Things to do on Sabayon 9 Xfce

Sabayon ships the Xfce Desktop Environment bare. The distro doesn't seem to offer whatsoever customized Xfce and forces the user to adjust the DE to his/her liking. Unfortunately, it also drops even some basic things that make the impression bad if missing.

Here are some basic things that need to be added to Sabayon Xfce:

Sound mixer/indicator on Xfce:
Add the mixer plugin to the Xfce panel


Keyboard layout configuration on XFCE. The following plugin needs to be installed:


xfce4-xkb-plugin: http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-xkb-plugin

This plugin offers a keyboard indicator for the Xfce panel and also a gui way to add a new keyboard layout, to configure layout switching options/shortkeys, layout behavior (used globally, on per window or application basis), and some other options.


Multimedia keyboard Volume control on Xfce. The plugin below makes the Xfce Sound Mixer accept commands from the volume up/down multimedia keys on the keyboard:
xfce4-volumed

How to fix mute/unmute through multimedia keys on Xfce:

http://grumbel.blogspot.com/2011/10/fixing-volume-control-in-xfce4.html

How to add calendar and date to Xfce panel:
xfce4-datetime-plugin