Linux: The Ultimate Guide

The Internet
The pre-selected tab window for applications allows you to select your 
default web browser and Mail Reader. The Web Browser is used to open 
links and display texts, while Mail Reader will compose emails when users 
click on email addresses, for example, on a website.
Preferred Internet Applications
To select a different web browser that will be used to open links, click the 
drop-down in the Web Browser, and choose your selected browser from 
the list of available web browsers.
If the browser you are looking for cannot be found by the system auto-
matically, you can select More in the drop-down menu, and a box will 
appear asking you to enter a customizable browser command.
Resources
The second Preferences window tab lets you select your default File 
Manager and Final Template. The File Manager has used the system to 

---

xfce Desktop Environment 
◾
117
open folders to browse files, and the preferred Terminal Emulator will be 
used to run documents and applications that need to be run in the CLI 
area. For custom terminal commands, “% s” is in the command. If not, the 
same rules apply as described in the paragraph above.
Command-Line Options
A simple command line in front of the end of the popular apps frame-
work is included, called exo-open. You can use this application to launch 
the preferred application for a particular category or open URLs with the 
default URL holder.
Exo-open supports two modes of operation. The first one will automati-
cally launch a popular application for a particular category by selecting 
the pass parameter. For example, to launch a command mutt in a set of 
Airport Emulator set, you can use:
exo-open - launch TerminalEmulator mutt
To open the popular Web Browser without additional restrictions, the 
following command will be used:
exo-open - launch WebBrowser
The second exo-supported mode opens all the parameters with the 
default URL holders. Here URLs refer to fully qualified URLs (i.e., https://
www .xfce .org/ or mailto: xfce4 -dev @xfce .org), or local methods (i.e., ~ 
/ myfile .t xt). For example, to open ~ / file1.mp3 and ~ / file2 .t xt in the 
default settings, you will use the following command:
exo-open ~ / file1.mp3 ~ / file2 .t xt
To start composing an email list for xfce4-dev addresses in the pre-
ferred email reading application, for example, you can type:
exo-open mailto: xfce4 -dev @xfce .org
Required packages:
• GIO
• GLib
• GTK+
• gthread

---

118
◾
Linux 
• libxfce4ui
• libxfce4util
• gio-unix
Garcon – Menu Library
Garcon is the implementation of a specific menu specific to Freedesktop .or 
g. It is based on GLib/GIO and aims to cover all details except asset menus. 
It was started as a complete redesign of the previous xfce menu library 
called libxfce4menu, which, unlike garcon, lacked the essential integra-
tion of menu loading menu menus.
Garcon incorporates almost every part of the menu specificity except 
the asset menus and a few XML attributes. Unlike libxfce4menu, it can 
also load customized menus and menu editors like Alacarte, as menu inte-
gration is now supported. The only significant feature that is still missing 
is monitoring menus and menu items to make changes. It is something 
that will work on in the next release. The garcon API will probably not 
freeze until it is released at 1.0.0 (currently version 0.7.1)!
Tumbler – Thumbnail Service
Tumbler is a DBus service for requesting icons for various URI programs 
and MIME types. The DBus icon management is described below. The 
DBus icon management specification is in the standard DBus API to 
handle icon creation.
With DBus specification for thumbnail management, applications do 
not have to use it to manage thumbnails themselves. When an icon is 
found, they can send the icon function to a special service. The service 
then dials when it has finished producing the thumbnail.
This service has benefits:
• There is no need to link sophisticated software pieces to all 
applications that work with icons.
• The possibilities for closed format icons (which may be patented) 
coexist with free desktop software (just) that wants to display files 
as thumbnails.
• Reuse of existing infrastructure instead of having all the applica-
tions redesigned.

---

xfce Desktop Environment 
◾
119
• The complexity of the LIFO line, the setting of I/O, and the arrange-
ment of small background images are no longer the function of the 
application developer.
It is written in an object-oriented manner using GLib and GObject. Its 
modular structure makes it very flexible and valuable in most situations. 
Provides plugin workspaces for extending URI schemes and MIME types 
for which icons can be created and changes the background storage used 
to store icons on the disk. Tumbler functionality can be extended using 
special icon services used in conjunction with the D-Bus icon manage-
ment. Tumbler is used by Thunar, Ristretto, and xfce.
Reasons to Use xfce as Your Desktop