Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: xfce

Running VLC in XFCE

August 27, 2010 / / 18 Comments

As you may know I am using KDE for my daily work. However, I use XFCE from time to time – for example when I have to run a remote X session over XDMCP and want to keep a fluid feel to the desktop.

When I was working in XFCE yesterday I wanted to use VLC to check a video file on my computer, and I was in for a surprise when clicking “Media > Open file” made my VLC hang indefinitely!

I remembered a discussion about this phenomenon on LinuxQuestions.org and indeed the solution as pointed out in that thread works for me.

What happens here?

The core of the issue, is that Qt4 makes an incorrect assumption about which GTK+ theme engine to use. A GTK+ theme engine makes a Qt4 application blend in nicely with a GTK+ based desktop environment such as XFCE, by using GTK+ instead of Qt4 to render all graphical components.

There are a few GTK+ theme engines available – one of them is QGtkStyle which is part of Qt4 in Slackware. However, Qt4 libraries look at the environment variable “GTK2_RC_FILES” in order to find out how to configure the GTK theme engine.

If this environment variable is not (or incorrectly) set, then Qt4 assumes that GTK+ is using GTK-QT-Engine which is not part of Slackware (GTK-QT-Engine is used to give GTK appplications a Qt feel when they are running in KDE) and it will not correctly apply the QGtkStyle engine. It sets QGtkStyle to use the GTK style Clearlooks, and outputs an error message which you will sometimes be able to see if you started a Qt-based application from a terminal:

QGtkStyle cannot be used together with the GTK_Qt engine.

This can be solved by explicitly telling Qt4 where Slackware keeps its GTK+ configuration files, and then making sure a GTK+ theme is configured there.

  • Define the environment variable “GTK2_RC_FILES” in one of these files: ${HOME}/.xinitrc (applies to just you) or in /etc/profile.d/qt4.sh (applies system-wide) by adding the follwing two lines to that file (assuming you are using bash as your default shell): 
    GTK2_RC_FILES="$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0:/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"
    export GTK2_RC_FILES
  • Create a new file (or edit the existing) ${HOME}/.gtkrc-2.0 (so that the GTK theme applies to just you) or /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc (so that it applies system-wide) and add the following line to it: 
    gtk-theme-name="GTK+"

That should fix VLC’s “Media > File Open” dialog which will now appear instantly.

Note: You can choose a GTK+ theme for all your QT4 based applications if you want by running “qtconfig” and in the tab “Appearance” set the “Select GUI Style” to “GTK+” instead of “Desktop Settings (default)“.

Eric

GTK2_RC_FILES

Icons disappear in XFCE 4.6.0

March 11, 2009 / / 2 Comments

Ouch…

You just upgraded your Slackware computer to the latest slackware-current and you are using XFCE as a desktop manager. Perhaps you wondered why all of a sudden most of your panel icons are missing, and several of the icons that should display in menus and dialogs are gone as well.

The issue you are experiencing is caused by the removal of the Rodent icon theme from XFCE 4.6.0. This icon theme was the default in past versions, and your configuration in ~/.config/xfce4/ will have references to that Rodent theme especially if you selected custom icons in some places. Now you upgraded to 4.6.0 and the Rodent is gone, XFCE will not be able to display the associated icons.

The remedy is fairly simple (thanks Robby for informing me). Running (all of) the following three steps should work:

  1. Run the command “/usr/bin/gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor”
  2. Use the XFCE Settings Manager to change the theme to Tango or Gnome
  3. Re-install the “hicolor-icon-theme” package

When that is done, you may still have icons for launchers on the panel that are missing. In that case there is no other solution than to edit that particular launcher’s properties and select a new icon for it. See our bug report about this issue at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5067 which was opened by Robby Workman.

Note that you will not experience this “missing icons” behaviour if you install XFCE 4.6.0 without ever having used older versions of XFCE before on that computer. It is purely upgrade-related.

Cheers, Eric

Massive updates in slackware-current

March 10, 2009 / / 20 Comments

Today, Pat Volkerding published a massive amount of package updates to the slackware-current tree. The entry in the Slackware ChangeLog.txt measures more than 200 lines, and is probably the largest update to the development tree ever.

Many of the core packages have received an version upgrade, but those changes may not be immediately visible to the average end user. Some of the absolute highlights mentioned in the ChangeLog are indication of a big step forward for Slackware: a new kernel (2.6.28.7), new gcc (4.3.3), new glibc (still called 2.9 but the snapshot we use is more like 2.10), a new XFCE (4.6.0) and most importantly: KDE 3.5.10 is gone, replaced by KDE 4.2.1 (which had been living in the /testing directory for a long time).

I have been working with KDE4 releases for nearly a year now, running it as my default desktop, and 4.2.1 is stable, fast and beautiful. People who heard or read that the new KDE is bloated and slow, should try it out and decide for themselves; I think it performs better than KDE3. I also ran the new XFCE for a while and it looks sweet. Note that when you upgrade from XFCE 4.4 you may experience missing icons in the panel. This happens because the Rodent icon theme was removed from XFCE in the new release. The file CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT (located in the toplevel directory of slackware-current) explains this issue and what you can do about it.

One neat feature addition which did not make the ChangeLog, but is definitely worth mentioning: the initrd.img and usbboot.img files which contain the Slackware installer,  have also been updated for the new 2.6.28.7 kernel. As a result, you can now install Slackware to an ext4 filesystem!

If anyone out there with a Netbook (one of those Intel Atom powered, 9 or 10 inch sized laptops with long battery life) is going to install Slackware-current on it, I would like to hear your impressions. Leave a comment to this blog post.

Have fun, Eric

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