XFce on debian installs panel inaccessibly (and fix)

[Patrick Wiseman]

Hi, all:

I've recently had occasion to install XFce on two new Debian (woody)
machines and had the same weird thing happen each time, so I guess it's
not a coincidence.  After installing XFce, I ran xfce_setup as an ordinary
user.  When I start X, the xfce panel is way down in the bottom right
corner of the screen with only the top-left logout button visible.  A
right-click on the desktop confirms the panel's odd geometry (and this on
a machine with 800x600 and another with 1024x768).

A "fix" is to edit the [GEOMETRY] section of ~/.xfce/xfwm-session for the
panel so that the first two numbers are zero.  Then when you restart X
(actually I had to do that twice before it worked) the panel shows up at
the top left of the screen and you can move it where you want it.

But, obviously, that's not a very intuitive fix.  I wonder how many people
have tried XFce on Debian (some on my recommendation!) and thought, "well,
that's screwy" and gone to another wm?

The first time I just thought it was odd and fixed it; but when I saw it
the second time I thought, "this is a bug" - so, should I file a bug
report?


Patrick

-- 
Patrick Wiseman
pwiseman at mindspring.com
Linux user #17943