Taskbar suggestion & some problems with XFCE from CVS (.18)

[MaT]

Hello there...

I'm experimenting with Linux for some months and I found XFCE about
2-3 months ago and I'm very happy with it ('coz of IBM 5x86 on 150 MHz
and similar hw :-). There are some concepts that I have to fight
against - for example - I don't like the panel much. And I was missing
something like taskbar... Instead of big ugly icons on the right
side... In previous week, I found interesting program - it's called
fspanel. I also found some other version - mde-fspanel (try Google, I
don't remember address now, I'm offline now and my linux box is now
off :-). It makes a small taskbar, program has icons on it, it also
have 4 buttons to switch among desktops and also a clock... I was
using it for some time as a complement to XFCE and I was happy. :-)
This week, I've found this mailing list - and it's archive. I realised
that there is the taskbar feature in XFCE - so I did "rpm -e xfce" and
installed it from CVS... For the first time, I was not able to find
it, I was trying to find some checkbox in configuration, then I red
the archive more thoroughly... :-)

But... Why I'm writing this (except of joy from XFCE - I wish to thank
to all people arround it - it's really nice environment :o) - i think
that this "fspanel" can still be inspirating for the authors of this
taskbar. I like the icons much. :-) You could think that it is some
bloatware - but - the source for fspanel is about 20 kB! And what is
even better - the resulting binary is only 10 kB! So I think, that
these icons cannot be a such problem to implement and it cannot add
too much bloat in existing code...



And now to one problem that I currently have with running the new XFCE
version... When I found it for the first time, I was very happy that
it can work wich czech locales very easily (it is also translated in
czech - it isn't important as much for me - I understand English well
(better than writing, maybe :-) and sometimes it's more consistent to
have some command in English than in some strange translations :-) -
but I liked that it can display special czech characters in - for
example - window titles and menus... Yes, it is about support for
international fonts...

So - for assurance - I set all fonts to "...-iso8859-2" and I was
happy - everything worked. But now, I have this new version compiled
(before that - I have the last RPM from XFCE website) - and although
I've set all fonts in configuration that I've found to iso-8859-2 too,
I can see only some "strewn tea" (as we call it in Czech republic :-)
instead of right characteres like "c with wedge" or "e with wedge"...

I know, these czech characters and encodings are the worst evil - and
I can only thank to Mr. Jan Hus who invented this in czech language...

He was burned in Konstanz on 6th July 1415, I can have celebrate an
anniversary today... :o)

But - is there something I can do to display correct czech characters
in menu again?

I think if it can be related to use of antialiasing - in the RPM, i
think that it wasn't there (and also - the antialiasing support after
compilation was also one of the reason to compile my own version)...

But I can't find why it can interfere this way - fonts are the same -
if they are not hardcoded somewhere in sources... So - maybe it is a
bug... And maybe there is nobody in this list who could point to this
in the past. :-)

And again - i really like XFCE though... It's nice and incredibly fast
on my machines (other one is Intel 233 MMX :-)...

MaT

-- 
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