XFCE

From MEPIS Documentation Wiki

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems (such as Linux or BSD) developed and maintained since 1996 by Olivier Fourdan, a French IT production engineer, and his colleagues. Designed for productivity, Xfce loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.

It can be used in place of, or alongside, other desktop managers such as KDE and Gnome; it is included in some distributions (FreeBSD, Slackware, Xubuntu, etc.) as the default.

1 Components
2 Installation: MEPIS 7
3 Installation: MEPIS 6.5
4 Hints for Use
5 Links

[edit]

Components

Xfce 4.4 contains the following standard components:

  Window manager      Xfwm
  File manager        Xffm/Thunar
  Widget toolkit      GTK+
  Terminal emulator   Xfterm4
  Text editor	      Mousepad
  Video player	      Xfmedia
  Audio player	      Xfmedia
  CD burners	      Xfburn
  CD ripper	      GRip 
  Image viewer	      GQView
  Office suite	      OpenOffice.org
  Web browser	      Mozilla Firefox 
  E-mail client       Mozilla Thunderbird

For descriptions and screen captures of Xfce components, see this list.

[edit]

Installation: MEPIS 7

For a simple way to quickly set up Xfce 4 (actually 4.3.99), install:

xfce4

This package is a meta-package: it depends on the core packages of the Xfce4 desktop environment and recommends some extra Xfce4 packages. If you later just want to pick and choose the core components then feel free to remove this package.

[edit]

Installation: MEPIS 6.5

There are two ways to install Xfce.

-- A partial install that lets you get an idea of Xfce can be carried out by installing two packages:

    xfce4
    xubuntu-default-settings

This will allow you to see and use Xfce 4.3.9. It will be largely functional. One optional package to consider is thunar, the lean Xfce file management package.

-- For a full install of Xfce 4.4, you can use Xfce's graphic installer, which will allow you to install the most recent stable version. It is a complicated process, because many development files need to be chased down and installed.

Fortunately, an excellent visual guide has been put together by Saist that walks you through the many steps to install xfce 4.4 on MEPIS 6.5. NOTE: this guide will not work for Xfce 4.4.1.

For troubleshooting installation, see links below.

[edit]

Hints for Use

If the installation was successful, you should find "Xfce Session" as one of the options under Sessions on the KDM log-in page.
If the GUI crashes when you try to run an application, hit Ctrl-Alt-Bksp to restart the desktop manager of your choice (under Sessions).

[edit]