Table of Contents

Sıkça Sorulan Sorular

Bu bir Xfce hakkında Sıkça Sorolun sorular listesidir. Sayfayı geliştirmekten ve/veya genişletmekten çekinmeyin, ama başka kullanıcıların rahat okuması için temiz tutun.

Başlarken

Xfce Hakkında

Xfce nedir ve niye kullanayım?

Xfce,Unix ve benzeri sistemler için bir masaüstü ortamıdır. (Örneğin Linux, Solaris ve BSD). Xfce, üretkenlik/verimlilik için tasarlanmıştır. Uygulamaları hızlı yükler ve çalıştırır, aynı zamanda sistem kaynaklarını korur.” (Olivier Fourdan). This philosophy should appeal to anyone looking for a fast, modern, and efficient working environment for a *NIX box. Bu felsefe bir NIX kutusu için hızlı, modern ve verimli çalışma ortamı arayan herkesin hoşuna gidecektir.

Xfce'nin okunuşu nasıldır ve anlamı nedir?

“İks Ef Se E”. The name Xfce originally stood for XForms Common Environment, but since then, Xfce was rewritten twice and doesn't use XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but the F is nolonger capitalized (not “XFce”, but “Xfce”). Currently the acronym doesn't stand for anything (suggestion: X Freakin' Cool Environment).

Xfce simgesininin anlamı nedir?

A mouse, obviously, for all kinds of reasons like world domination and monsters and such.

Xfce şu anda hangi platformlarda çalışıyor?

Xfce is developed to be versatile. It is currently supported on Linux, Solaris and BSD, but has been known to run in some shape or form on IRIX, MacOS X, and Windows.

Xfce hangi lisans altında dağıtılıyor?

Xfce 4 components are licensed under free or open source licenses: GPL or BSDL for applications and LGPL or BSDL for libraries. Read the documentation, the source code, or the Xfce homepage for more information.

İki resmi sürüm arasında ne kadar süre var?

There is no set schedule, but there are goals the developers try to meet. That said, the creation of deadlines does not lend itself well to those working without compensation. So the overall goal is to release a new version as certain goals are reached. Unfortunately, that does not allow the advanced statement of any release schedule. Please check back often to read any news releases about the product.

Kurulum

Kurulum Seçenekleri

Xfce can be installed in at least two different ways:

Paket Yönetimi

This is the ideal solution, if your distribution of permits.

It also helps to go back, leaving no trace, if the environment Xfce is not for you (But is it possible?).

Xfce'yi başlatmak

Xfce'yi konsolda kullanıcı girişi yapmışken başlatabilir miyim?

There are three different ways to do this:

if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" -o "$(tty)" = "/dev/vc/1" ] ; then
  startxfce4
fi

Is it possible to use Xfce with DMs?

Oh yes. And probably it is the default behavior of most distributions.

Setting up LXDM

LXDM is the display manager of LXDE. But it is universal. I (Paiiou) think that it is an excellent manager for Xfce: no dependencies on GNOME or KDE, nice interface, very complete. Most distributions have a package to install. Regarding the configuration, check the presence of a file (or add) /usr/share/xsessions/06xfce4.desktop (the location may differ depending on the distributions), such as:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xfce4
Comment=Use this session to run Xfce4 as your desktop environment
TryExec=/usr/bin/startxfce4
Exec=/usr/bin/startxfce4
Icon=/usr/local/share/pixmaps/xfce4_xicon1.png
Type=Application

Lines TryExec and Exec may also differ between distributions.

Setting up SLiM

If you want to avoid Gnome or KDE dependencies and a more attractive interface than XDM, you can give SLiM a try. Read the SLiM manual for more information.

Setting up GDM

If you installed Xfce system-wide and you want to use the GNOME Display Manager (gdm) to start your Xfce session, you will have to create a .desktop file to teach gdm how to start the Xfce session. This is a sample desktop file, Xfce.desktop:

  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Name=Xfce4
  Comment=Use this session to run Xfce 4.4 as your desktop environment
  Exec=/usr/local/bin/startxfce4
  Icon=/usr/local/share/pixmaps/xfce4_xicon1.png
  Type=Application

It is usually enough to simply copy the example file to the Session directory used by gdm; this directory is usually located in /etc/dm/Sessions, /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions, /usr/share/xsessions, /usr/X11/share/gnome/xsessions or some other location, refer to the documentation of your system for details. You need to restart gdm after you created the file.

Setting up KDM

If you installed Xfce system-wide and you want to use the KDE Display Manager (kdm) to start your Xfce session, you will have to create a .desktop file to teach kdm how to start the Xfce session.

First you need to find where kdm searches for its .desktop files:

  locate kde.desktop

Common locations are /usr/share/apps/kdm/sessions or /usr/local/share/kdm/sessions. Once you found the kdm session directory, you need to create a new file Xfce.desktop with the following:

  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Type=XSession
  Exec=/usr/local/bin/startxfce4
  TryExec=/usr/local/bin/startxfce4
  Name=Xfce4
  Comment=The Xfce4 Desktop Environment

Login problems

When I start Xfce a dialog pops up saying "Could not look up internet address for..."

Xfce simply wants your hostname to be in /etc/hosts. Example input: 127.0.0.1 localhost

Logout problems

When I try to log out by pressing the logout button in the panel, I get a dialog asking me whether I want to quit the panel and/or xfce4-session-logout reports that no session manager is running, but it is!

For some reason, your X applications can not connect to the session manager. Possible causes are: your hostname cannot be resolved (see Login problems section), your home partition or partition containing /tmp is filled up, your hostname contains non-ascii characters (no umlauts allowed, in particular) or that either ~/.ICEauthority or /tmp/.ICE-unix has wrong permissions. Also check .xsession-errors for clues.

Usage

Keyboard

Is there some way to call the menu with the keyboard in the xfce?

Assign a key with the Keyboard Settings → Shortcuts to the command xfdesktop -menu. (This does not work reliable since Linux Kernel is tickless, so xfdesktop -menu needs a fix) The menu will popup where your mouse is located. You can also use xfce4-popup-menu to popup the panel menu (also provided by xfdesktop and make sure you have the plugin in your panel ^_~).

Is it possible to focus the Verve plugin with a key?

Assign a key to the command verve-focus

My windows button does not work in the Keyboard Settings > Shortcuts.

The windows button (also known as the superkey) not working as a modifier is related to the toolkit, GTK+ in the case of Xfce. If you want to have the windows-key working we recommend you to upgrade GTK+ to at least version 2.10.0.

How do I get numlock to start on login?

There are two possibilities to achieve this. Or you should use a display manager that turns the numlock on (eg. gdm, check the settings) or you can use a little program called numlockx, adding numlockx on in your .xinitrc will do the job.

Is it possible to use Media keys in the Shortcut Editor?

Use xmodmap to assign keycodes to your Media keys to make them available for the Xfce shortcut editor:

To determine keycodes of the multimedia keys use the program xev. Create a .Xmodmap file in your $HOME directory containing those keycodes and assign keysyms to them. Example:

 keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
 keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
 keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
 keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
 keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
 keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
 keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
 keycode 237 = XF86AudioMedia
 keycode 230 = XF86Favorites
 keycode 236 = XF86Mail
 keycode 178 = XF86WWW

All possible keysyms can be found in /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB or /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB. To ensure that the .Xmodmap file is loaded when you start Xfce add /usr/bin/xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap to your .xinitrc or .xprofile file. When you start the shortcut editor the assigned keysyms should show up when you press one of your multimedia keys. Now it is possible to assign a command to them. Note: Several problems with auto-loading of .Xmodmap files at xfce startup have been reported (also when issued as autostart command). Search the xfce bugzilla sites for current problems. As a workaround, run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap by hand every time, or try out editing the somewhat less straightforward xkb configuration files.

What should I do to change keyboard layout?

There are several options. One is to use xfce4-xkb-plugin, see http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-xkb-plugin . You can also use the setxkbmap command with the two letter keyboard code as argument; you can edit your X server configuration file to choose a different keyboard layout (change the value after Option “XkbLayout”, e.g.: Option “XkbLayout” “dvorak”).

Is it possible to change the default shortcut keys?

Yes, of course… Keyboard shortcuts are defined on two locations. The shortcuts to handle the window manager are defined in the Settings Manager > Window Manager Settings > Keyboard. The Default theme can not be changed, but when you add a theme you can change that one. More global keyboard shortcuts, like volume adjustements, can be found in Settings Manager > Keyboard Preferences > Shortcuts. Again you need to add a new theme before you can start customizing it.

How do I make a shortcut that doesn't steal focus?

You can't.

Ok, why were the default shortcuts suddenly changed in 4.6?

How do I enable menu accelerators?

Menu accelerators let you set a keyboard shortcut to a menu item or entry. To enable menu accelerators go to the main menu and select:

Settings → Appearance → Settings tab

and select the 'Enable Editable Accelerators' option.

Alternatively you can run the command xfce4-appearance-settings from a terminal or from the Alt-F2 run command instead of using the menu to get to the appearance settings to enable accelerators.

Kiosk

I want to use Xfce in a corporate environment and not let users modify their menu.

Use kiosk mode (see xfce4-session and panel docs).

The left-click to get the menu on the title bar menu button seems a little slow. How do I change that?

The left-button single-click menu button display speed is linked to the double click speed. If one wants the menu to appear quicker, just change the double click speed in the Xfce 4 Settings Manager Mouse properties to be faster. Or, one can right click on the title bar to get the menu displayed almost instantly without adjusting the double-click speed. The menu will display both ways.

How do I display a list of all windows?

There are two possibilities. The first is by middle clicking on the desktop (if you have xfdesktop running) or you can add the window list plugin to the panel (is provided with a xfce4-popup-windowlist command).

How to edit the auto generated menu with the menu editor?

cp ~/.cache/xfce4/desktop/menu-cache-name-of-the-generated-file.xml ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/menu2.xml
cd ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/
cat menu.xml > menu3.xml
cat menu2.xml >> menu3.xml
mv menu.xml menu.orig.xml
mv menu3.xml menu.xml

Now, you already have a menu with all the categories in the main tree with some duplicates, but you must first edit menu.xml with your favorite editor and remove the 4 following lines in the middle of the file, otherwise the menu editor will complain about a wrong format:

</xfdesktop-menu>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xfdesktop-menu>

<xfdesktop-menu>

That's all. Now you can run the menu editor, remove the few duplicates and edit all as you like.

Settings > Desktop > Menu > Menu Editor

Notes: by removing the “system” line, you will remove all the duplicates menu entries from the auto generated file. So, if it is changed in this auto generated file, they don't appear anymore, but you will get rid of most of the duplicates.

To restore the original menu, just do in a terminal:

mv menu.xml menu3.xml; mv menu.orig.xml menu.xml

What are the exact commands used when launching the 'Setting' applications?

Please see this wiki entry.

File Manager

You can find more information about Thunar on the homepage or in the wiki.

Can I disable the trash?

No, you can not. But you can do for example:

  1. use 'SHIFT + del' to bypass the trash bin and immediately delete something for real.
  2. use cron to clean the trash every now and then.

I want to assign a keyboard shortcut in Thunar to "whatever action" in the menus

Thunar allows you to edit menu accelerators by simply hovering over the chosen action and by clicking the new keyboard shortcut you want to assign. To activate the editable menu accelerators select the “Editable menu accelerators” entry in the User Interface Settings plugin.

Where are the deleted items from the trash located?

Thunar is following the freedesktop standards in this. Following the links below you can find out more of this freedesktop specifications. Read more here and here.

You will find your deleted items in ~/.local/share/Trash/files

Can Thunar display video thumbnails?

Two possible ways. First, You'll need to build thunar with support for gconf (GNOME thumbnailers) and install one of the available movie thumbnailers for GNOME, i.e. Totem includes the totem-video-thumbnailer. Second, You can get thumbnails without GNOME by installing thunar-thumbnailers plugin.

When will it support samba/network browsing?

It already does! Just mount your shares and go to them with Thunar! Just kidding.

You are obviously asking about Thunar being able to discover remote machines on a network and mount/unmount shares from them. What you are asking for is nice, but there is no common framework for it yet that Thunar can build on.

Thunar is designed to be a file manager, not a network file system manager. Once such a beast exists, Thunar and all other applications will be able to use it, and you can browse your samba or NFS shares in firefox or emacs, whatever.

Short answer: not any time soon unless you write it yourself.

For Linux users, and especially Xubuntu users, the following thread can help: Xubuntu How to: Thunar Native Windows Network Browsing. You will need fusesmb. For me it worked like a charm with Feisty. You should read the post from EatMorePie, as it avoids unnecessary steps.

Desktop Manager

I want to disable the trash, home and filesystem icons on my desktop, is that possible?

Yes, in Xfce 4.4 you can hide some of the desktop icons. You can read more about those hidden settings here.

My Xfce Desktop doesn't have any shortcut icons, why?

I have more questions about xfdesktop

Xfdesktop faq @ spuriousinterrupt

Window Manager

Firefox jumps between workspaces, why?

When a new tab is opened from an external link in Firefox, it asks the WM to show the window containing the new tab. If the window that has requested to be raised is not on the current desktop, the Xfce Window manager will bring it to the current desktop by default. If you do not want this behavior, there is a hidden option to control this behavior. For Xfce 4.4 in ~/.config/xfce4/xfwm4/xfwm4rc you can put the following:

  activate_action=bring|switch|none

For Xfce 4.6 you can go to Xfce Menu > Settings > Window Manager Tweaks and go to the tab Focus, or you need to use the xfconf-query tool to change the setting:

  xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/activate_action -s bring|switch|none

As the name suggests, the “bring” option moves the window requesting to be raised to the current workspace, the “switch” option switches workspaces, and the “none” option takes no action.

Some of the windows are always centered, why?

The Xfce Window Manager has a feature called smart placement which can be adjusted based on the window size. Basically it will automatically center windows that are below a certain size and once they get bigger than that, new windows will try to be arranged automatically in the best place to have coverage. You can adjust the minimum size setting under Settings → Window Manager Tweaks → Placement.

Is it possible to have windows remember their position?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: If the application supports it, it will restore itself at the location and size you last specified (example: Terminal or Thunar). If the application doesn't support it you can use a window matching application like devilspie or wmctrl

How do I programmatically switch workspaces, move windows, etc?

wmctrl is a commandline tool that can switch workspaces, move windows between workspaces, move window positions, maximize windows, etc.

libwnck is a library that does similar things.

A window suddenly became transparent! How do I undo this?

If display compositing is enabled, the Xfce Window Manager allows you to adjust the opacity of a window by hovering your mouse over the title bar, holding down the Alt key, and using the scroll wheel (down lowers the opacity, and up raises it). So use Alt+ScrollWheelUp to reset the transparency.

Session Manager

Some of my applications are always started when I login

There are two possible reasons why the application is started: It is saved in the last session or it is listed in the auto started applications. Follow 1 of the two steps below to get rid of the applications.

I'm unable to shutdown or restart my computer when running Xfce.

There are two way to fix this: sudo and hal/dbus. Default starting from version 4.4 is hal.

Using sudo

You have to allow the user(s) to execute $installdir/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper with sudo. Install sudo and run visudo (root) and add the following line (replace prefix with the correct path):

 %users ALL = NOPASSWD:<prefix>/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper

Add the user to the users group (root):

 gpasswd -a <username> users

When you logout and login again, the shutdown and restart buttons should be sensitive. For more information you can referrer to the xfce4-session and sudo documentation.

Using hal and dbus

Make sure that the hal and dbus daemons are started on boot, and that you are running a recent version of dbus (at least 1.1). Refer to your distribution for exact steps.

In the steps below the groupname “power” is used. This is DEPENDING ON YOUR DISTRIBUTION.

Your /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf should contain a section similar to this:

<policy group="power">
  <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement"/>
  ...
</policy>

Add the user to the power group (root):

 gpasswd -a <username> power

When you logout and login again, the shutdown and restart buttons should be sensitive.

I don't see the logout dialog when I press the quit button

Enable the checkbox “Prompt on logout” in the session manager settings.

Panels

How do I disable the taskbar in Xfce 4.2?

Just don't run it at startup…

What is the "use startup notification" option?

If you select this option, the window manager will show an hourglass while the program is loading. The startup notification libraries have to be installed. They are probably available with your distribution. This feature is only supported by modern applications (Gtk2.x and Qt3.x based).

Please note that the API is not yet frozen, and therefore Xfce 4 is only guaranteed to work with the startup-notification library version >= 0.5.

Visual Appearance

Applications

Help, my panel/task bar/desktop/window borders has disappeared

As Xfce is modular by design all of those visual elements are actually separate processes. You can just start their process again to regain them. If you want to make sure that they are started again next time you login you should check the “Save session for future logins” in the logout dialog or check “Save session automatically on logout” in “Sessions and startup settings”.

Panel xfce4-panel
Taskbar xftaskbar4 (Xfce 4.2 only)
Window Manager xfwm4
Desktop xfdesktop (can depend on the dbus service, Xfce 4.4 only)

My desktop is so nice, I want to make a screenshot! How can I do that in Xfce?

There are at least 6 possibilities:

    • Add it to your panel and click to make a screenshot, or use the xfce4-screenshooter stand-alone application.
    • Dedicated application for doing screenshots and application captures
    • Add a keyboard shortcut (i.e. Control-Printscreen) for the “salasaga_screencapture” command
  1. The Gimp
    • e.g. “scrot -s -t 150×150” (either select a window or select a rectangle with the mouse)
  2. Import from ImageMagick
    • e.g. “import image.png” (select a window with the mouse)
  3. Using good old xv with grab function

The file chooser is very slow, what is it?

It is more likely that the icon theme you are using renders too many SVGs making it very hard to scroll. Switch to another icon theme.

Response to Terminal application is slow?

For NVidia users, add this to your settings:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=0 -a GlyphCache=1

For all users, your driver may not support argb visuals very well. You can disable it for Terminal by exporting the environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1. To disable it for Terminal only, put the next lines inside ~/bin/Terminal for example (given you have a personal bin directory, you can also put it inside /usr/local/bin):

#!/bin/sh
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 /usr/bin/Terminal

Themes

The gtk-xfce-engine themes do not appear in the "user interface" settings dialog

The gtk-xfce-engine-2 package has to be installed using same prefix as Gtk2 itself. When installed from sources, the engine is, by default, installed in /usr/local, while Gtk2 is often installed in /usr. Just install gtk-xfce-engine-2 again using ./configure –prefix=/usr, and the themes will hopefully become available.

How can I customize my Xfce desktop environment

You can read everything about changing themes in the How to install new themes wiki page.

Windows

How do I enable panel transparency and window shadows?

Enable the Composite extension in the X11 config file and make sure Xfwm4 is compiled with embedded compositor (xfwm4 -V).

 Section "Extensions"
   Option "Composite" "Enable"
 EndSection

Pay attention: recent versions of X.org turn composite on by default. If you experience speed problems or any other glitches you have to disable it explicitly:

 Section "Extensions"
   Option "Composite" "Disable"
 EndSection

If you have a reasonably new X.org (7.1, possibly 7.0) and your graphics card is listed as “supported” at X.org's EXA status page, you should also enable EXA by adding this line to the card's Device section in your xorg.conf:

   Option "AccelMethod" "exa"

Enabling EXA will normally provide a speed increase for compositing and font rendering, but may cause a small reduction in OpenGL rendering speed.

Once the Composite extension is activated, go to Settings → Panel and Settings → Window Manager Tweaks.

ATI users (X.org radeon driver)

ATI R3xx/R4xx (9500 to X850, X1050) users may also need this in the device section for the card:

 Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
 Option "AccelDFS" "true"			# but see radeon(4)
 Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
 Option "EnableDepthMoves" "true"
nVidia users

NVidia users may also need this in the device section for the card:

 Option "RenderAccel" "true"
 Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

Read /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx/README.txt.gz (and search for “RenderAccel” and “AllowGLXWithComposite”) to see if they are recommended at all for your system. At least for recent NVidia GLX drivers, “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” is only for X servers older than X11R6.9.0, and “RenderAccel” “true” is the default setting, and therefore not required. If you are running a recent NVidia driver and a recent xorg-server, you do not need these settings (and should not use the “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” setting).

Panel

Is it possible to change the icon used by the icon box or task bar for a given application?

It's not possible. This setting has to be managed by the application itself.

I've installed a plug-in for the panel, but the indicators don't use different colors. What can I do?

First, try another Gtk theme, since some themes override the color. If it doesn't solve the problem, you probably have an old ~/.gtkrc-2.0 : remove it and try again.

How do I set the panel layer in Xfce 4.2 and 4.4?

In order to improve focus management this option was removed.

Is there a world clock applet?

You need to add the Orage Clock to the panel. Then you can middle-click the clock to open the “Global Time” window, to which you can add any number of clocks.

Development

How can I report bugs?

You can report bugs here or ask on the mailing lists or forums for help. If you want to report a bug please read the Xfce debug guide and the Pidgin get a backtrace to ensure your bug report actually makes sense and is useful.

How often are new releases made?

Whenever we feel like it is ready to be released. If you are unhappy with this you can always choose to hire the whole Xfce developer crew and pay us (we accept VISA/MasterCard, but not American Express)… Then we can even tailor it to your liking…

I have asked a question / reported a bug on the mailing list / bugs.xfce.org and no one is answering

2 possibilities: