XFCE suddenly not applying any themes any more

Hello people out there!

Recently I faced some strange behaviour with my Xfce 4 (.10) after I had plugged in a beamer. On first login after startup it wouldn't apply the window theme I set, nor would it use my preferred icon theme.
Also, setting the theme again with the xfce settings dialog (xfce4-appearance-settings) would not have any effect. Logging out and logging in again solved the issue temporarily, though.

Usually I already use a dual monitor setup and the beamer just switched place with my desktop monitor. So this was obviously a dual or multi monitor problem, and the first place I looked in for error messages was ~/.xsession-errors. There I encountered a line saying:

"The program 'xfsettingsd' received an X Window System error"

So the error occured in xfsettingsd, which also explained why using the settings dialogs hadn't had any effect later on.
Luckily, google would directly lead me to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=867455 when searching for this error message, where I found the solution:
By simply deleting

.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml

I was able to fix the error. As mentioned in the bug report, the file was recreated. Nevertheless I recommend to backup the file, since one never knows if such a file contains additional configuration markup you would maybe want to have access to later.

I hope this information can help somebody. If you want to thank me or want me to add something or maybe have any suggestions for improvements, I would be glad if you left me a comment.

Until then, see you soon

suluke

Dark theme for Eclipse Juno on dark Xfce in 3 steps

[EDIT 2013/11/08]
In the meantime, Eclipse Kepler was released and I have moved to an Eclipse installation via Arch User Repository. I do not know which of both broke my guide, but I really couldn't get it to work any more, so I checked the web again and found THIS "install-new-software"-installable theme via Stackoverflow. To turn it on, go the same way as before (Window->Preferences->General->Appearance).

Hey folks!

Since I had to spend some time googling again to make this work, I thought I'd just write down the necessary steps for some of you.

Actually it is pretty easy to "dark theme" eclipse juno when knowing how to:

1. Install "dark juno" by Roger Dudler from here by
   1. Downloading the plugin zip file
   2. Extracting the "plugin" folder from the zip with its contents to <eclipse installation directory>/dropins/
   3. (Re-)starting Eclipse
   4. Navigating to Window->Preferences->General->Appearance and choosing "Dark Juno" in the dropdown
2. Install the Eclipse Color Theme from the Eclipse Market
3. Look for a nice theme on http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/ and apply it via Window->Preferences->General->Appearance->Color theme

That should be it. My result (with Color theme "Zenburn") looked like this:

Happy coding!

Xfce dark theme firefox font color issue

Good evening everybody!

For quite a while now I'm using xfce with a nicely looking dark/black theme ("dark orange bird" to be precise) and it's just so much better for my eyes this way.
There has only been one problem coming along with it, namely appearing in firefox, which was that FF seemingly adopted the white font color from the system when rendering fonts in input fields (e.g. in the main search field on the google webpages).

Unfortunately, "Preferences" -> "Content" -> "Colors" -> disable "Use system colors" did not resolve the problem, so I had to google a bit further and finally found Stefan Hellmann's guide HERE

The Problem described there was bit different from mine, since I wanted everything to stay "normal" with a white google page and black letters on white ground, so the userContent.css I ended up with looked a bit different:

input { 
   -moz-appearance: none !important;
   color: black;
}

textarea {
   -moz-appearance: none !important;
   color: black;
}

I also had to create the "chrome" folder. And don't be confused - what was FOO:BAR in Stefan Hellmann's blog post can greatly differ from that. Usually it ends with :DEFAULT and (at least for me) starts with some seemingly random letters.

I hope this may help someone out there.
See you soon

suluke