Category: Xfce

kirsle

tl;dr version: it seems that the gstreamer-ffmpeg package is required for Thunar (or tumblerd, specifically) to render thumbnails of video files on the XFCE desktop for Fedora 16. This package is provided by RPM Fusion yum repository (rpmfusion-free-updates specifically).

It seems to be pretty hard to find this information online. None of my Fedora XFCE systems were able to render thumbnails of videos, and this caused me some headaches with removable drives (when I'd be done with the drive and want to unmount it, I wouldn't be able to because "the device is still busy"... and lsof /media/Cyro would show that tumblerd was the culprit... it was trying to render thumbnails of any video files I may have seen while browsing in Thunar and wasn't having much luck with it).

The usual set of packages that provide all the video codecs for me didn't do the job (vlc, smplayer, gstreamer-plugins-{good,bad,ugly}), I even tried installing ffmpegthumbnailer and no luck. Finally I installed gstreamer-ffmpeg, and after doing a killall thumblerd and then visiting a folder full of videos in Thunar, it finally worked and started making thumbnails.

Xfce for Gnome 2 Refugees

kirsle

Click the screenshot for the full size version.

Along the top panel I have my Applications and Places menus, app launchers for my commonly used programs, my CPU usage graph, notification area and clock. On the bottom panel are my task bar and workspace switcher. These are all standard Xfce panel applets.

The details for anyone who's interested (the only panel applet options shown are the ones that differ from the default options):

• Top Panel:
  Orientation: Horizontal
  Size (pixels): 24
  Length (%): 100
  • Applications Menu
    Button title: Applications
    Icon: a Fedora icon in /usr/share/pixmaps...
  • Places Menu
    Show: Label Only
    Label: Places
  • Separator
  • Many Launcher applets for my commonly used programs
  • Separator
    Style: Transparent
    Expand: checked
  • Brightness plugin
  • Screenshot
  • CPU Graph:
    Background: black
    Width: 48
    Show frame: checked
    Show border: unchecked
  • Separator
  • Notification Area
  • Separator
  • DateTime:
    Layout Format: Date Only
    Date Format: Custom: %a %b %e, %l:%M %p
    The DateTime applet has a drop-down calendar, unlike the normal Clock applet.
• Bottom Panel:
  Orientation: Horizontal
  Size (pixels): 24
  Length (%): 100
  • Window Buttons
  • Workspace Switcher