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[Bastian]

Xfce (http://www.xfce.org), a lightweight desktop environment that is used for example in Xububntu, is in the repositories that yum on the XO calls by default (koji). I could install xfdesktop in emulation, but with the emulated screen resolution only part of the desktop was visible. Did somebody give it a shot a on the XO?

Bastian

[info_anarchy]

upon your suggestion, i tried out xfce, and it seems to work well, plenty fast, resolution is fine.  The only limitation seems to be my own understanding of how to configure it

from command line, I ran:
yum install xfdesktop

then, i copied the ~/.xsession-example to ~/.xsession and uncommented the line:
exec xterm

so when i restarted the machine, i got a terminal instead of sugar.  then i ran
xfwm4 &
xfdesktop &

and I got a reasonably working xfce desktop.

my question is: what command am I supposed to use to start xfce?  I obviously did it a sloppy way.  the docs say use startxfce4, but no such script/binary exists with the packages I installed.

i'd love to hear any advice or further progress anyone's made!

[ashtond33]

and I got a reasonably working xfce desktop.

How was it speedwise compared to the default setup? (coming from a person who has yet to receive their xo, and has not yet played with sugar)

[info_anarchy]

the performance was quite good.  the graphics are a bit choppy for some things like resizing a window, but still perfectly usable.
Launching opera seemed a bit faster, but it's really difficult to tell, and that could be subjective.
right now, running xfce and one xfce terminal, I have 78MB free memory, CPU usage of about 2%, and load of 0.08.

as far as I can tell, the neither the brightness or volume keys work outside of sugar, which is unfortunate since I can't switch to grayscale mode - i suspect it's possible to make them work but dunno how - probably some sugar sub-program handles them.

the other obstacle that i've found is that xfce doesn't auto-configure my wireless connection the way sugar does, so I'll need to figure out how to easily manage the wireless card when booting purely into xfce.

[info_anarchy]

k, in my continuing adventuers of substituting xfce for sugar:

i got a wireless manager and made it work.  i did:
yum install wifi-radar

and then edited /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf
and changed the line which said "eth1" to "eth0".

Then, you can call up wifi-radar from the networking menu, and it displays all available networks for you to connect to, and works fine.

[xzela]

Sounds pretty sick, I might try that. However, I'm a bit confused on how you were able to install the xfce windows manager. I think it would be interesting to get a menu screen that allows you to choose which windows manager you're interested in running for that session (sugar, xfce, gnome, etc...). 

[info_anarchy]

also, you can apparently change the brightness simply by sending number values to /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness

for example: echo 15 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness
sets it to full brightness, while echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/dcon-bl/brightness
turns off the backlight.  Interestingly, i think this enables finer brightness increments than the buttons do in sugar, so you might be able to set your screen to use even less power at night by keeping the backlight super dim.

there may be a similar device control for the sound, but I haven't found it.

[moocapiean]

my question is: what command am I supposed to use to start xfce?  I obviously did it a sloppy way.  the docs say use startxfce4, but no such script/binary exists with the packages I installed.

Here's how I installed Xfce4 on my XO:

From the command line, I ran:
yum install xfce4-session xfdesktop xfce-utils xfce-mcs-plugins

I then copied ~/.xsession-example to ~/.xsession and replaced the line:
#exec xterm
with:
exec startxfce4

Well, that should be everything!  If anyone knows the right way to do this, I'd be happy to know!

Edit: Updated yum install command to add xfce-mcs-plugins at suggestion of http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=592.msg8366#msg8366

[moocapiean]

Ok, so I did some more poking around with Xfce4 and found the *real* way to get startxfce4 on the XO:
yum install xfce-utils

I've updated my post above to include the latest way to install Xfce4.  If you followed my original instructions, to fix things, just:
rm /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc /home/olpc/.Xclients

[moocapiean]

k, in my continuing adventuers of substituting xfce for sugar:

i got a wireless manager and made it work.  i did:
yum install wifi-radar

and then edited /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf
and changed the line which said "eth1" to "eth0".

Then, you can call up wifi-radar from the networking menu, and it displays all available networks for you to connect to, and works fine.

Where did you get /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf ?  I installed wifi-radar with yum and it didn't show up.  Could someone post what your wifi-radar.conf looks like?

Thanks in advance!

[info_anarchy]

Thanks for the info on xfce-utils, that did the trick for me.

I assumed /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf got created along with the package, but maybe it's created when you run the program and try to set up a network. Give that a try, but for reference, here's an example (with some values changed):

[DEFAULT]
ifup_required = False
auto_profile_order = MYAPNAME
speak_up = False
scan_timeout = 5
interface = eth0
commit_required = False

[MYAPNAME]
prescript =
use_wpa = no
postscript =
mode = Managed
key =
use_dhcp = yes
security =
channel =


Another thing, I noticed: you usually have to tell wifi-radar to disconnect from the mesh network (which is set up by default) before you can make a new connection.  I think you also have to explicitly set your connection to be in Managed mode, since the default connection is ad-hoc.

[dialectric]

I've got xfce working and just installed the xmms audio player which seems to work fine once double sized.

 yum -y install xmms   

the xmms audio player installer took a while; can't tell exactly how much space it took but seemed to have a lot of dependencies and downloaded a fair amount of stuff. Still at 60% free space w/ xfce and xmms, though, so I've got a bit more space to work with.

xmms player is now in xfce start menu under multimedia
in xmms, right click, choose options -> double size to make the player usable on OLPC

some demo .ogg files are in /usr/share/activities/music

dialectric

[moocapiean]

I've got xfce working and just installed the xmms audio player which seems to work fine once double sized.

 yum -y install xmms   

the xmms audio player installer took a while; can't tell exactly how much space it took but seemed to have a lot of dependencies and downloaded a fair amount of stuff. Still at 60% free space w/ xfce and xmms, though, so I've got a bit more space to work with.

Did you give Audacious a try?  It looks and acts identical to xmms, but requires only 2.9 MB to install whereas xmms requires 14 MB!  I got those sizes from:
yum install package_name
When it asks you if you want to install the package and its dependencies, it'll tell you how much space they'll take up.  By using the -y option, it's harder to see that information since it won't pause waiting for your response.

[moocapiean]

I assumed /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf got created along with the package, but maybe it's created when you run the program and try to set up a network. Give that a try, but for reference, here's an example (with some values changed):

Thanks, running wifi-radar creates the config file.

To stop it from automatically creating the mesh networks, run:
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop

I wonder if it's possible to use NetworkManager (which comes with the XO) instead of wifi-radar...

[kidatari]

XFCE works like a champion for me, is there any way to override Sugar's window manager and run XFCE in a window'ed mode (instead of fullscreen for all apps)?

Thanks to everyone who posted the information!