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!

Linux Skype "send file via drag & drop"-problem

Hello everyone!

Skype on Linux isn't as bad as many think it is...I guess. At least for me the most important features work as good as so I would never come to the idea that I needed to boot windows in order to have a convenient conversation.

There are some minor "flaws" though - e.g features in the UI microsoft didn't (want to?) make work on linux. One of those is the fact that you cannot simply drag a file from nautilus/konqueror/thunar (I only confirmed thunar, so correct me if this is an xfce-only problem) and drop it onto the skype window to send it. Thus, you will probably need to click on the (+), then "send file" and the navigate to the file (again). If you are used to have the system file manager open in the file-to-send's folder next to your skype window, this is not really a nice workflow to be honest, compared to what is possible in the windows version.

I spend quite some time researching on this, so I guess that I have to tell that this lack isn't "fixable" as of now unfortunately (although I would be glad to have someone correct me here, too).
BUT I just found out another way to simplify the process by accident:

Skype seems to accept files to send from the clipboard!

Thus, ctrl-c with the desired file selected in your file manager and then ctrl+v inside skype will have the same effect as dragging and dropping on windows and is almost as convenient.

I hope this text will be findable in google so others may see this alternate solution, too. If you like this "workaround" or have a better solution, leave a comment.

Until then: Good bye!

Yours suluke

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