Jannis Pohlmann

This is my first post ever on the Xfce weblog. I’ve never been so much into blogging. I tried for a while but stopped at some point. However, this is not about me and my blogging habits: this is about how the Xfce community — yes, you! — rocks!

About a month ago, my laptop suddenly stopped working. We were working hard on the alpha (little did we know how long it would take to finally release it … I suppose Stephan is preparing release notes at this very moment) and this was just bad timing. I reported it on the mailinglist to let the other developers know about my situation. I had no idea of what would happen next.

And then I received the first mail offering a donation. And then another one. And another. One day later my PayPal account had grown up to third of the price of the laptop which I finally bought two weeks later. This came completely unexpected and just blew me away!

So on my short England vacation (I was visiting and old friend of mine in Portsmouth) I made plans on what to buy. I read a lot of reviews and at the end I came back to the same brand I had used before: I bought a Thinkpad. My old one was a R51 bought in 2004. It served me well all the years at home, at the university and at work. It even survived a shelf crash (I only had to replace the keyboard). When I arrived at Lübeck at 11pm on August 26th, I ordered a Thinkpad T61 in the same night. I still had to wait about a week waiting for it to arrive which I literally spent it on the couch doing nothing else than to wait for the postman. This has to be one of the worst weeks of my life ;)

Just like the whole week, the arrival was kind of chaotic. I had received a tracking URL the day before and so I followed the delivery process online. At noon on the day of the arrival it said “the package has been delivered”. And I was like … what?! Then I called their service number and a computer voice told me it had been delivered and some guy had signed it. Unfortunately I couldn’t find his name on any of the mailboxes downstairs. There was just one last opportunity: the sex shop in the basement. DHL had never dropped a package for me there before. I went into the shop and asked the guy if he was Mr. X (the one who signed the package). He said: No, I am not. I asked: Does a Mr. X work here then? He said: Yeah. I said: Well, did DHL leave any packages for me today? And he said: Yes. And there it was, my new laptop:

What can I say? It’s a great laptop! I managed to get all the features working within a few days, like special keys, suspend to ram, hibernate and it’s fast as hell! I might write a more detailled report about how to set up Linux on it for ThinkWiki later. The first thing to do obviously was to remove Windows and install Lunar Linux (the distribution I help working on) on it. And since then I’ve spent a lot of nights hacking on Xfce already. But that’s another story …

So today I want to thank those of you who stepped up and helped me out. I thought some time about whether to tell their names or not. I am really grateful for what they did so I think they deserve to be listed. So I’d like to thank the following people a lot for their help. In alphabetical order:

• Benedikt Meurer
• Bernhard Fröhlich
• Christine Pohlmann
• Cody A.W. Somerville
• Colin Leroy
• Jelle de Jong
• Stavros Giannouris

This has once again proven that you — the Xfce community as a whole — rock!

Seems like Stephan hasn’t finished the release notes yet, so I’ll spend the rest of the evening bugging him about it. I hope you’ll enjoy the alpha and Xfce 4.6 in general. Everyone is welcome to join our mailinglists and IRC channels to discuss ideas, bugs or possible contributions - if you think Xfce is worth it, let us know and maybe you can help making it even better than it is today.

Edit: Not only the community rocks, our developers do so as well! Thanks Benny!