Couple of Xfce questions

[alun_sundry]

Although I first installed Mint KDE 9 I have put Xfce on as well and not booted out of it since yesterday. I also have Mint Xfce on a memory stick for use with a laptop at a relative's home - thanks to Merlwiz for the best behaved and best-looking Xfce distro out.

I wanted to ask how it is that only the Mint menu icon and the default Xfce rat fit properly in that particular area on the panel - if you try to replace it with anything tweaked, the icon's edges are chopped off. Similarly if you remove the 'Menu' label a bit more of the icon is lost. I'm assuming as I've not seen the mint icon chopped up that Merlwiz found a way round this for the same aesthetic reasons I'm on about. I've logged out and back in and restarted and tried other font and panel sizes without change.

The other thing is, Xfce distros seem to have trouble moving larger amounts of files around, e.g from or to an external hard drive or larger memory stick. Some kind of crash or stalling happens when I try this, with folders of music. Is this commonly found? It hasn't happened with Mint 9 and me yet, but maybe it will. Is there a known reason for this and is is being attended to by the Xfce people?

Thanks.

[MerelyJim]

I noticed the file transfer lag myself, but thought it was just me.

I never found a fix for it, but found that by copying or moving things around at the command line sort of bypassed the problem.

[vrkalak]

I have used most every Linux distro that has Xfce as it's Default desktop.

The transfer lag is minimal (at least, on my machine) but the new Xfce-4.8 release has addressed this, as well as, several other slightly annoying issues.
Some of these 'bugs' and previous issues are spoken of, in the Xfce Forums. The Xfce Devs as working at providing 'fixes' to these.
You can ask your questions in the Xfce Forums, they are better apt to help, with providing answers for Xfce specific topics.

Perhaps, you might look into upgrading your version of Xfce from 4.6.2 to 4.8 pre2 . . . not been released as 'stable' yet.
But, it works really well. I have my Xfce upgraded to 4.8pre2 in my Debian 6.0 Squeeze, beta2 install.

Xfce04.8 release >> http://www.xfce.org/about/news?id=25
Xfce Forums >> http://forum.xfce.org/
Xfce Wiki >> http://wiki.xfce.org/
Xfce 'bugs' page >> http://bugzilla.xfce.org/

Come on over to the Xfce Forums . . . we has cookies !!

[alun_sundry]

Thanks. If you're still reading, is the 4.8 beta at least as stable as 4.6, and will it update to stable once that's ready? Having joined the Xfce forum about the same time as this thread was begun I imagine I can look up how to update there.

My setup isn't ideal, I'm guessing that Kde acts as some bloat when in Xfce - couple of seconds pause after clicking some programs before they open. Dithering over whether to reinstall with just Xfce, but knowing me I'd start craving the other after a few days...

[vrkalak]

Xfce-4.8 is still in the Beta stage of it's development and is not scheduled for Final Release until Jan. 16, 2011.

So, no, it is not as stable as 4.6 yet . . . the Xfce Devs are still working on source development and fixing bugs, as they are reported.
I belong to the Xfce Developers Mailinglist ... and I receive posts/emails on known bugs, newly found bugs and how the fixes are developing.

I don't know for sure, but I believe that you will have to do a fresh re-install of Xfce-4.8 ... and not be able to upgrade from 4.6 to 4.8
I'll know more about that as the Final Release approaches.