Dear friends:
We all know about KDE and Gnome. Some have even heard of Window Maker,
Sawfish, Enlightenment, Icewm and Blackbox, all of which are listed on
Mandrake's graphical login menu and all of which are installed by
default.
Realizing that the days of my AMD k6-2 400 mhrtz with 128 megs of RAM
are numbered, I have been exploring the past week other desktops and
window managers that can give me the full range of Linux, including all
of KDE and Gnome, X and console. I tried all of the above and was not
quite satisfied. And then I discovered, hidden deep in Linux-Mandrake
7.2's own CD's under Graphical Desktops (Other), a wonderful desktop
environment called XFCE. It is a beautifully designed desktop, bold and
original, featuring a toolbar concept (instead of a panel/taskbar) with
pop-up menus for icons and with desktop menus for all of KDE and Gnome
applications. It is very intuitive and allows full configuration and
customization right down to the color of your menu background and menu
text and a full theme manager. And you can get tech support from its
mailing lists. Yet, the whole program is under 20 MB instead of the 127
megs of KDE or Gnome. It launches very fast from the console.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Go to XFCE's home page at
http://www.xfce.org and look at the following snapshots of actual xfce
desktop themes:
1) Five user-contributed snapshots at http://www.xfce.org
2) Ten more user-contributed snapshots at:
http://www.xfce.org/usersnaps.html
3) Twelve more user-contributed snapshots at
http://www.xfce.org/usersnaps2.html
I think you will be very impressed by what you see.
TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS:
If you are interested in trying out XFCE, please do NOT use the by now
old version in LM7.2. Instead, download the latest RH
xfce-3.7.2-1.i386.rpm. That's what I am using.
After installing xfce by rpm or by tar or whatever, be sure to run the
xfce_setup program as USER:
$xfce_setup
It only takes 3 seconds. You can also run the xfce_default script. But I
would recommend not doing so until you are quite certain that you want
xfce as your default desktop, If, for any reason you do end up with xfce
as default and you want to switch, just type, again, as USER,
$xfce_remove
And then you can still keep your xfce settings but are free to use any
other desktop or window manager of your choice.
WARNING for Linux-Mandrake users (perhaps for other distros as well):
Since XFCE is not listed on the graphical login menu, you will need to
access it from the console. When you do, please remember to type the
SINGLE word:
$startxfce
That is, NOT "startx xfce". There is an apparent and very mysterious bug
in Mandrake which causes "startx xfce" to launch the ICEWM window
manager INSTEAD of xfce. So, please remember the one word command as
user:
$startxfce
Well, that's it. Hope you give XFCE a try. It's well worth it. And it's
a damn shame that Linux Mandrake does not install it by default. If you
like it, you might wish to let them know how you feel about it.
Benjamin
--
Sher's Russian Web
http://www.websher.net
Benjamin and Anna Sher
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
