stick's corner

The Xfce development team announced today the release of the long-awaited 4.6.0 version of their Xfce Desktop Environment. There is also a very nice Visual Tour prepared by Jérôme Guelfucci and Jannis Pohlmann, which highlights some of the new and exciting Xfce features. For me, the most vivid change is the complete rewrite of the Settings Manager together with its configuration backend, but I’m sure that everybody will find his/hers own favorite .

It took me longer to prepare the updated packages than I expected, because of the busy BuildService, but they are finally ready in our X11:xfce BuildService project and I would like to encourage you to try them. If you encounter any problems, either upgrade issues from distribution 4.4.x series, issues with clean installation from repository or any other defects, please do not hesitate and contact me. Thank you very much and I’m looking for your comments and responses!

Instructions (command-line):

1. add X11:xfce repository if it is not already added:

   zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/xfce/openSUSE_11.1/ xfce

   (replace 11.1 with your openSUSE version)

2. refresh this repository:

   zypper refresh xfce

3. get new packages
   • if you have Xfce 4.4.x installed – upgrade the packages from xfce repo:
     zypper dist-upgrade --repo xfce
   • or install the Xfce packages directly:

     zypper install Terminal mousepad orage ristretto thunar thunar-volman xfce4-appfinder xfce4-desktop xfce4-mixer xfce4-notifyd xfce4-settings xfce4-taskmanager xfce4-volstatus xfconf xfwm4

Instructions (one-click install):

just click on the link with your distribution:

• openSUSE 10.3
• openSUSE 11.0
• openSUSE 11.1

Randy_sk asked today on IRC if we had any idea how to run commands in parallel, but he also wanted to limit the number of the concurrent processes. I immediately responded: “use make”. I started to shape my idea further until I came to this Makefile:

tasks := $(shell seq -s ' ' 1 `cat commands.txt | wc -l`)

all: $(tasks)
    @echo Done

%:
    @echo `sed '$@!d' commands.txt`
    @eval `sed '$@!d' commands.txt`

This expects you had the file commands.txt prepared, which contains one command per line. If you want to call the same command over and over again, just replace commands.txt with values.txt and eval with the command you want to run.

Using this approach you can limit both the number of concurrent jobs: make -j 5 and the maximum load: make -l 2

Others ideas were to use the shell with & and wait, or to use the following one-liner:

while sleep 1; do [ "`ps ax | grep your_cmd | wc -l`" -gt 6 ] || your_cmd &; done

but I really like mine solution the most

Due to some requests on mailing lists and Feature #305803 I decided to change the default behavior of command-not-found handler (in openSUSE 11.2 and SLE11).

Now it prints this info immediately:

$ blender
If 'blender' is not a typo you can use command-not-found to lookup the package
that contains it, like this:
    command-not-found blender
bash: blender: command not found

$ ifconfig
Absolute path to 'ifconfig' is '/sbin/ifconfig', so running it may require
superuser privileges (eg. root).
bash: ifconfig: command not found

instead of directly performing the search.

If you want the old behaviour back (i.e. search invoked automatically), just add

export COMMAND_NOT_FOUND_AUTO=1

to your bash profile. (This is also documented in command-not-found man page).

You can install the updated packages from home:prusnak:scout BuildService repository as usual.