Rubénerd!

Two machines I've installed the Xfce spin of Fedora 15 on hang after logging in with GDM after the second boot. I haven't the foggiest idea why, but creating a new account fixes it.

In a nutshell, after logging in with GDM on the second boot, the Xfce desktop loads including the panels, but then the system freezes. The cursor can still be moved, but all clicks are ignored.

On a hunch, I...

1. used the classic CTRL+ALT+F2 just before GDM starts to bypass xorg
2. logged in as root
3. created a new account separate from the one created during installation
4. rebooted and logged in with the new account in GDM

Multiple restarts later, and Xfce is working just fine.

This leads me to believe that for some reason on my hardware (a homebrew MSI system and a ThinkPad X40) the Xfce preference files are somehow corrupted when being installed. By creating a new account those files are necessarily recreated when Xfce is started from that account, and those files are free of the bugs. I have no proof of this, but its all I can think of right now.

I use FreeBSD and Arch Linux on some systems because I like building things from scratch, but for getting up and running with full drive encryption, SELinux and [generally] graphics hardware, nothing gets up and running quicker than Fedora, from my experience. Of course by seeding design decisions to someone else, it also means tracking down the reason for bugs like this is harder, though I suppose one could level the same arguments against Mac OS X or Windows even more so.

For a bit of a change in Xfce on my FreeBSD machines I've decided to eschew the Tango Project iconset and use the Gnome Desktop icons available from the ports collection:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/gnome-icons
# make install clean
# echo "Grilled Cheese Sandwiches"

They're very classy and quite minimalistic which really appeals to me, and even though I use Xfce instead of Gnome which the icons were originally designed for, they work smashingly. Did I just say "smashingly?"

Now if only the folder icons weren't that dull sand colour we'd be in business!

Given it's been over a month since this milestone it almost seems silly posting about it here, but for some reason I never got around to doing it. I blame the current financial crisis and several weeks of bad hair days. Yeah, that works.

If you're as avid a user as me of Xfce, the latest 4.6 release which I blogged about back in March has been updated to 4.6.1. There have been quite a substantial list of improvements and additions including more comprehensive I18n support and many bug fixes.

Now if you speak Polish, Japanese, Galician, Portuguese, Norwegian and/or Spanish, you don't have an excuse any more to try this beautiful piece of software!

If you're a FreeBSD user like me, you can access 4.6.1 from the ports collection.

Thanks go out as always to Olivier Fourdan and the team for their tireless effort on this project. Show 'em how it's done guys :).

Much to my excitement, one of my favourite free and open source software projects finally hit the big 4.6 release recently after over two years of development, and I've finally had a sliver of time this afternoon to take a look at it and type up a quick review.

I'm glowingly talking about the lightweight, zippy and very attractive Xfce Desktop Environment for Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems. Xfce is perfect for older systems with more modest specs, and for people like me who value clean design even on fast hardware.

Because my ultra-souped up FreeBSD desktop tower is back in Singapore, I installed the latest release fresh from the pacman system for Arch Linux on my little Armada M300, a 600MHz subnotebook with 320MiB of RAM. I'm typing this as we speak in Firefox inside the Xfce environment. Yes, it even runs beautifully on this machine!

I could go on and on listing the new features, bug fixes and changes, but the Xfce team have already done a great job documenting these. Instead, I thought I'd briefly talk about the thinks I've noticed and liked so far.

Click for the original size

First of all, the design looks much more professional now out of the box than version 4.4.x. It has a slick default background and an integrated panel which I moved to the top of the screen given I'm a Mac user. I also use the ThinIce GTK+ theme that comes with the Gnome theme pack, and the Tango Desktop Project's iconset.

Given I use other desktop systems one of the most nagging problems for me had always been Xfce shows you the Xfce Menu of launchable applications when you right click the Desktop. Now it presents you with a clean list of Desktop related functions as well as the Xfce Menu at the bottom if you still want it. Icons on the Desktop also behave more predictably as well: you can now select a series of icons by dragging your cursor.

Visually a new feature is the redesigned window manager titlebars, unfortunately this is the one feature I'm not sure I like. The default appearance now looks a bit too Windows Vista-ish for my tastes; I always thought having the buttons off-centre at the top instead of in the middle looked really silly. Still, Xfce does make it easy to change them to a dizzying array of other styles in the Window Manager settings manager pane. I use the B5 BeOS style title bars which you can see below because I use keyboard shortcuts instead of the widgets on window titlebars anyway. It's clean and minimalistic, and matches the ThinIce theme perfectly.

One of the great things about Xfce is it's lightweight but still has a comprehensive Settings Manager system like Gnome and KDE. Many of these panes have been reorganised and redesigned, the most notable of these is the Desktop pane which lets you change backgrounds and colours much more easily than before.

These are the things I can show you visually, under the covers there have also been some huge changes. The mixer application now uses the Gstreamer audio framework by default which makes it really easy to get going with audio applications (WWR streaming anyone?). The Thunar file manager now supports encrypted volumes! I could go on and on.

If you're on FreeBSD this version of Xfce is in the ports system, as it is in the Arch Linux pacman repositories. If you're a Gnome user in particular, give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised!

A huge thanks to Olivier Fourdan and all the contributers for this amazing software. The love and care you put into this project shows.

In the interests of disclosure, you may have noticed the old graphic I had on the side of the site here promoting FreeBSD and the KDE desktop has been replaced. I figured that while I really liked the KDE 3.5.x desktop, I don't use the 4.x desktop on any of my current machines. Not sure whether that will change, I'm presuming it will, but for now I'm really happy with Xfce. The Xfce desktop is simple, lightweight, and fits all my GTK+ apps nicely.

In it's place I'm using some Spread FreeBSD graphics which [surprisingly] link to http://www.spreadbsd.org/, a BSD server and desktop advocacy site as well as an advocacy site for the BSD licences themselves.

If you like FreeBSD or PC-BSD (the desktop) you can register for a free affiliate account too which will allow you to keep track of the number of visits your site has generated. You don't get any money, just a warm fuzzy feeling that you're helping to spread FreeBSD awareness and whatnot, even if (like me) you're not Bill Kurtis.

As I increasingly use and rely upon Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD (and GNU/Linux) on desktops, I tend to forget at times that I'm using a sophisticated server installed locally to generate my graphical environments, namely X11. And just as with any server I can call it up from another machine and use its services.

X11 was built specifically to serve graphical applications over networks, and can still be used in this way by employing SSH on the client, and installing the desired applications on the server. My primary desktop is a DIY running FreeBSD 7.0 (more on my debacle with Debian GNU/Linux in a later post!), and my primary mobile machine is an original generation MacBook Pro.

USELESS ASIDE: Given the fact it's about time for my half-yearly move back to Adelaide, Australia I've been contemplating how best to access my desktop machines here in Singapore using my MacBook Pro which I'll be taking with me. These are the things that keep my up at night.

To access desktop applications on a remote Unix-like machine on your Mac, fire up your Terminal and use the regular SSH command, but with the -X flag:

% ssh -X [USERNAME]@[HOST MACHINE]
% Password: [PASSWORD]

Provided you have installed X11.app from either your Tiger or Leopard install DVD; or better yet downloaded the latest community build of Xquartz from MacOSForge; you should now be able to enter in the name of a graphical application and have it appear!

Tunneled FreeBSD X11 apps running on Mac OS X through SSH

For example, I entered % xfce4-panel and used that to launch some of my favourite apps, as you can see above. Over my local home gigabit ethernet connection and even at Starbucks on the free Singapore public WiFi networks the applications felt like they were running on my local machine.

You may recognise the Xfce panel from my previous post on Xfce and Openbox. There's a reason for that; I'm using the panel remotely from the same machine. Ain't [computer] science wonderful?

Plus then you can do things like run local Mac applications and the remote X11 applications on the same screen:

Xfce's Thunar file manager compared to Leopard's Finder

What started as a mini series on the Xfce Desktop Environment on my university intranet has evolved into an open ended exploration on my public blog, and I'm having lots of fun doing it! Scroll down to the end of this post to view links to the previous posts in the series.

Part of the Xfce desktop environment is Xfwm, the Xfce window manager. Xfwm provides sophisticated and pretty composting effects such as drop shadows and alpha transparency on windows and menus, while still using less memory and power than competing desktop window managers. Despite this, for much slower machines even Xfwm can be overkill.

ASIDE: "Window managers" draw the widgets, title bars, resize handles and other elements onto application windows. "Desktop environments" such as KDE, GNOME and Xfce bundle their own window managers along with software developed specifically for their environments, such as Thunar for Xfce.

Enter Openbox, again! Openbox is an extensible, standards compliant, very minimalistic window manager that can be used by itself or in place of a desktop environment's default window manager to further reduce memory and processor resources. The separate obconf utility provides a nice graphical control panel you can use to switch themes and adjust settings.

Openbox running in Xfce with the bundled "Mikachu" theme

Most reputable package managers carry both Openbox and obconf, check your distribution's repositories. To install them on my favourite BSD flavours for example:

FreeBSD ports system or package
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/openbox && make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/obconf && make install clean
or:
# pkg_add -rv openbox
# pkg_add -rv obconf

NetBSD pkgsrc
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wm/openbox && make install clean clean-depends
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wm/obconf && make install clean clean-depends

Now we want to kill the active Xfwm process in Xfce and open our glorious Openbox replacement. Fire up your Terminal and enter:

% killall xfwm4 ; openbox & exit

It really is smaller in every sense of the word isn't it? To make sure Openbox is used by default whenever you start Xfce, quit Xfce and check "Save sessions for future login".

Don't worry, CC looks pretty confused herself!

You'll also notice that the "Openbox Configuration Manager" has added itself to the Xfce Settings menu! Click on it and have fun with all the different themes, button positions, font sizes and arrangement settings.

Related posts

• Long live the Cobind Desktop 2008.06.21
• Fun with Xfce part 3: Themes 2008.06.18
• Fun with Xfce part 2: Setting up 2008.06.17
• Fun with Xfce part 1: Introduction 2008.06.15
• Sleek Openbox in KDE on FreeBSD 2008.03.19

This post is part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I'm republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

In part one of my Fun with Xfce series I talked about why I like using Xfce to begin with, and in part two I explained how to install the complete desktop environment from scratch using FreeBSD ports and pkgsrc, as well as some free GNU/Linux distros that use it by default. In this post I'll be showing you how I spruce up Xfce to look much more spiffy, learned from many hours of experimentation!

When you run Xfce for the first time, it does look a bit bare. I revel in this; it's like getting a blank but very flexible canvas to change as I see fit! Assuming you installed the complete desktop using a "meta" package or port, the first thing you can do is browse the built in themes and options. Right click your desktop or click the Xfce icon in the lower dock to bring up the Desktop Menu, then navigate to Settings and click Settings Manager. The control panels you'd be interested in are Desktop, User Interface and Window Manager. They're extremely well laid out and very self explanatory.

If every computer system had configuration panels that were as intuitive as Xfce's, I imagine the world would be in a much less stressed place!

Settings windows with the default Xfce 4.4.2 themes & decorations

While Xfce does come with a beautiful collection of polished window manager decorations (aka title bar styles), personally I don't like the built in themes as much and am not a big fan of the lone icon set. Fortunately because Xfce uses GTK+ you can use many of the same themes and icon sets developed for the much larger GNOME desktop with no problems. Kick arse!

First to the themes: personally I like using the Clearlooks theme engine that is used by Ubuntu. It looks very polished and doesn't have as much of a chiseled look as some of the default themes. In the FreeBSD ports system there are two different versions available which caught me out the first time! Once you've installed them, go back to your User Interface settings screen and choose Clearlooks from the list box.

For the fancy version, as famously used in Ubuntu:
# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/gtk-murrina-fancy-clearlooks
# make install clean
or: # pkg_add -rv gtk-murrina-fancy-clearlooks

For the older, Bluecurve inspired version:
# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/clearlooks
# make install clean
or: # pkg_add -rv clearlooks

As for icons, I'm a huge fan of Tango Desktop Project who's stated aim is to "help create a consistent graphical user interface experience for free and Open Source software". The icons they've developed look very swish, scale beautifully and use lots of green and blue which I prefer to the default Xfce brown iconset. On FreeBSD you'll want to grab two Tango ports, then click the Icons tab in the User Interface settings window.

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/icons-tango
# make install clean
or: # pkg_add -rv icons-tango

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/icons-tango-extras
# make install clean
or: # pkg_add -rv icons-tango-extras

Just by installing Clearlooks and the Tango iconset, you'll be rewarded with a much prettier desktop!

Before...

After...

Okay I cheated in that second shot, I set a desktop background and changed the window decoration to Katiola which blends the menu and title bar to make it look more OS X-ish.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

This post is part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I'm republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

In my Fun with Xfce part one post I explained that I find Xfce such a pleasure to use because it's fast, lightweight and has natural visually consistency with my GTK+ apps without the bloat of GNOME, while still providing a cohesive desktop experience with functional applications. In this post I'll be explaining how to install it.

ASIDE: If you want to give Xfce a try without going through the process of using a package manager and configuring Xorg, the Zenwalk and Xubuntu GNU/Linux distributions have Xfce as their default desktops, plus they have very slick installers and are very newbie friendly.

What's so liberating about using Xfce as opposed to GNOME or KDE is how lightweight it is and how few dependencies it has in comparison. This is especially noticeable on computers with less storage space, and slower machines which can literally take an entire day to build a desktop environment from source, if that's your preferred installation method. Of course this means that Xfce is missing some features, but I don't find myself missing any of them.

My experience with package managers are really limited to the FreeBSD ports system and NetBSD's pkgsrc (on NetBSD and Slackware Linux), so these will be the systems I'll talk about here. Most *nix package management systems have Xfce though, and most have an easy to install "meta" package that contains the whole desktop.

To install a complete Xfce desktop on FreeBSD (I'm assuming you already have X installed and configured), update your ports tree (visit the Using the Ports System chapter in the FreeBSD handbook if you need help) then compile and install. Alternatively you can install the pre-compiled package which is generally up to date with Xfce's releases (currently at 4.4.2).

# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4
# make install clean
or ...
# pkg_add -rv xfce4

On NetBSD and/or if you're using pkgsrc, the procedure is just as easy:

# cd /usr/ports/meta-pkgs/xfce4
# make install clean clean-depends

Then it's simply a matter of adding exec startxfce4 to your .xinitrc file in your home directory; create it from scratch if it doesn't exist. Make sure to comment out any other lines related to other desktops and/or window managers you might have installed (but obviously keep lines you may have added to have X11 applications start automatically when you launch X).

Typing startx at this point will start X and your new Xfce desktop!

ASIDE: If you haven't aliased your machine's hostname to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts file, Xfce will give you a warning message. You can safely ignore it, but it can get irritating after a while! Edit your host file to fix this.

In the next post I'll be explaining how I pretty up Xfce by adding new themes and icon sets, and how to make it look like other desktops. Stay tuned.

This post is going to be part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I'm republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

You may have noticed a few weeks ago I announced that I was moving my primary machine over to GNOME from KDE, mostly because the applications I use most heavily on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are all GTK+ based and it seemed silly to run them in a Qt system. I'm a sucker for eye candy and visual consistency.

Well here I am now typing this on my newly reinstalled FreeBSD, Xfce desktop and it's running great.

You can be forgiven if you're new to the world of Linux, BSD and X11 in general if you've never heard of Xfce; it certainty has been given far less publicity than the heavyweights GNOME and KDE despite it actually being born around the same time. Unlike GNOME and KDE which strive to be the ultimate desktops with all the bells and whistles, Xfce is designed to be lightweight and fast while still being a usable and complete desktop environment out of the box (as it were). This means unlike vanilla window managers such as Fluxbox it also includes a file manager, desktop background and icon support, graphical configuration, panels and so forth. A full list of included goodies is maintained on the Xfce projects site.

The real kicker for me is that as with GNOME, Xfce uses GTK+, meaning all my most used applications such as Gnumeric, Abiword, Mozilla Firefox, The Gimp, Inkscape, Thunderbird and the X11 version of VIM all look really slick and match the rest of the system. I'm a sucker for eye candy and visual consistency. Wait, I already said that.

In the coming days I'll be posting many more entries about my experiences with Xfce including how I've customised and used it and some other tidbits I've picked up along the way. Stay tuned :-).