[HowTo] Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment - LXDE is back!

[PCMan]

Warning: This article is already out of date.
Please use the new apt repo to install LXDE instead.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...highlight=lxde


Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, as known as LXDE, is a project launched in 2006 aimed to provide a modern lightweight desktop environment for X11.
It tries hard to get maximal usability from minimal resource usage, and provide a usable desktop for low end machines.

The development was paused for one year, but glad to say, we are back again, with a lot of improvements.

Homepage: http://lxde.sourceforge.net/

The official homepage sucks, but the software rocks!

Here is a screenshot:

• The lightweight yet feature-rich file manager with tabs on the left side is PCManFM.
• The image viewer on the right side is GPicView, which features lightening fast startup and simple user interface.
• The desktop panel at the bottom of the screen is LXPanel. It provide a good-looking and feature-rich panel. The menu is automatically generated from *.desktop files installed by every packages. The configuration can be done through preference dialog, and there is no need to edit the config file.
• The window manager used here is OpenBox, with hotkeys and menu well-configured. Alt+F2 for "Run" dialog. Ctrl+Esc for the start menu.

• The logout screen is provided by the session manager - LXSession.
• It's completely standard compliant. It can handle autostart spec of freedesktop.org. It can also remember the applications used in the previous session, and restart them on the next login.

The main difference between this project and others is, all the components are "desktop-independent" and loosely-coupled. They don't depend on each other, and the dependencies of the whole environment is kept minimal. If you only like the panel or the file manager, just get it installed, and it won't ask you to install the whole desktop environment.

Currently it's still under heavy development, and there is still much to do. So there are no deb packages for the latest version.
The installation guide on the official website is already out of date, so here is an automated script.

http://lxde.svn.sourceforge.net/view...lxde-ubuntu.sh

To run the script, put it in a newly created directory, then:

> chmod +x install-lxde-ubuntu.sh
> sudo ./install-lxde-ubuntu.sh

The script will help you install the whole desktop from source code, and get all settings done. It grabs the latest source code directly from our svn repository, and install all the packages require to compile LXDE via apt-get for you. (NOTICE: Most of these packages are only required when building the programs from source code but not required to run the programs) Then, the script will compile all of the source code automatically, then get them installed (root access via sudo is required).

After the automatic installation, you can login to LXDE from gdm via selecting LXDE in the session menu.

Have fun!

[D-EJ915]

good to see work continuing on this!

[Vitamin-Carrot]

wow,

I like the linux community.

There is just a whole bunch of cool stuff happening all the time.
If I wasn’t careful I would suffer sensory overload and fall into a coma

[Dr Small]

I might try this, but what files / directories do I delete if I don't like it?

[K.Mandla]

Fantastic! I'm going to give this a test run later and maybe use it on my OLPC machine. Good to see LXDE getting updates!

[regomodo]

aha! lxde isn't orphaned after all. I tried it a while back and liked quite a lot about it.

[zmjjmz]

So your using Openbox instead of IceWM now?
Oh well, it looks great.
With this new upgrade, did the specs change at all?
I think it would be great to get this on an old computer...

[PCMan]

So your using Openbox instead of IceWM now?
Oh well, it looks great.
With this new upgrade, did the specs change at all?
I think it would be great to get this on an old computer...

Yes, we are using OpenBox now.
Although it uses a little bit more resources than icewm, it provides something important to a modern desktop that icewm lacks.

1. The most noticeable one is startup notification.
When you open a file in file manager, you'll see some visual feedback (the busy mouse cursor) from OpenBox.
This one is really needed for desktop environment.
In the few window managers supporting this (metacity, kwin, openbox), OpenBox is the only one that's lightweight enough.

2. OpenBox is configurable via GUI, using ObConf.

3. It by far looks much nicer and stylish, but the resource usage is still reasonable.

4. It doesn't have too much unnecessary dependencies.

Of course, you can still use icewm if you like, but I'll provide configuration for OpenBox by default.

[edredon]

trouble: i don't see lxde in gdm after installing AND restarting gdm in ubuntu gutsy gibbon.

i see gnome/openbox, kde/openbox and openbox itself as new items :S

[Scarath]

Hi, nice to see new lightweight environment, although looking at the website I dont know why I would choose this over Openbox. However if everything is much easier to set up that Openbox I guess it would be good for some.