Behold! And welcome to the new bluesabre.org! If you're a regular, you might have noticed that the site has had a bit of a facelift. After nearly a decade of publishing with Wordpress, I've moved to Ghost. And so far, I'm impressed.
It's faster. Ghost is fast without any help, providing all the publishing tools I need and (from what I can tell) none that I don't. To further speed things up, I've optimized all of the images on my site for small download sizes and super-fast loading.
It's more open. Ghost themes, powered by Handlebars templates, are significantly easier to maintain than Wordpress themes, and you can really go far with the default Casper theme. I've forked the theme with a few minor enhancements, and made it available on GitHub. Meet Mouser.
It's more consistent. Years of blogging included years of varying headers, layouts, and custom CSS. With this move, I'll standardized each page and post to make for a less jarring reading experience. Oh, and it now supports dark themes (as sent by your system or browser).
/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --force-dark-modeIt's easier for me. Goodbye plugins, hello everything I need to just write. With a nearly upstream theme, an unmodified core, and no plugins to worry about, I can worry about other things like development, blogging, mentorships, and community engagement. It all gets better from here.
With this site migration finally out of the way, it's time to get back to work on Xubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa". There's a lot of work to do, and only a few months to do it. In particular, I'd like to get some appearance items out of the way...
Let me know what you think of the new site in the comments below. As for me, back to work I go!
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First off, head to the Ubuntu 19.10 release images. We want one of the Preinstalled server images, since booting on the Raspberry Pi is still a tricky fiasco. You’ll see two installation options:
We’ll want to choose the first option, Hard-Float. While the Pi 4 does in fact support the 64-bit ARM image, unfortunately USB devices fail to initialize with this option. If you have no need for mouse and keyboard, feel free to use the 64-bit option. This should be resolved in time for the 20.04 release.
Once your server image has been downloaded, download and run Etcher. If you’ve never used Etcher before, it’s a simple, cross-platform solution for installing disk images to USB devices. It’s reliable and easy to use, and will help you avoid overwriting your hard drives.
Select the downloaded image (.xz is fine, no need to extract), select the correct storage location, and the click Flash! After a few minutes, the image will be installed and validated, and you’ll be ready to go. Re-insert your MicroSD card into your Raspberry Pi, connect an ethernet cable, power it on, and proceed to the next step.
Note: Once USB installation finished, I received an error that the checksums did not match, but everything seems to work correctly afterward.
This part tripped me up for a while. Once installed, the default username and password are both “ubuntu”. However, the first login to your Raspberry Pi has to be via SSH! First step, find the IP address of your Raspberry Pi device.
Be mindful that if you’re in a corporate or other shared environment, scanning for devices might be frowned upon. With that warning out of the way, let’s use nmap to look for our device. I’m not going to cover usage here, but a quick DuckDuckGo search can point you in the right direction. The server installation image defaults the hostname to “ubuntu”, so look for that.
$ nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24
...
Nmap scan report for ubuntu.attlocal.net (192.168.1.230)
Host is up (0.00036s latency).
...
Once you know where the device is, SSH in and reset your password. Enter “yes” to continue connecting if prompted for the fingerprint.
$ ssh ubuntu@ubuntu.attlocal.net
ubuntu@ubuntu.attlocal.net's password:
You are required to change your password immediately (administrator enforced)
WARNING: Your password has expired.
You must change your password now and login again!
Changing password for ubuntu.
Current password:
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Connection to ubuntu.attlocal.net closed.Now, SSH in once more with your new password, and let’s install Xubuntu!
We’re almost done! Now it’s time to decide: Do you want Xubuntu Core, the minimal Xubuntu base that you can easily customize to your needs, or Xubuntu Desktop, our standard installation option? I’ll be doing installing Core for this guide, but if you want to install Desktop, just replace “xubuntu-core^” with “xubuntu-desktop^”.
Also worth noting, while setting up Xubuntu on the Raspberry Pi, I came across an issue that causes our default login screen to fail. This has been fixed upstream, but to work around this issue now we will be using Slick Greeter for our login screen. Now, let’s get back to the installation. Please note that the caret, ^, is not a typo!
sudo apt update
sudo apt install xubuntu-core^ slick-greeterThis will take a while. Once everything’s installed, the final step is to set Slick Greeter as the login screen. Create /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf with the following contents using your favorite command-line editor.
[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=slick-greeterAnd finally, reboot!
sudo rebootYour Raspberry Pi 4 will now boot into a graphical environment, and you’ll be greeted by Slick Greeter. Login with the password you created earlier, and the Xubuntu desktop will load, same as you’d find outside of the Raspberry Pi.
That’s up to you, but the first thing I recommend is creating a new user. The default Ubuntu user is an administrator, and has a bit more power than you’d normally have on the a desktop installation.
Beyond that, the Pi’s the limit! Have fun, and enjoy running the mouse-based distribution on your mouse-sized computer.
I purchased my Raspberry Pi 4 with funds from my Patreon, so my patrons helped make this project possible. I’ll continue experimenting with the Pi 4, so look forward to even more awesome projects. Thanks everybody!
As promised we’ll try to stick to a tighter schedule this time, so without further ado: the development phase towards Xfce 4.16 has officially started! 
This means that we have a list of features we will try to work on (that is not guaranteed though) and that is detailed on our roadmap page and its subpages. I’ll try to summarize and highlight some (obviously with a focus on the stuff I know better because I’m more involved) of it for you here.
Let’s start with one very important and obvious change: we will drop Gtk2 support with Xfce 4.16. This will have a concrete effect on old Panel plugins or Gtk2 applications that rely on libxfce4ui.
Xfce 4.16 will introduce a new dependency on libgtop to display information about the system (in the “About” dialog). We hope this will also have a positive side-effect on e.g. Panel plugins to standardize on this library.
In the 4.14 cycle we tried to do a 1:1 port of what used to be our Gtk2 desktop environment, avoiding visual changes. In the 4.16 cycle we plan to harmonize the appearance of certain elements that either became inconsistent through the port or already were inconsistent before (e.g. toolbars or inline toolbars).
We will also play with client-side decorations where we feel it makes sense (for instance replacing the so-called XfceTitledDialog, that is used for all settings dialogs with a HeaderBar version). Before anyone gets too excited (both positively or negatively): It is not planned to redesign more complex applications (like Thunar) with Headerbars in 4.16. We will however try to keep the experience and looks consistent, which means gradually moving to client side decorations also with our applications (please note that client side decorations are not the same as HeaderBars!). Through this change e.g. “dark modes” in applications will look good (see the part about the Panel below).
Now before there is a shitstorm about this change I would kindly ask everyone to give us time to figure out what exactly we want to change in this cycle. Also, switching to client-side decorations alone is not a big visual departure – feel free to also dig through the client-side decorations page if you want to read/see more on this.
As mentioned before: no big redesign. But lots and lots of smaller improvements and goodies are planned to up the user experience of the file manager you love!
This includes extending the API for plugins, installing some Thunar actions by default and storing view settings per directory.
Some of the building blocks of what shall be done for the panel is already underway, so I can show off some screenshots in this section (shameless self-advertisement).
As dark modes are all the rage everywhere and it really makes sense for the panel to have one, here it goes. Now you can easily get a dark panel – even with bright themes like Adwaita! With having client side decorations, the window borders of the preferences dialog will also look consistent with the rest of the dialog (remember that Xfwm4 doesn’t – and won’t – support the dark Gtk variant).
The panel’s autohide modes received a “slide out” animation, so it’s more intuitive to understand where the panel went. (We may tweak this feature further or even make it optional, but for the time being it’s there by default.)
The launcher plugin will receive a feature from garcon, i.e. showing the Desktop Actions of a launcher item in its right-click menu (i.e. “Open Private Window” for Firefox). This is really just a feature preview though, the code is in working but very hacky/rough state.
Some other core plugins (workspace switcher, tasklist) will also receive tweaks and improvements.
Especially the display settings shall receive more attention, introducing support for scaled mirror mode (helpful if not all displays share a reasonable resolution) and more.
We may also include our own daemon to talk to colord directly to eradicate the need for xiccd.
“Night light” (as in: a timed function that applies a colorfilter to your display to reduce strain on the eyes) will likely be added to the power manager. (Although if we figure out it’s easier to implement in the settings daemon it may be moved there.) Also some improvements to the panel plugin are planned as well as including a battery histogram in the settings dialog to visualize battery drain.
As mentioned before this cycle is intended to be more lightweight to enable us to “stick to the plan” and get a release to our user base sooner than with the previous two releases. Also keep in mind that we want to renew some of our infrastructure, which will also take away some time.
So now let’s get the 4.15 releases going!