New XFCE apps

Len Ovens len at ovenwerks.net
Mon Mar 4 04:44:55 UTC 2013


I was "listening in" on the Xubuntu meeting today. Mention was made of
menulibre. I looked it up with synaptic and could not find it. So I asked
:) and it is an in the works deal that xfce will be using to replace
alacarte which both Xubuntu and Studio use as a menu editor. It is being
written by the same author as catfish so I expect it to be good. It is
lighter than alacarte as well... though I think we carry all the gnome
libs anyway. I will be watching testing as work progresses. Perhaps it
will be better than alacarte. I have been frustrated with the lack of
usefulness of alacarte and the support headache I have had with it when
other people try to do more than it was built for.

While I was there I asked about monitor detection and when I told them
why, I was told that there is a new display tool on the way as well.

The background on displays is that dual monitors has been less than easy
to use and once set up less than stable. Unity has a better (not as good
as I would like) setup than xfce does. Unity at least defaults to side by
side... though the side by side is top aligned rather than bottom. This is
ok if both monitors are the same size, but with a laptop the main monitor
in the laptop is likely smaller than the second and bottom alignment makes
more sense (the mouse will be easier to find when moving it from one
display to the other). I don't know how it deals with more than two
monitors, but that is getting into specialty use and requires special X
setup anyway as most video cards only have 2 outputs. Unity also does not
allow setting the second monitor to left of or above the main monitor with
a saved setting. That is, the second monitor can be moved, but if it is
unplugged and reconnected it goes back to default to right of/top aligned.
I would like to have a setup where there are two settings saved. A single
setting and a dual setting and xfce dynamically switches form one setting
to the other on hotplug.


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net




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