Best Way To Get Taskbar Plugin for XFCE ? (DockbarX)

[nathan2423]

DockbarX is something I add into every MX installation I make, and I would appreciate it if the Devs could get it working in MX19.

I have been playing with the beta and Dockbarx appears to work fine in the standalone mode, but apparently the xfce4-plugin for dockbarx will not install because it is checking for a version of XFCE4-panel not greater than 4.13.

I can kludge this in the meantime by making the standalone into a "corner" and telling it to offset enough so as not to cover the MX start whisker menu, but that's just a kludge and it would be great to get the XFCE4 plugin working.

I can't tell if this is really an issue or just a version check that could be easily bypassed, but if it is possible to make Dockbarx available in the MX19 repos at some point I would be very appreciative.

Thanks very much!

[SwampRabbit]

DockbarX is something I add into every MX installation I make, and I would appreciate it if the Devs could get it working in MX19.

I can't tell if this is really an issue or just a version check that could be easily bypassed, but if it is possible to make Dockbarx available in the MX19 repos at some point I would be very appreciative.

@nathan2423, I am with you in adding it on every install I make, especially my wife's Yoga 2 in 1 because screen space is limited, and she just needs things to aesthetically work.

I asked about getting the plugin for MX-19 in the beta feedback thread already, but....

I can tell you it can be installed in MX-19 right now with a bit of work and functions somewhat normally as long as you don't use "Blend with panel".

The XFCE4-panel < 4.13 check is in the "Control" file of the .deb.
The quick and dirty way to get it to install is you unpack the .deb for xfce-dockbarx-plugin (dpkg-deb -R), remove that "xfce-panel << 4.13", then repack the .deb (dpkg-deb -b) and it should work.

I am sure you noticed that there are a ton of dependencies needed for dockbarx-common and the rest that aren't in MX-19, the xfce4-dockbarx-plugin needed some too if I recall. I pulled all dependencies it needed from MX-18.3.

If I can get it to work in a hodgepodge kinda way, I know the MX devs can migrate it to MX-19.

Honestly though the whole dockbarx and plugin need rewritten, there are already some info on the web as the capabilities of a dock in the panel is a huge need, its kinda outta my abilities though.

dockbarx-plugin_proof.jpg

[nathan2423]

Great work Swamp Rabbit and thank you!

In a fit of "self-justification" I want to repeat what the author of the program says on his site -- that this "Windows 7" method of using the icon as the indicator that the program is running is a very intuitive way of working. You find the program at the same place all the time so there's no hunting for which window it is in the window list. So the point of using Dockbarx is not to make MX look like Windows 7 (though that may of benefit to some new users), but to allow the use of a very intuitive way of working with a panel. Of course I think KDE allows this too, even though it's not native to XFCE.

Bottom line is that I find this to be a great utility and plan to use it as long as I am with XFCE.

Once I get it working I will report back if i run into any issues.

[SwampRabbit]

You're welcome. I may not know too much, but always willing to share what I know.

allow the use of a very intuitive way of working with a panel.

I don't care if it looks like Windows 7 or whatever in any way, its the "intuitive" part for me, it looks and works far better than the XFCE Window Buttons IMO.

Creating launchers doesn't do it for me because then I have like 10 launchers and 10 Window Buttons open all the time, and some are duplicate applications.
I've tried to use other panels and docks but you always lose out on something.

There is an applet for Mate that can do the same, I wish that could be made as a XFCE plugin.

There used to be an Gnome2 applet that I used to use called Talika, it was by far the simplest and nicest one I ever used, sadly its very very defunct now.

Its 2019, IMHO, a launcher/dock should be standard in any DE nowadays.

[nathan2423]

Thank you for your advice SwampRabbit! Followed it (in my case I left the line in and changed the 4.13 to 4.15) and now have the panel plugin working. For me it seems to be working better than it did in MX18, where I always had to fiddle with it in order to make it appear after adding it to the panel. With the 19beta it just jumps to life immediately and seems to work fine. Thanks again!

[SwampRabbit]

Hmmm... now I might have to try it that way.

When mine first got added to the panel it wasn’t working OOTB, but it never didn’t for me with compositing and transparency on before.

You can see from my screenshot that I had to reduce the alpha to 77 to get it to play nicely with the default panel.

When I get some time I can break down exactly what I did.

Outside of downloading dockbarx and dependencies then my little change did you do anything else?

[nathan2423]

I don't think I made any other changes, SwampRabbit. As you indicated, I did not select the "blend" option, because selecting that made it seem to go away completely.

Now previously I had been using the Dockx panel and placing it over the XFCE panel, so I may have customized something there, but I don't think so.

The only change I made in unpacking and repacking the deb file was to change the "3" to "5" on that line you indicated.

Maybe I should for the record say that I run the preferences with the "Deep" theme and the "DBX" window list style. I don't think I customize anything else.

[SwampRabbit]

I think that is the same theme and everything I typically use.

Yeah when I added it to the panel, it’s just shows as blank but it flickers a bit like it wants to show the icons. Changing that setting brings it to life and it works like a charm.

[Stevo]

Maybe Tim remembers what he did to get it compatible with MX 17. I tried rebuilding a newer git version from the PPA linked on the dev's site, but a couple of its Python 2 dependencies are missing from Buster.

[SwampRabbit]

Stevo, I wasn’t aware there was a newer version on git. What I and Nathan (he can correct it if I’m wrong) did was simply manually pull the dockbarx, dockbar-common, themed, xfce-plugin, etc from MX-18.3 test repo.

Then manually installed all dependencies that were possible from MX-19, the rest of the dependencies that aren’t in MX-19 were then manually pulled from the MX-18.3 repo.

I still have them in a folder on the desktop of the VM I tested it on.... will list them in a bit.

If the dependencies from MX-18.3 can be put in the MX test repo that may work. I don’t know why those dependencies are not in Buster but maybe they were dropped for a newer technology stack.