The Other Desktop: Running Xfce
One of Linux’s greatest strengths is that it’s easily customized. Although most distributions ship with a variety of standard tools for specific purposes (such as sendmail as a mail server or Vixie Cron to handle repeated jobs), alternative tools are readily available. You can rip out just about any component, either removing it entirely or replacing it with something else. Linux lets you remove or replace more components than most operating systems, allowing the savvy administrator to customize a Linux installation for specific purposes.
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
One of Linux’s greatest strengths is that it’s easily customized. Although most distributions ship with a variety of standard tools for specific purposes (such as sendmail as a mail server or Vixie Cron to handle repeated jobs), alternative tools are readily available. You can rip out just about any component, either removing it entirely or replacing it with something else. Linux lets you remove or replace more components than most operating systems, allowing the savvy administrator to customize a Linux installation for specific purposes.
One area that can be customized and that’s quite obvious to end-users is the desktop environment. Most Linux distributions use the K Desktop Environment (KDE) or the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) as the primary GUI. Others are available, though. At the minimal end of the scale, you can use a bare window manager, such as IceWM, Blackbox, or twm. This approach places a minimal load on system resources, but also provides a very bare-bones working environment. Another option is to use an alternative desktop environment, such as Xfce (http://www.xfce.org), XPde (http://www.xpde.com), or ROX (http://rox.sourceforge.net). Here, let’s investigate Xfce.
Why Use Xfce?
Most desktop Linux users run KDE or GNOME. Both environments offer a complete set of features and desktop utilities. So why consider anything else? Although Xfce isn’t for everybody, it does offer some unusual features and advantages over KDE and GNOME:
