Rotating/Slideshow desktop wallpaper in XFCE

 General  No Responses »
Apr 062010
 

After a boring moment and coming across a little guide video on youtube that used Windows 7 with the rotating desktop wallpapers, I decided to see if I could make rotating wallpapers work in XFCE. A quick google search later and I came across this simple guide: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/creating-slide-show-backgrounds-xfce

I only had to tweak the cron job line to stop the command output going to system mail every time it ran, and it all worked as expected.

My crontab line: */5 * * * * /usr/bin/xfdesktop –display=:0.0 –reload >/dev/null 2>&1

Another interesting way that doesn’t use cron is described here:

http://rockhopper.dk/linux/software/xfce/xfce-auto-rotate-wallpaper-without-cron/

 Posted by deansu at 1:00 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Tiling rxvt terminals

 Linux  No Responses »
Jul 222009
 

Rxvt is a great terminal. When I needed a light weight terminal that supported unicode on my ye olde laptop, rxvt was the answer.

When combined with the font Terminus it quickly became my terminal of choice on the PC as well, but back to the topic at hand. Using a large monitor resolution leaves alot of unused screen real estate and one of the common action I would do with my terminal windows was to tile them, lining each terminal window up against the edge of the screen, and then dragging them half way.

This quickly becomes rediculous manually adjusting windows each time you boot. I searched for ways of tiling windows in XFCE a number of times but either came across posts about using applications to do the tiling or going the the whole way and using a tiling window manager like awsome.

Fortunately last week while exploring the vast rxvt-unicode documentation, trying to solve another issue I came across the geometry command line option.

My terminal tiling is simply two terminals taking up half the desktop each and I use a seperate shortcut for the tiled windows and a generic window, with XFCE’s window management nicely placing the two terminals side by side.

Here is my tiled rxvt command line options from my terminal shortcut:

rxvt-unicode -bg black -fg white -vb -sl 10000 -fn "xft:Terminus" -geometry 102x62

 Posted by deansu at 10:37 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Changing your Keyboard layout in XFCE && X Window System

 Linux, Ubuntu  2 Responses »
Jun 282008
 

I came across a handy blog post with a way to change your keyboard layout in X as XFCE doesn’t include any ability to natively do so. A major flaw of using X’s keyboard layout change is that it doesnt change the Control and Meta keys over to the new layout.

Which is a bit of a pain given it works changing layouts with setxkbmap on my debian + xfce ancient laptop and the Ctrl/Meta keys are for the new layout. Unfortunately while xfce works on my laptop, its a touch minimalistic for me to use on my PC, and really the fact that xfce is missing an applet to do this for you is all part of that.

Maybe when I become code-worthy I will hack up a language changing applet for xfce.. and modify all the other little things that annoy me. http://ubuntu.sabza.org/2006/10/13/xubuntu-easily-switch-keyboard-layout/

Edit:

Luckily Alexander Iliev has come along and written a very handy xfce panel app (based off earlier work of Gauvain Pocentek) that will allow you to easily add/remove and change keyboard layouts. I would have to say it was one of last remaining issues stopping me from using XFCE on my desktop and now that I’ve installed Debian on there I use XFCE instead of Gnome. Great stuff.

xfce4-xkb-plugin: http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-xkb-plugin

DV = dvorak keyboard layout

XFCE kb applet

 Posted by deansu at 12:08 am  Tagged with: , , , ,
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