Xfce

About Xfce

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.

Xfce embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. It consists of a number of components that provide the full functionality one can expect of a modern desktop environment. They are packaged separately and you can pick among the available packages to create the optimal personal working environment.

Another priority of Xfce is adhereance to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org.

Installation

Before to start compile Xfce you need to know:

First, you need have a proper configuration for Xorg.

Second, check that you have the USE flags for the correct functioning of Desktop environment. You can set to desktop in you profile:

eselect profile set 2

Check this is ok with:

eselect profile list

Or put this flags in your /etc/make.conf:

USE="-minimal dbus consolekit jpeg libnotify lock session startup-notification svg thunar udev X"

Now we can install Xfce, emerge the meta-package:

emerge -av xfce-base/xfce4-meta

Running Xfce

There are different ways to start Xfce:

• Simply typing the command startxfce4
• From Display Managers (Slim, GDM, KDM, etc.)
• Add exec startxfce4 to your .xinitrc in your home directory and simply use startx.
• Configure your shell profile to start Xfce.

See the most common way to start environment, configuring ~/.xinitrc:

The proper way to launch Xfce from the terminal is the startxfce4 command:

echo "exec ck-launch-session startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc

Note that ck-launch-session is needed by Xfce for shutting down, suspend, automonting, etc. and other applications may not work without consolekit. So the next step is add consolekit to default runlevel, running as root the command:

rc-update add consolekit default

Now for start the graphical environment execute:

startx