The JLAB Cult of XFCE

Tired of window manager bloat? Tired of editing 16 AnotherLevel fvwm2rc just to make a mintor change in your root menu? Tired of the latest Desktop (GNOME/KDE) (see below for why you shouldn't use GNOME) taking to much screen real estate, using up all your memory and then crashing. Wasted to much time configuring your themes, and ended up with an ugly desktop anyway because your a physicist, not an artist?

Then renounce false idols, embrace the Cult of XFCE and get to work. Don't be the last on your wing!

What is XFCE

XFCE, the "Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment", is toolbar, window manager and several other easy to use and configure utilities that can (and shall) replace your current window manager and desktop environment. It has a panel

that looks a bit like CDE, but is much easier to configure. It includes a drag and drop file manager, a clock/calendar, and the ability to configure the backdrop, mouse and sounds. (But just enough without bloat)

Installation

First install the XFCE package. Under RedHat 6.0, this is done by simply doing

    rpm -Uvh xfce-3.1.2-1.i386.rpm

Under RedHat 5.2, some libraries need to be installed. The commands

rpm -e gtk+-devel glib-devel
rpm -Uvh glib-1.2.1-1.i386.rpm glib10-1.0.6-4.1.i386.rpm \
         gtk+-1.2.1-7.i386.rpm gtk+10-1.0.6-4.1.i386.rpm \
	 gtk+-devel-1.2.1-7.i386.rpm glib-devel-1.2.1-1.i386.rpm \
	 xfce-3.1.2-1.i386.rpm

will install the new gtk and glib libraries plus keep the old versions installed for compatibility with other RedHat 5.2 applications. The above RPM's may be downloaded by clicking on the filenames or by copying from the NFS directory wood.jlab.org:/d1/RPM/xfce.

On other versions of Linux or other operatings systems see the XFCE download page for other binaries or source code.

After installing XFCE, login to the user account that you will normally work in and type xfce_setup. Then start/restart X windows.

Number of XFCE converts:

July 30, 1999	1
August 2, 1999	3
August 5, 1999	5
August 6, 1999	6 + 1 laptop
August 9, 1999	7 + 1 laptop
August 24, 1999	9 + 1 laptop

Don't use GNOME

Dont' use GNOME because one day you will need to update what seems to be a small inconspicuos file and so you do and then the world comes crashing down on you because that one file was needed to decide the appropriate texture for the left upper menu bar in some program called gchkdgts on the third sunday of every fifth month, and then because this texture, which of course you could care less about, and in fact you don't even know what texture actually "means", you just like the way it rolls of your tongue, cannot be found the sounds which once populated your desktop, such as the "ping!" and the "plopt!" will no longer work and your gnome_applet_manual_browser_file_tree_super_duper applet will exit with a segfault, signal 11, caused by a stack overflow in the gtksmallroundbuttonwiththecutecurves library therfore essentially causing GNOME to fail on account of the rain.

Michael Katz-Hyman

Last update 7 October 1999

saw@jlab.org