Recent Status of LXDE


Actually, the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) project had rested for some time. Though we’re getting more and more people to join us since Linux World Expo 2008, LXDE have no much improvements since July this year. It’s happened due to our main developers didn’t have time to write new code, PCMan took time to focuses on his physician jobs, Jserv has worked for a new project which is confidential. About me, I was burdened with my family, so I also need to focus on my current jobs and my school to earn more money.

Recently, we’re planning to release a new version and new stuffs of some LXDE components for Merry Christmas. 😀 It is a great news that LXDE has a new project – “menu-cache”, which is a library creating and utilizing caches to speed up the manipulation for freedesktop.org defined application menus, and also it can be used as a replacement of libgnome-menu of gnome-menus. It means the menu-cache will speed up our LXLauncher and LXPanel menu, they will be getting faster. for supporting the menu-cache, PCMan is working hard on LXPanel right now, you can see logs of SVN everyday.

Besides, we hope to release a lxpanel-dev package for development of lxpanel plugin next version. Currently, it is difficult to write a new plugin for lxpanel, if you wanna write a new one, you have to download the LXPanel sourcecode and inject your code into the LXPanel and then copy the .so file to the system folder after compile it successful. It doesn’t make sense that is too complicated for developing a plugin. So we are tring to export header files and pkgconfig for making easy for development of plugin. Additionally, LXPanel has been reformed, lxpanel-core and lxpanel-plugin be separated. It will be helpful to maintain LXPanel sourcecode for us.

Well, I wanna make an apology for all of patch provider right now, because you guys’ patches which wasn’t applied for a long time. We are reviewing those patches currently, it will be applied as soon as possible, I hope so.

LXDE team members believe that LXDE has a great future, even if we don’t have much time to do that. Hope you guys can join us to help LXDE keeps going. 🙂

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4 responses to “Recent Status of LXDE”

  1. LXDE is really quick. And I really want to join this project. Now I am setting my developing environment and studying lxde code. I think I can be a LXDE developer someday, although so many things have to be learned.

  2. It is great to hear the the project isn’t dead. LXDE is truly great, keep up the good work!

  3. I appreciate the work. Post info about menu changes, they have broken my desktop. A menumaker XML file LXPanel seems to ignore now, actually fails completely, because of that.

    There is no man page for menu-cache.