XFCE without running Gnome in Breezy

[Onos]

I hope that I am not derailing the topic too much:

I recently installed Ubuntu + Xfce4 and did some small bit of hacking about with Firefox 1.5 to get it to work.

Turns out that I needed to remove FireFox 1.07 in its entirety to make this happen - this in turn, forced a removal of xubuntu-desktop.

I cringed at this a bit, but the Synaptic package manger said this:

Xubuntu desktop system
__________________________________________________ ____________________
This package depends on all of the packages in the Xubuntu desktop system

It is safe to remove this package if some of the desktop system packages are
not desired.
__________________________________________________ ____________________

So, I went ahead and had it removed along with FireFox 1.07...

When I logged back in, my desktop settings were not coming up, specifically, my desktop background picture, and the context-sensitive menu when I right-click on the desktop was no more.

This is a minor annoyance compared to the hair-pulling of getting FireFox 1.5 to work nicely, but even after re-installing the xubuntu-desktop package, I still am unable to set my desktop background, and have no context menu when right clicking the desktop area.

Has anyone else come accross this yet? If so, is there any hack or other fix to get it to work right again?

Something tells me that I need to go hack some config file or change a symbolic link somewhere, but I haven't a clue as to how to do that.

[Onos]

A wee bit more digging around turns up this helpful link:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...6&postcount=62

Here, Sapo suggest to another member having a similar problem to

...press Alt + F2 and type: xfdesktop

Thanks!

[rpm1200]

I figured it out after messing with it for a week and pulling some of my hair out!

Hopefully this will work in all the older ATI cards.

This will be a quick reply until I type out a longer FYI howto thread sometime in the near future.

Working on my ATI Rage Mobilty 8mb P/M card in a Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop (Pentium 3 500)

Ubuntu server install (no Gnome) + Xubuntu.

[snip]

I am experiencing a similar problem on my iMac rev B - I followed the steps in the wiki to install Xubuntu/Breezy... I completed the server install then had a failure during the xubuntu-desktop install (the screensaver did not install), so I ran sudo apt-get -f install and that seemed to complete the xubuntu-desktop install. Now when I run startxfce4 an error message flashes up really quickly then the screen clears and I get a blank screen with blinking cursor forever. I could not read the whole error message but I noticed something about a log file - any idea what directory the log file is saved to?
Since the iMac uses an ATI Rage Pro chipset I'll definitely try videodrome's steps....

[rpm1200]

Got it now...
Had to run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. After setting up the ATI card there, I got it to the point where it would not bomb out anymore when running startxfce4, but the monitor would go into standby mode and never come out. After a quick google search I found out that you have to set the monitor to 60 horizontal (fixed) or it will never work. In dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg I autodetected the monitor, which correctly identified the supported resolutions of 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768. Then I chose advanced mode, set the horizontal frequency to 60 and the vertical frequency to 75-117. Voila, now it works and I am posting this from Firefox running in Xubuntu!