Problems With 4.4.1 Upgrade

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Sun, 7 Oct 2007 14:44:20 -0700 (PDT) Rich Shepard wrote:

>    First, the upgrade blew away ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc. While I had
> made a backup on my workstation/server, I neglected to copy over all
> the dot-files. Sigh. Another good lesson learned.

Definitely a Slackware issue; we certainly don't touch this file.
Though it seems odd that Slackware would touch anything in $HOME either.

>    Xfce-4.4.1 loads, but with a black background, an abbreviated
> panel with none of my applications on it (including the lock screen
> and settings icons), including the battery charge status applet
> that's important on a portable. However, the major issue is that
> while I discovered how to get to the settings, every time I make a
> change and close the dialog box, the screen is left with random white
> boxes, blocks of spackled colors, and other indications of an ill
> system.

You negelected to mention what your old version of Xfce was.  If it was
4.2.x, then some of this is normal -- the panel configuration file
format was changed between 4.2 and 4.4, and unfortunately there's no
migration script.

As for panel plugins, they'll need to be update for the new panel as
well -- if there aren't Slackware packages, you'll have to do that on
your own.

The black background probably just means that (for some reason)
xfdesktop isn't getting started as a part of your session.  Hitting
alt+f2 will bring up the run dialog, and you can run 'xfdesktop'
there.  Then quit xfce and save your session.

	-brian