The xfce4-panel in the latest Xfce 4.2.1 release contains a bug: It does not save its configuration on session logout. The Xfce Debian package already contains a fix for this bug, so you don't need to worry about it. If you have installed from the graphical installer or plan to install from the graphical installer, follow these steps to fix the bug:
Continue readingI just uploaded new Debian packages to the os-cillation repository, including the update to Xfce 4.2.1, the new Xfmedia 0.7.0 release and a few goodies. In addition the xfld-desktop package does no longer depend on xnetcardconfig, which enables Ubuntu users to easily install xfld-desktop now.
Continue readingMickael and Juha are doing a great job at improving xfcalendar recently. I'm pretty sure that Xfce 4.4.0 will ship with a very nice and very useful calendar application. Xfcalendar can already schedule appointments (tho it's still very rough on the edges), it currently looks like this:
Continue readingWe are currently discussing the Thunar User Interface:
Continue readingOSNews did it again today, but not only did they announce Xfce 4.2.1 before it was officially released, this time they did the same for KDE's 3.4 release. Neither xfce.org nor kde.org contained any mention of a new release at the time the announcements where published on OSNews. In today's open source world, the most difficult part of release engineering seems to be preventing news sites from announcing releases before they actually happen, in order to get a smooth release. This worked amazingly well with the Xfce 4.2.0 release, but not before I mailed several news sites that they should not post anything until they get an official notice.
Continue readingI finally got EnigMail working with native Mozilla on NetBSD/i386 -current (latest Mozilla 1.5.1 from pkgsrc with enigmail 0.82.2). I uploaded the XPI files here. To install the XPI files, run Mozilla as root, open the directory that contains the three XPI files in the browser and click on the files to install them, in the following order: The IPC module, the enigmime package and finally the enigmail package. Finally start Mozilla and configure enigmail as mentioned on the EnigMail website.
Continue readingIn order to get a sane build environment and to build sane packages out of your environment, you should consider overriding some default values in your /etc/mk.conf. For example, if you are running NetBSD/alpha, you shouldn't use any optimizations to cc(1), because gcc is still buggy on Alpha. And in general you should think twice before setting the optimization level above 2, because this might cause several programs to segfault frequently or not run at all. Here are some lines from my mk.conf, which might help you (they will honor all default values but -ON):
Josh Tolbert <hemi at puresimplicity dot net> recently put together a lot of stuff related to the NetBSD/dreamcast port and created an easy to install NetBSD Dreamcast system along with a short introduction on how to setup your Dreamcast and what need to be done to increase the usuability of the NetBSD/dreamcast port (for now, focus on wscons(4) support for the Dreamcast framebuffer and getting POSIX threads to work). Josh's How-To and all stuff needed to get NetBSD working on your Dreamcast can found here.
Continue readingAs mentioned on www.netbsd.org the german publisher C&L has made available a book on NetBSD 1.6. The book covers NetBSD installation (i386, macppc and others), user administration, updating the system, kernel tuning, configuring the rc.d startup system, package management using pkg_install and the pkgsrc tree, configuring the X window system and using NetBSD in a networked environment (IPv4/6, DNS, NFS/NIS, FTP, Samba and the like).
Loadable kernel modules (LKMs) are quite popular on most modern operating systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and of course Microsoft Windows, just to name a few. They offer you the possibility to extend the kernel's functionality at runtime without recompiling or even rebooting the system. For example nearly every Linux device driver is available - or can be made available - as a loadable kernel module, that can be loaded at runtime to get support for a particular device (or even a pseudo-device).
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