Table of Contents
Xfce
Xfce is a GTK+2 lightweight desktop environment. Quoting the official site, Xfce “aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly”. While coming with a little less features than either KDE or Gnome, it contains a full range of lightweight applications for most of your needs. Having a smaller memory print and cpu usage makes it a good candidate for low-end workstations or for laptops, improving your battery life.
Installation
Xfce is part of Slackware installation media. The latest stable release, Slackware 14, comes with the latest version of Xfce, 4.10. During the installation process, please make sure that you select the Xfce package group. It gets a new package folder under “/slackware/xfce
”.
Adding Xfce to an existing installation is straightforward:
darkstar~# slackpkg install xfce
Configuration
Startup
If you wish to make it your default starting environment, you can specify so at installation time. The choice can be made at the “SELECT DEFAULT WINDOW MANAGER FOR X” step.
After the system is already installed, you can switch between window managers by running the xwmconfig script as root and selecting Xfce:
darkstar~# xwmconfig
Looks
Xfce comes with a bundle of themes that changes the way Xfce looks and feels.
Changing the current theme is as easy as going to Settings → Appearance and selecting one of the preinstalled themes.
More themes, backgrounds, mouse cursors and other goodies are available at http://xfce-look.org/
Keyboard setup
If you wish to configure your keyboard setup under Xfce, please visit the Xfce keyboard layout page.
Additional Plugins
SlackBuilds.org contains a wide range of Xfce plugins that aim at extending Xfce's functionality.
External links
- Xfce 4.10 tour: http://www.xfce.org/about/tour
- Xfce FAQ: http://wiki.xfce.org/faq
- Xfce Looks: http://xfce-look.org/