Xfce4: Problems with Sound and Screen Locking on ASUS G53S

Question

Hello everyone,
I recently installed Arch for the first time, and decided to use xfce4 for my desktop environment. Everything seems to work well after I followed the instructions given in the wiki, except for the sound and screen-locking functionality. Regarding the sound, I made sure that my user account is added to the audio group, and installed the gstreamer1.0-base-plugins and gstreamer1.0-good-plugins packages. The xfce4-mixer applet starts up without any warnings and recognizes the available devices, but I am still not able to hear any sound. The "Lock Screen" applet simply does nothing upon being clicked. Do you have any ideas as to what I should try in order to fix these problems?
Thank you very much!

Answer 1

To be able to lock the screen you have to install and configure a screen locker or screen saver, e.g. xscreensaver, slock, i3lock, maybe combined with  xautolock. When you use a screen locker and not xscreensaver, XFCE might not recognize it. Then create a symlink in /usr/local/bin/xflock4 or use a shellscript if you need to pass parameters.
My configuration: xautolock with i3lock. /usr/local/bin/xflock4 is this executable shellscript:
#!/bin/sh
xautolock -locknow
xautolock is started in the XFCE autostart with this commandline: xautolock -locker 'i3lock -d -i ~/Bilder/arch/arch-linux-lock.png'
PS: If you like i3lock and need user switching capabilities, I can give you a patch where Ctrl-S calls a custom command (gdmflexiserver by default)
Last edited by progandy (2012-06-17 14:19:12)