Xfce 4.8pre1 released!
Sunday, November 7 2010, 17:57 - Permalink
Xfce 4.8pre1 is now available for download.
It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:
exo 0.5.4 gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0 libxfce4ui 4.7.4 libxfce4util 4.7.3 libxfcegui4 4.7.0 thunar 1.1.4 thunar-vfs 1.1.1 xfce-utils 4.7.1 xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1 xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3 xfce4-panel 4.7.4 xfce4-session 4.7.1 xfce4-settings 4.7.4 xfconf 4.7.3 xfdesktop 4.7.2 xfwm4 4.7.1
Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/src http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src
A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:
http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs
Release notes for 4.8pre1
The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release for Xfce 4.8. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project announces the feature freeze for the final 4.8 release which is set to be pushed out to the world on January 16th, 2011.
This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular) from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop. The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.
Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8 is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, udev and many more. A lot of old cruft like has been stripped from the core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still around for compatibility reasons).
Thanks to the awesome Transifex translation platform, our language teams have been able to update their translations at an incredible pace. Please include them when praising this release!
A complete list of all changes since the latest stable release is available on
http://mocha.xfce.org/documentation/changelogs/4.8pre1
Below you will find download information for Xfce4.8pre1. Please give our mirrors a few hours to synchronize. We hope you will enjoy this release, feel encouraged to blog and tweet about it! Feedback is welcome in all forms. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker as usual. We need your help to make Xfce 4.8 our best release ever!
Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release,
The Xfce development team
Comments
Great news, although it's a little concerning to hear that you can now DnD from the app menu, to the panel. I can't stand that behaviour in Gnome; I regularly hit the wrong menuitem and like being able to just follow through to the correct menuitem, without releasing the mouse button. In Gnome, the moment I try to do this, it interprets that gesture as my trying to DnD the first menuitem onto the panel, or desktop.
Am also reading that the app menu plugin has been moved out of xfdesktop. I can't imagine that this means that the right-click app menu in xfdesktop has been dropped but I want to be sure. Xfdesktop still implements it's own app menu, right?
thank you, love you guys! :D
@Icaria: Yes, of course xfdesktop still supports the right-click application menu. It's just the panel plugin for the menu that has been moved into xfce4-panel (because that felt like a more appropriate location). About the menu DnD: I think that's kind of a must have nowadays, although I can understand your problems with it.
Great news! Thanks for your work! I'm impatiently for try it! :D
i am so thankful for everybody's work and looking forward to january (or whenever). there is something difficult to express about xfce--it is so elegant and well thought out. i am glad that you approach it with care and continue to polish it instead of feeling the need to constantly destroy and reinvent like some other DEs. ;)
Oh! My day is saved by this great news! I love Xfce so much (compared to Gnome and KDE) and I can't wait for the release! Thank you so much for your hard work!
Its an awesome news guys. XFCE is really an elegant lovely desktop of mine. Been using it for along time. I dont want 2 see it getting bloated.
Its great to see a bit of faster releases than existing.
u guys rock, well done. Thanks!
I had no idea your dev team was so small. XFCE is a wonderful desktop environment, I have always been impressed by it's polish and stability. You guys deserve to be applauded for the fantastic job you've done.
I've wanted to use XFCE on my desktop since 4.2.0 came out. But having virtual file systems built into the desktop file manager was a convenience I simply could not give up. So news about official GIO support is very exciting. For me, it was the pivotal piece of functionality that was missing (and I'm sure a lot of potential users would say the same).
Oddly enough: I had just discovered Gigolo a few weeks ago. I had not had a chance to test it out; but it sounds like it's days are numbered.
Anyways, great news; keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to becoming a full time XFCE user. ;)
I always like new xfce releases :) Great.
I have one question though, about thunar and tumbler, I see that now ~/.local/share/thumbnailers desktop files doesn't have any effect, and I don't have anymore thumbnails for application/x-cbz and x-cbr (comics). Those are just images inside zip or rar archive, I used before comicthumb which comes with comix.
Is there a way now to add new mimetypes and external commands for this? I used for example
nailer instead of ffmpeg and I really want those comic covers back. Does one now must write a new C plugin for this? Thanks.
@Milan:
Two things about that:
1) We will slowly start porting some of the thumbnailer scripts or .desktop files to tumbler as real C plugins.
2) I am planning to write a tumbler plugin that can handle .desktop files like those used by thunar-thumbnailers, so that additional thumbnailers can be created in about the same way they could before.
All this will take a while though.