not, you should send it to the Xfce i18n mailing list where someone will review it and get it in.

Fourth step: this tutorial sucks and you need more information

The Xfce i18n Wiki contains a lot of information but some of it may be outdated. If you have any questions, please ask them on the Xfce i18n mailing list.

I hope that I was clear enough and that we will be flooded with new or improved translations! We need you!

Xfce 4.6 has been out only since yesterday but there are already a great number of reviews spawning all around the Web. I'll try to keep a list of the main ones here:

• Phoronix
• Tectonic.co.za
• Zdnet.com
• Osnews
• Linux magazine
• Softpedia
• Ostatic
• Detector Pro
• Xubuntublog
• Arstechnica

French:

• Gaston wrote a nice article in French on DLFP.
• PC Inpact

Spanish:

• And I've found a Spanish translation of the Xfce 4.6 tour, that's a nice work!

Czech:

• Linuxexpres

As usual, Béranger found something to complain about But as he is complaining about the transparency of desktop icons, I think we can still say that 4.6 is a good release!

Reading those reviews, I can see two main issues: the desktop right click menu and the menu editor. For the menu editor, our rocking Jannis Pohlmann is already on it and is making really good progress on libxfce4menu: it'll allow us to use Alacarte to edit menus in Xfce 4.8 or to develop our own menu editor, if someone volunteers for this. For the right click menu, just find a beautiful wallpaper and remove all those ugly non-transparent desktop icons that hide it and your old beloved menu will be back!

If you find any other interesting reviews, please share them!

Edit: I added some links from the comments.

Recently, there were a few releases in the Xfce Goodies project. I will try to summarize the main changes.

Xfce4 Power Manager 0.6.1 and 0.6.2

Those two bug fix releases fix various annoying problems: a tab was not working in the settings dialogs, there were some D-Bus related errors and the -r option is not needed anymore to start the application.

The author also added a brightness control plugin for the Xfce Panel to the Xfce SVN and discussions have started about merging the different battery panel plugins and the power manager. He also considers using DeviceKit. A lot of exciting stuff for the next release!

Midori 0.1.3

This new release of Midori, the fast Webkit based browser, brings a lot of interesting new features:

• improved zoom preferences.
• the interface can now be easily configured.
• a new Mouse Gestures extension allows you to bind actions to particular mouse gestures.
• Maemo integration for mobiles.
• Find as you type feature for the search bar: results are proposed while you type a word in the search bar.

Gigolo 0.2.1

This bug fix release fixes a few bugs: Obex URIs are saved correctly now, some interface related problems have been fixed and one can now use the @ symbol in adresses.

Xfburn 0.4.1

And one more bug fix release ! It fixes drag and drop related issues, a crash when creating folders in a composition and burners detection has been improved. It is also advised to use libburn 0.5.6 or higher, which fixes a few annoying crashes.

Xfce4 Screenshooter 1.5.1

Yet another bug fix release... The mouse cursor is now displayed on the screenshots, a crash when the application did not detect any application to open images and one memory leak fixed...

Those little goodies should appetize you for Xfce 4.6 !

I'll start to write some posts in English, in case some English speakers are interested by Xfce news, I made a category for each language, so that people can read the posts of their preferred language easily. Xfce 4.6 is not out yet, but some developers have already started to implement nice things for the future versions, particularly Xfce 4.8.

Libxfce4menu : easily editable menus ?

People have been complaining for a long time that menu editing is a pain in Xfce : Xfce 4.4 menu editor was quite limited. 4.6 is a bit better as you can put Desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications/ to modify the menu, but it lacks a GUI to do those actions quickly and easily.

Jannis Pohlmann, the developer of libxfce4menu, has recently announced that he has started to improve libxfce4menu so that it implements the whole Freedesktop menu specification. This work is only at its early stages, but it seems to be quite promising : he published a video where one can see him editing the Xfce menu using Alacarte, the Gnome menu editor.

His code is available on git.xfce.org and works pretty well. After installing this new version, you just need to restart xfdesktop and xfce4-panel, to edit the menu using Alacarte and to configure the menu panel plugin to use the ~/.config/menus/applications.menu menu file.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to set a custom menu file for the right click menu of the desktop, so no right click custom menu for now... This new version will also allow some neat things, which might interest sysadmins, such as having a menu file on a network and use it on the local machine.