I have xfce-4.4.1 installed from the CentOS 5 distro. I want to set up separate configurations for when my laptop is hooked to an external monitor, which has 1600x1200 resolution vs the 1024x768 of the laptop screen. I set XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_CACHE_HOME to .config_external and .cache_external (for the external monitor) but then I found that thunar would crash immediately on startup. I tried with a fresh configuration with the same result. Thunar works fine if I rename .cache_external to .cache and unset XDG_CACHE_HOME. So either I am doing something wrong or thunar is not reading the XDG_CACHE_HOME variable correctly. Any suggestions? Tony
You must use absolute paths for XDG_CACHE_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
And this one is invalid then... :-)
In my opinion this is a bug. Absolute paths may be a workaround but why would this be a resolution: other XFCE apps dont require absolute paths for XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_CACHE_HOME as far as I can tell. I could not find documentation of this point (perhaps I overlooked it) and there are no error messages. Its by no means obvious to the user that 1) Thunar requires absolute paths 2) That the cause of the Thunar crash is related to this issue. I think the path issue should be addressed.
While it would be possible to do this, it would make Xfce incompatible with other applications (i.e. GLib/KDE based applications). Currently all applications implementing the desktop basedir spec require absolute paths, which makes sense and is consistent.