Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 14 August 2009, 10:27 AM
Using Xfce for a Netbook Desktop
The first thing to do is get Xfce installed. Of course, you can download the latest Xfce release (4.6.1) from their web page, and install it yourself on pretty much whatever distribution you like. Another alternative is to add the Xfce meta-package to a standard Ubuntu (Gnome) distribution, and then choose an Xfce session through "Options" before you login. I tried that, but it always seemed as if the Xfce desktop was sort of "glued on top", not really well integrated. Of course you can download one of the distributions that uses Xfce as its base, such as Dreamlinux or Zenwalk - in fact the Xfce web page has a pretty good list of distributions which incorporate their desktop. However, since I am most familiar with Ubuntu at the moment, at least from an installation and administration perspective, I decided to start with Xubuntu. Download and installation were as smooth and easy as usual with Ubuntu. I used the Ubuntu utility to convert the LiveCD (.iso) image to a bootable USB stick, and then used that to install on my HP 2133 Mini-Note and ASUS N10J netbook.
The standard Xubuntu desktop has panels at the top and bottom of the screen, much like the standard Ubuntu Gnome distribution. That seemed rather a waste, if I was going to have that I might as well stay with Gnome. Right-click on either of the panels, and a "Custmize Panel" window comes up. My first objective was to rearrange the panels, to make better use of the limited desktop space available. The Xfce panels can easily be moved to any edge of the screen, and switched between full-width/height and "normal" (only as wide/high as necessary for their contents). I chose to keep Panel 1 (which contains the menus and task list) at the bottom of the screen, but reduced to normal width; Panel 2 I moved to the right edge of the screen, and also set to normal width. That looks better already. Hmmm. The bottom (horizontal) panel is obviously well suited for text, such as the menus and task list that it already contains, and the digital clock, but now the right (vertical) panel seems to be practically crying out for non-text icons, such as the notifiers (network, battery and such), and launcher icons.
Right-click on any of the icons and select "Move", and you can drag the icon to another position on the panel, or even to another panel. So I moved the Firefox launcher, Notifier, Trash, "Show Desktop" and "Workspace Switcher" to the right panel. That left only the menus, tasks, clock and Shutdown button. Hmmm. No reason to have the Shutdown button on the bottom panel rather than the side, so drag it over there too. That looks very nice. Now, the things left on the bottom panel are not something I need to see or have immediate access to, so I set the "autohide" attribute on it. It's interesting to note that most netbooks today have 1024x600 screen resolution, so the vertical dimension is the most "critical" for space - doing something simple like moving and/or hiding the top/bottom panels really makes a difference.
Now, the right panel, though, contains icons and such which I think I will often use, so I decided not to authide it for the time being. That fits pretty well with what I just said about screen real estate, there is more available space horizontally so giving up a bit to keep a visible panel is not such a sacrifice. This is looking better and better! I added a couple more launchers to the right panel, for Thunderbird and a Terminal window. Hmmm. Looking at the bottom panel, it occurs to me that the clock has an analog display option... what if I switch to that, and then move it to the side panel as well? Hey, that looks good! Now the bottom panel contains only the menus and task list, and it can be kept out of sight without hiding anything that I want/need to look at periodically.
There are still a few icons left directly on the desktop, and I don't care for that - that's the reason I have them on the right panel, and it's not hidden! Right-click on the desktop, choose "Desktop Settings" and then the Icons tab. There you can choose what Icons, and groups of Icons, are shown on the desktop. I left the standard group (File/Launcher Icons) selected, but un-checked the Home, Filesystem and Trash. I didn't change to the "None" group, because I still want it to show an icon on the desktop when a USB stick or whatever is plugged in. Ah, now the desktop is looking really clean. By the way, another of the very nice features of Xfce is that you can get to the Application menu at any time by right-clicking on the desktop background - one more reason to keep the desktop clean, and to autohide the bottom panel with the menus on it. There are a couple more good things on that right-click menu too, such as "start a terminal here" for those of us who still use the command line interface a lot.
One other nice feature of the Xfce desktop that fits well with netbook use. In addition to the normal Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons on the window title bars, there is an "Up Arrow" which will "Roll Up" the window when you click it, leaving nothing but the title bar visible, and changes to a "Down Arrow" you can click to restore the window. This turns out to be a very convenient way of getting windows out of the way without completely iconifying them and then having to go to the bottom panel to get them back. I find that I am using this more and more to switch between windows. By the way, I recall something similar to this in one of the window managers in the very early days of the X Window System, but I can' remember exactly which one it was - does anyone else recall it?
So far, that's what I've got. I've only been using it this way for a few days, but I have been very happy with it, and I haven't run into a single situation where I found it to be lacking or inconvenient. It looks good on different sized screens - 10.2" on the ASUS and 8.9" on the HP Mini-Note - and at different resolutions - 1024x600 on the ASUS and one Mini-Note, and 1280x768 on the other Mini-Note. I expect that I will be refining this more over the next few days and weeks, and I'll post comments about it here as appropriate.
Comments and feedback on this are more than welcome. Good ideas and suggestions are always appreciated.
jw
PreviousComments on this post
Xubuntu's "Window Shade" feature is available in standard GNOME Ubuntu, though it's called "Roll Up". Double clicking the title bar rolls up/down the window.
Enable this feature in System > Preferences > Windows.
A window decorator such as Emerald for Compiz will animate the roll up/down action, plus add numerous other features and themes.
Note that GNOME's panels are also highly configurable. I prefer to have just one panel, as a general purpose taskbar. (Don't forget to include a Notification Area in your lone panel, as well as the Window List applet.)
:)
Hi Gnothi, Thanks for reading and commenting as always. It's good to know that Gnome can do the roll-up feature as well; actually, as I was about halfway through the Xfce setup I started to wonder how much of the same things I could with standard Ubuntu/Gnome - quite a lot, I'm sure. I've seen an interesting contrast in speed while I've been trying this. Xubuntu seems to start up much more slowly than standard Ubuntu/Gnome, between "Login" and have a desktop ready, but once it is up and running Xfce generally responds noticeably faster. I've just downloaded both the standard and Xubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 releases, it will be interesting to see if this difference persists. I'll also try a couple of the other Xfce distributions for comparison as well.
The bottom line is, I'm honestly surprised at how much I like the desktop I've put together on the netbooks - but not enough to try it on my full-sized Fujitsu S6510 yet, I'm still firmly entrenched with Gnome here, both Jaunty and Karmic...
jw
I have not used XFce, though it was on my list of things to try after finding that my favourite window manager CTWM (very small, very fast, very robust, and very tailorable) was not being developed and could not cope with full screen Flash. But before trying XFce I tried Openbox and since it did almost everything I wanted I stopped looking, because of time pressure.
If you want something clean and "minimalist" openbox does well. I use 10 virtual desktops and use CTRL+Left and CTRL+Right for rapid navigation (with wrapping at both ends, which some window managers fail to provide), and they all start completely empty (except for a clock, which I sometimes specify). I have a few keyboard commands for starting things (e.g. CTRL+F1 brings me an xterm window from which I do almost everything anyway) but the mouse right button in any visible bit of root window brings up a tree of application menus, so I never have to uncover an icon to start an application.
I have more information about how I use Openbox (on Fedora 10) on my Desktop and Laptop machines here, including a few screenshots and a link to another convert from CTWM to OB whose style is rather different.
I use neither gnome nor kde, and instead set /etc/inittab to start me in plain text console mode (using the option "id:3:initdefault:"). So if I need to do any work before starting up X (e.g. installing a new driver for my NVidia card, or changing the X configuration) I can do that easily. To launch graphical mode the 'startx' command is used, which consults the file ~/.xinitrc to specify some default windows (e.g. xdaliclock) and start up openbox -- or another window manager if I am experimenting).
I don't have to go through that process (console login+startx) very often as the main reason I use Fedora10 is that there are very nicely packaged versions of tuxonice (software suspend 2) available here, providing very fast suspend to disc and resume. So I normally don't log out or shut down the computer, merely use hibernate, then switch off, and resume with all my virtual desktops displaying all my unfinished tasks, as needed. (I use my computer as a highly integrated part of my working memory).
One thing I have never understood about Windows users is how they put up with having to do everything on one desktop -- which I see even professors of computer science struggling with when they give presentations. I can prepare various bits of my presentation on various desktops (pdf or xdvi files displayed, videos, demo programs, etc. ready to run) and switch between them instantly.
Aaron
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