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Weather

Originally written by Bob Schlärmann, this panel plugin shows information about your local weather in the panel, using forecast data provided by met.no.

Attention: Please update to and try the latest version (see below or on the right) before reporting problems. Versions older than the latest and greatest may be maintained and supported by your distribution, but we don't support them - if you create bug reports on the Xfce bug tracker for older versions you will simply be told to update your version of the plugin and the bug report will be closed.


Usage

The first time you open the configuration dialog, the weather plugin automatically configures itself to fetch weather data from a place which should be near you - based on your IP address. It will also try to determine the units used in your country, but you can alter these on the units page.

You can change this location using the Change… button and searching for the city, country, address, monument etc. you're interested in. Only latitude, longitude and altitude will be used for the data requests, so you can change the location name to something you like. There is a further tab for appearance settings and one for customizing data visible in the scrollbox.

On the panel icon, a middle click forces an update, left click brings up a forecast and details page. Right-clicking opens the contextual menu.

There are a lot of tooltips describing the options and values available.

NOTE: To save power, the plugin stops animation and deactivates other CPU-consuming settings when your laptop is on battery. Remember this when you try to change settings, as some results may only be visible when the A/C adapter is attached! If you don't like this feature, there is a hidden setting to turn it off, see the README file.


Known Issues

The temperature and/or other values reported are not correct

In short: Given that the chosen location parameters are correct, this is caused by the quality of the datasource used (met.no), and there is nothing the plugin can do about it.

Long explanation: When the former maintainer started rewriting the plugin to switch from weather.com to another weather data provider, the choice of free data providers was really scarce for the given criteria. The decision was made for met.no, which provides weather data globally. However, that free weather data a bit later only turned out to be forecast data. So in fact, what the 0.8.x versions of the weather plugin show as current weather is actually fake, derived from forecast data. Yes, the weather plugin is cheating! In most cases and for many locations however, that data is sufficiently good. Keep in mind that often values provided by other (even local) providers differ a bit from those at your actual location, some are even more than half an hour old. For some locations though, or for some times/days the results will be quite off from the real temperature. Sorry about that.

Of course, the current author is aware that this is not an optimal solution, and today certainly better solutions are available. Therefore, future 0.9.x versions of the plugin will use data from openweathermap.org. However, work on such a new version has not began yet, and will take a while because it includes other necessary tasks like migration from gtk2 to gtk3.

Text in the forecast window is cut off

If you're using a higher than standard DPI, which you can set with xfce4-appearance-settings (more easily accessible in the Xfce settings dialog), it might happen that some text in the forecast window is cut off. Unfortunately, fixing this would be very tricky and time-consuming, and the current developer doesn't want to spend more time on this. However, this known issue will be fixed in a future 0.9.x version of the plugin, which will need quite a rewrite anyway.

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Icon themes

A few icon themes are included in the distribution package. You can choose them on the appearance tab in the settings dialog. If you want to create your own theme, read the README, it has good explanations.

Here is a collection of links to further icon themes. If you know of more (complete) themes that are not included in this list, please send the developers/maintainers a mail so they can add them.

To add new themes, download them and put them in the proper directory. You can quickly and easily access that proper directory from the appearance tab in the settings dialog, there is a button there to create/open it.


Screenshots

Panel plugin:
Panel plugin

Location settings:
Location options Location search

More options:
Units options Appearance options Scrollbox options

Forecasts:
Forecast - Calendar layout Forecast - Days in rows

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Latest Release

  • xfce4-weather-plugin 0.11.2 released (2024/03/08 10:21)

Read the CHANGELOG

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Source code repository

Reporting Bugs

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