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XFce Desktop 4 Released
BladeMelbourne writes "After thorough RC testing, version 4.0 of my favourite 'lite' desktop environment has been released. Sporting purty eye candy, XFce is leaps and bounds ahead of the legacy XFce 3.8.18 release, whilst retaining it's performance.
Release notes are available, as well as binary and source packages. Bring that PII back to life!" While it may not have all the bells and whistles, it's pretty clean looking.
I run TWM on my server and OpenBox on my iBook. Smaller window managers leave more ram and more proc. time for the processes that matter.
Try comparing compile times of the kernel between TWM and KDE3, no surprise which will win.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The desktop environment / window manager is irrelevant in this case. You want X to take care of that. man XF86Config and do a search ('/') for "Virtual"... It'll make the virtual desktop as large as your video card can handle (usually the same as the video card's max resolution). You'll get your movable window.
I use it. Right now, I'm using it on a dual 450MHz Xeon machine with 1GB of RAM, and it's just snappy. At home, I've run it on a 133MHz 486 with 32MB of RAM, and it's just snappy. At work, I run it on 2.0GHz P-4s with 512MB of RAM, and it's snappier. :)
In short, as long as you can run X, you can run XFce. I really like it because of its extensible and easy configuration (an uncommon combination, unfortunately), in addition to its low memory and CPU footprint.
It's been in the tree ( or at least the ~x86 tree ) since at least thismorning.
;-)
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curious@clyde x11-wm$ emerge -s xfce4-base
Searching...
[ Results for search key : xfce4-base ]
[ Applications found : 1 ]
* xfce-base/xfce4-base
Latest version available: 4.0.0
Latest version installed: 3.99.4
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I'll probably be excommunicated from the Gentoo community now for being 0.00.6 of a release behind.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
I advise all RedHat users (downloading XFce RPMs) not to download and install gtk2-2.2.4-1rh9.i386.rpm from the XFce SourceForge page - it prevented my gdm graphical greeter from loading the login screen.
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf for half an hour like me, changing gdm greeter themes.
The error message was: "The theme for the graphical greeter is corrupt. It does not contain definition for the username/password entry element." I clicked OK several times, but the error message stayed there.
If you run into troubles, revert to an older package like gtk2-2.2.2-0.ximian.6.3.i386.rpm or gtk2-2.2.1-4.i386.rpm
Dont play with
Mike
Here is a mirror for the png's.
XFce screens
LiteStep, GeoShell, bb4win, and countless others are available as shell replacements for windows. I have been using LiteStep for about 5 years, and it even made win98 look stable. Very fast, very configurable, modular, and much prettier than the plain default explorer startmenu.
ShellFront and Desktopian are great places to start.
It works just fine under XP as a shell. If you want to test it without replacing your current shell, just launch it from the command line with the -desktop option.
There are a few:
There's also progman.exe*, shipped with windows. I've heard tell of a "winfile" also supposedly built in, but I don't know anything about that.
I've tried a few of these, but some of them (Blackbox) seemed to take more resources than Explorer! Another caveat, the ports of *nix windows managers retain the *nix settings system, so setting them up can be a pain if you don't have experience with them.
*Yes, that is progman of Win16 fame.
What hasn't been mentioned yet is the xfce plugin for fvwm. I kinda liked xfce, but really liked fvwm but didn't want to spend the time customizing, and then I find that there's a plugin to load into fvwm and suddenly I have the xfce taskbar. It's really the best of both worlds. Fvwm's efficient management of the desktop, and a nice toolbar to keep everything organized. Although I suppose the fact that three of the buttons on the taskbar get set to different sizes and colors of xterms says something about me....
I've used 3 before using xfce4/cvs and xfree 4.(2/3? can't remember) and the hardest part was getting the /etc/X11/XF86Config file right to make everything happy. Once I got that working, I had a complaint that overlays/opengl don't behave due to my graphics card (damn you matrox) but everything else was happy.
s0be
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
This comment must have been written by someone (and modded up by
someone else) who doesn't know much about XFCE. XFCE is not just a
window manager, but a fully integrated, mouse-configurable desktop
including wm, panel (with panel applets), taskbar, pager and graphical
file manager (including Samba browsing support), extensive drag'n'drop
capabilities including for printing, central configuration menus
including sound and mouse setup. It's based on Gtk 2.x and
freedesktop.org standards (and thus with a high degree especially of
Gnome and KDE interoperability).
Think of XFCE as a desktop environment without the redundant middleware
layers (DCOP/KParts/arts etc. in KDE, Corba/Bonobo/esd/Gconf etc.i in
Gnome) that make both KDE and Gnome bloated and slow, and which are
hardly used by third party applications outside main Gnome and KDE
distributions at all.
So it amazes me that the previous commentator thinks XFCE is "not a
desktop". On the contrary, XFCE is a desktop done architecturally right,
similar to, for example, the desktops of AmigaOS, RiscOS, Macintosh
Classic and BeOS. While both the XFCE panel (with its legacy to the user
interface of the CDE panel) and new file manager could still need some
usability improvement, the architectural foundation is excellent.
XFCE is also the proof that a X11- and GNU/Linux-/BSD-based desktop
computer can be as fast and efficient as one would normally expect from
a Unix-like system. In other words, it's as fast as a basic window
manager setup with Window Maker/icewm/fvwm2 while providing a fully
integrated desktop that doesn't require users to run the shell or edit
configuration files.
(A prominent XFCE user and supporter is, btw., Alan Cox.)
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
It's all matter of scrolling distance setup. If you have edgescroll set to 50-100%, it's real pain in the ass. Set scroll to 5% and the fact that your screen shifts when you touch the edge with your cursor becomes a great feature instead of a problem.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
When every program makes the scrollbars look and behave differently even the most flexible of mind can get a bit worn out.
Oh, you mean how just on a default Windows XP/Office XP desktop there are 4 different kinds of scrollbars, and three different kinds of toolbars? The idea that the MS UI is more standardised than the linux GUI is ridiculous. Every new version of office introduces it's own new toolkit, often breaking existing UI guidelines.
that is why, we shoud never teach a product but a concept.
I used to run XFCE 3.x on a P120 w/120 megs of RAM. KDE wouldn't run, but XFCE acted like it belonged there. Oh, and use FreeBSD. It's a bit more mem efficient.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I use it everywhere. It works, it does just the things one wants a desktop environment to do, out of the box, and it's light and fast, as advertised. It's basically Macintosh simplicity come to Linux, without the sluggishness and memory usage of Macintosh system software. XFCE3 looked a bit too much like CDE, but XFCE4 looks nicer in addition to working well.
I am running Gnome 2.2 on a pentium 2. Works great. All you need to do is add a bit of memory.