Entries tagged as xfce
Xfce 4.12 not suspending on laptop-lid close

Xfce 4.12 as default in Ubuntu/Xubuntu 18.04 LTS did not suspend a laptop after closing the lid. In fact running
xfce4-power-manager --quit ; xfce4-power-manager --no-daemon --debug
showed that xfce4 wasn't seeing a laptop lid close event at all.
To the contrary acpi_listen
nicely finds button/lid LID close
and button/lid LID open
events when folding the screen and opening it up again.
As so often the wonderful docs / community of Arch Linux to the rescue. This forum thread from 2015 received the correct answer in 2017:
Xfce4 basically recognizes systemd and thus disables its built-in power-management options for handling these "button events" (but doesn't tell you so in the config UI for power-manager). Systemd is configured to handle these events by default (/etc/systemd/logind.conf
has HandleLidSwitch=suspend
but for unknown reasons decides not to honor that).
So best is to teach Xfce4 to handle the events again as in pre-systemd times:
xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -s false
Now the UI options will work again as intended and the laptop suspends on lid close and resumes on lid open.
Update:
07.01.19: Changed XFCE -> Xfce as per Corsac's suggestion in the comments below. Thank you!
Background info:
The name "XFCE" was originally an acronym for "XForms Common Environment", but since that time it has been rewritten twice and no longer uses the XForms toolkit. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as "XFCE", but rather as "Xfce". The developers' current stance is that the initialism no longer stands for anything specific. After noting this, the FAQ on the Xfce Wiki comments "(suggestion: X Freakin' Cool Environment)".
(quoted from Wikipedia's Xfce article also found in the Xfce docs FAQ).
Firefox asking to be made the default browser again and again

Firefox on Linux can develop the habit to (rather randomly) ask again and again to be made the default browser. E.g. when started from Thunderbird by clicking a link it asks but when starting from a shell all is fine.
The reason to this is often two (or more) .desktop
entries competing with each other.
So, walkthrough: (GOTO 10 in case you are sure to have all the basics right)
update-alternatives --display gnome-www-browser
should both show firefox for you. If not
the entry to fix the preference on /usr/bin/firefox
.
Check (where available)
that the "Internet Browser" is "Firefox".
Check (where available)
that anything containing "html" points to Firefox (or is left at a non-user set default).
Check (where available)
that you get firefox.desktop
. If not run
If you are running Gnome, check
and the same for https
.
Run
and remove all entries that contain something like userapp-Firefox-<random>.desktop
.
Run
and delete these files or move them away.
Done.
Once you have it working again consider disabling the option for Firefox to check whether it is the default browser. Because it will otherwise create those pesky userapp-Firefox-<random>.desktop
files again.
Configuring Linux is easy, innit?
Fix Umlauts in the XFCE Terminal

The XFCE Terminal has the weird issue of sometimes showing question marks (?) instead of German Umlauts (äöüÄÖÜ) although they work fine in any other stock XFCE application (e.g. the default editor "mousepad").
The solution to this can be found on the XFCE Forums but it took me quite some time to find it. It was difficult to find a suitable search query to dig out that page. Google turns up a lot of irrelevant stuff on "XFCE Terminal question marks"...

The problem with Umlauts (and other 8bit ASCII characters) showing as question marks arises if the user has no LANG variable set.
A simple
resolves the issue. Put that into ~/.bashrc or any other place suitable in your distribution.
Gentoo users may want to
echo "LANG=en_US" >> /etc/env.d/02locale
env-update
exit
source /etc/profile
to set the LANG variable system-wide.
So keywords, dear Google: Umlaute, deutsch, Fragezeichen, kaputt, falsch, broken, display, zeigt, charset, Zeichensatz