Fedora 9 Xfce Spin - Progress Report

[Richard Hally]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> Fedora 8 Xfce Spin included almost all the Xfce utilities and plugins, 
> all the languages that Fedora supports and retained the upstream Xfce 
> layout. There has been some progress and some things we would like to 
> get more feedback on certain things. The entire list of things being 
> considered is documented in
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/XfceLive
> 
> The latest kickstart file is available at
> 
> http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/spins/livecd-fedora-9-xfce.ks
> 
> I am highlighting some specific changes below
> 
> Look and Feel
> -------------
> 
> We did not get default Fedora 8 background in the Fedora 8 Xfce spin 
> (due to a bug) and icon theme was rodent which is the default icon set 
> for upstream Xfce  You can see some screenshots in
> 
> http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=Fedora%208%20Xfce%20Spin 
> 
> 
> The new default look and feel for Xfce in rawhide is this:
> 
> http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/Rawhide20080303xfce.png
> 
> As you can see, Xfce now inherits the same default background as GNOME 
> and KDE and uses the Mist icon set which is also the default in GNOME 
> currently. The hard dependency on xfce-icon-theme from xfce4-panel and 
> Thunar has been dropped in rawhide. I believe we are supposed to be 
> getting the Nodoka theme but that doesn't appear to be the case yet. 
> There has been some discussions about the default panel layout and there 
> is a lot of different possibilities including a GNOME like layout but we 
> are likely to go ahead with some changes by including the trash, mixer 
> applet in the default top panel. If there is a preference for a specific 
> layout, let us know what (include screenshots preferably) and explain why.
> 
> Tracker
> -------
> 
> I have also made some changes to the kickstart file so that tracker 
> desktop search isn't started by default while running as a live cd. I 
> don't believe that this is going to affect performance much especially 
> with the new tracker in rawhide which suspends itself while the system 
> in busy but I saw a few complaints on this and have fixed this now.
> 
> Package Changes
> ---------------
> 
> I have dropped all the language packs temporarily and I am hoping to add 
> a select few where upstream and Fedora translations are more complete 
> and based on demand. There are a number of other package changes 
> including the addition of transmission, GIMP, replacement of Evince with 
> epdfview etc and these are not final yet. The current kickstart file 
> produces a nearly 600 MB image on x86 architecture. Any testing and 
> feedback is most welcome. I intend to continue sending progress reports 
> on a regular basis whenever we make major changes.
> 
> Rahul
> 
Nice work!
I run the F8 spin from a USB stick. I'm looking forward to the F9 one.
Thanks for doing this,
Richard