Switching to Xfce without a reinstall...

[Aped]

Been looking at it a bit and I am really interested in giving this environment a shot, both on my older laptop and my old server, in hopes of streamlining things a bit...

Is it as simple as synapticking a few specific packages or would I be better off just DLing and burning the install disc for xubuntu? If the latter, is a backup fairly necessary?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[peakshysteria]

I think you just can open a terminal and:


sudo apt-get install xfce

Then restart and choose session in the login window. Then choose XFCE, Gnome or other window managers if you have more installed.

[sheperson]

Well you can install the XFCE desktop environment by installing the xubuntu-desktop like this:


sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
The only problem (which is not a problem if you have enough hard disk), is that you have the Gnome desktop with all its applications too.

[kellemes]

As @peakshysteria already wrote..

sudo apt-get install xfce
This will install xfce.

Installing xubuntu-desktop will turn ubuntu into xubuntu, but maybe that's what you want?

[Noguarantee777]

If you just wanted to use Xfce to manage your windows than what peakshysteria said will work fine, I've used Xfce and it's pretty nice. If you're looking to streamline a lot than you might consider using Fluxbox (or just for fun). Same code just change Xfce to fluxbox I believe.

[ugm6hr]

If you just wanted to use Xfce to manage your windows than what peakshysteria said will work fine, I've used Xfce and it's pretty nice. If you're looking to streamline a lot than you might consider using Fluxbox (or just for fun). Same code just change Xfce to fluxbox I believe.

I think it is actually:

sudo apt-get install xfce4

I'd actually suggest a little more:

sudo apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-mixer catfish

This might help: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7631053#post7631053

[Aped]

Thanks a ton everyone, especially ugm, pretty much just what i was looking for. I'll check out fluxbox as well and maybe give it a whirl. Saving HDD space is a concern here, so I'd want to remove gnome as well if I liked xfce/fluxbox well enough.

For the server, well, I almost never even access it directly; it doesn't have a KVM setup attached at the moment, so maybe what i'd want to do is just boot it into terminal mode or something.

Anyhoo, thanks again guys.