I see there is a 11.3 ver, but it’s a year old. In May you guys came out with a 11.4 LXDE version so i assumed an Xfce versin would be out also. I read reviews on 11.4 Xfce but cannot find a download for it. Please help.
(I don’t compile from source just install ISO’s)
Is Xfce versions supported at least by the forum community if not by Novell itself? - In other words, can I get general support and help for it through the forums?
I have not used OpenSuse before and a few other Linux distros on and off for the past few years. I’m looking for the best desktop user experience I can find in a fast stable user friendly distro. Having been a Windows user for years after I used Timex Sinclair computers (the watch company), Texas Instruments Ti-99, Commodore Vic 20 and 64, all Radio Shack/Tandy computers from the COCO to model 4, Atari 400, 800 and 1600 computers, then starting PC with MS Dos 6.22 and all windows versions from windows 3.1, I have been spoiled to the graphical interface and refuse to touch a command line if I can do something any other way. I read a good review on OpenSuse here: Which distro offers the best experience?
Sorry there is not a forum for this topic so I posted here, the best fit IMO.
What am I missing here, anyone please tell me. I cannot believe these people make it this hard for a newbie to find and install a supposedly popular distro. Yes, I’ve read the download help pages from there and they don’t help. I must be missing one small detail or something.
Excuse me… I have to go bang my head against the keyboard for another 30 minutes. I’ll check back later.
Thank you for the code but I do not currently have a copy of OpenSuse installed.
I find a live CD for the 32bit and 64 bit versions of OpenSuse for KDE, Gnome and LXDE but not for Xfce, even though there are reviews on this DE. I wanted to download and install a live CD for XFCE.
The download pages do not tell you that there, apparently is not a compiled Live CD version of XFCE for download, like the other versions. It does not tell you that in order for you to get Xfce you must only install it from the repos. I find this a serious oversight on the part of whoever wrote those pages.
Apparently with Suse-Studio, there is a way to download and easily compile a Xfce iso. Those wiki pages should at least tell you that clearly when someone finds the pages I linked to above.
It’s really sad I had to go through all this trouble and searching to find an outsider provided the ISO that the Novell OpenSuse people should have provided. I don’t know now if I wanna try a distro from such a company.
When you do an install from DVD or net install (not live CD), I don’t know what choices you get if you select “other” at the Desktop selection](http://www.unixversal.com/linux/opensuse/images/opensuse_vm_install11.jpg). Maybe it’s possible to install Xfce as the only desktop. I always start with Gnome and install Xfce later. Otherwise I don’t think that starting with a LXDE live CD and installing Xfce afterwards would be a very big deal. But I’m glad that you found a solution.
In the case of LXDE , the production of the openSUSE-11.4 liveCD is an openSUSE community effort and NOT a SuSE-GmbH effort.
I understand the same is true for XFCE, where volunteers are needed to package the liveCD. I don’t know who packages the XFCE liveCD, but I do know the LXDE packager and XFCE packagers work together helping each other … so its possibly something has come up in the personal life of the XFCE community packager for openSUSE that has impacted their capability to produce an 11.4 liveCD, even after all of these months.
As noted by please_try_again, if you boot to the openSUSE-11.4 DVD, you WILL have an option to install the XFCE desktop and that will install only XFCE. So it IS possible to install XFCE on openSUSE-11.4.
Note there is also an irc chat channel on freenode #opensuse-xfce and you could try contact some one there (although that channel is VERY quiet, possibly even more quiet than the #opensuse-lxde channel).
That’s unfair and prejudges what is available and what the limitations are and expresses a lack of knowledge of the relationship between openSUSE community and SuSE-GmbH in terms of the contributions of each. Note also that as fairly recent, Novell is a separate holding company from SuSE-GmbH and openSUSE is not part of Novell.
Oh, I’d agree with HalJordan that there should be a working 11.4-based Xfce4 live CD linked to from openSUSE’s downloads page. Especially since there are going to be a number of people who are disaffected with gnome-shell (i.e. GNOME 3) and will be looking for an alternative.
Add to that, that the Xfce live CD they do link to, based on 10.3, is broken. It boots into twm rather than xfce. If nothing else, the link to that CD ought to be removed from the openSUSE wiki.
(One fix for the problems with the existing Xfce live CD is to switch to runlevel 3, enable networking, use zypper to install gdm – which pulls in some extra packages – switch back to runlevel 5, and exit twm back to the display manager.)
XFCE is not the light weight alternative to Gnome it aimed to be at the beginning. This alternative is now provided by LXDE. However I agree that Gnome3 changed the situation (although in fallback mode and after some handwork, it still looks familiar to the human eye and brain).
Thank you ( and the rest of you) for the explanations. I may have seemed harsh but nonetheless thus was my experience. If those software wiki pages contains the information you and others have given, I would not have had such a problem or would I have been prompted to post something that seemed harsh. This all could have been avoided with better more accurate information.
I do encourage the writers of said pages to fix these omissions to more properly direct others to the correct download links or proper methods of installing Xfce.
I have used Xfce on a few distros and compared it’s resource use and configuration ability/power to LXDE, KDE and Gnome and I find generally it out preforms KDE and Gnome in memory use, yet has almost the same amount of configuration ability as those two making it the best choice for speed and flexibility. Almost anything I can do with KDE or Gnome, I can do with Xfce and do it faster because it is less resource hungry. LXDE of course being the fastest resource wise but lacks much configuration power and flexibility.
You experience may differ and I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter.
At any rate, I did install Gnome ver 11.4 because I started downloading it before I found the Xfce link above thinking I would just install Xfce after installation. So far I find it to be sharp looking, more professional than a lot of other distros and have decided to give it a proper shakedown.
I spent some time geeking out with SUSE Studio and made up (yet another?) an Xfce4 live CD based on openSUSE 11.4. You can download it here. It looks pretty much like what you’d get if you installed it to your hard disk.
(It hasn’t been put through a lot of testing – just in VirtualBox and running the live CD on my PC – so don’t sue me if it steals all the food out of your refridgerator or makes your motner-in-law spontaneously combust.)
Interestingly enough, the “appliances” one creates with SUSE Studio don’t require any scripting (although you can add scripts if you want to). You can change the configuration files (for example, changing the default display manager from “gdm” to “lxdm” in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager) and then save them to your appliance as “overlay” files. (Which probably explains why the live Xfce CD openSUSE links to now starts up in twm – they didn’t change the default window manager.)
You need to install from the DVD (11.4 or now 12.1) and select ‘other’ when the list comes up. Under other, you have the choice of LXDE, XFCE and several others. The selection installs as if it were installed from a livecd for the individual selection. Works great. I installed XFCE from the 12.1 DVD today.
