ANNOUNCE: Xfce 4.8pre1 released

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Xfce 4.8pre1 is now available for download.

It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:

  exo 0.5.4
  gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0
  libxfce4ui 4.7.4
  libxfce4util 4.7.3
  libxfcegui4 4.7.0
  thunar 1.1.4
  thunar-vfs 1.1.1
  xfce-utils 4.7.1
  xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1
  xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3
  xfce4-panel 4.7.4
  xfce4-session 4.7.1
  xfce4-settings 4.7.4
  xfconf 4.7.3
  xfdesktop 4.7.2
  xfwm4 4.7.1

Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please
note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):

  http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/src
  http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src
  http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/src
  http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/src

A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:

  http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs
  http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs
  http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs
  http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre1/fat_tarballs


Release notes for 4.8pre1
=========================

The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release
for Xfce 4.8. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project
announces the feature freeze for the final 4.8 release which is set to
be pushed out to the world on January 16th, 2011.

This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop
environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time
requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the
entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular)
from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop.
The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher
management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel
features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new
menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once
again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as
Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been
streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui
library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4. 

Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8
is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team
from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned
with today's desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit,
udev and many more. A lot of old cruft like has been stripped from the
core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still
around for compatibility reasons).

Thanks to the awesome Transifex translation platform, our language teams
have been able to update their translations at an incredible pace.
Please include them when praising this release!

A complete list of all changes since the latest stable release is
available on

http://mocha.xfce.org/documentation/changelogs/4.8pre1

Below you will find download information for Xfce4.8pre1. Please give
our mirrors a few hours to synchronize. We hope you will enjoy this
release, feel encouraged to blog and tweet about it! Feedback is welcome
in all forms. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker on
http://bugzilla.xfce.org as usual. We need your help to make Xfce 4.8
our best release ever!

Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this
release,

The Xfce development team