Recently in Xfce Category

It's always news when a new version of Slackware is released, and this week Slackware 13 is available for download or purchase on CD or DVD.

The release announcement details which version of what package/app/feature is included in the new release.

I spent a bit of time running Slackware 12.0, but didn't do much with 12.1 and 12.2.

Part of that has to do with the fact that Slackware doesn't ship with GNOME, and if you choose to install without KDE, intending to use either Xfce, Fluxbox or another window manager, you don't end up with all that many apps.

I have two Debian Lenny-equipped laptops at the moment, with my main laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

The "quicker" of the two Lenny laptops is in backup/test mode right now, with a fully encrypted LVM installation. It's been going pretty well, but if I don't think of another machine I can run Slackware 13 on, that Toshiba laptop might be pressed into service for it. (I've got two resurrected-from-the-dead 2002-era Toshiba Satellites, making a-b testing pretty easy ... both have dead touchpads, one has some kind of inverter going bad, making the screen blank intermittently and also has a dead sound chip.)

This time I think I'll go for the full KDE experience. Aside from a few mellow-harshing bugs, I did enjoy using KOffice at one time. And if I did "get used to" KDE, the software mix in Slackware without adding anything else is pretty darn good.

The problem is that even with Slackbuilds and other repositories, there's nowhere near as many apps readily available for Slackware as there is for Debian-based distributions.

But Slackware is still Slackware, and the aforementioned Slackbuilds go a long way toward assembling a complete system, and there ARE tools such as slapt-get and Gslapt that make updating a Slackware box much less nightmarish (I got in the weeds pretty quickly on a Slack 12.0 install when I had to manually download packages and use updatepkg to roll them in one by one).

I've been bringing more data into my main Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation on one of my two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, and I continue to be satisfied with the performance of what by most accounts is the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution.

No, its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

I'm getting used to all the GNOME-ish touches in the Nautilus file manager and in Ubuntu/GNOME in general that makes a full-fledged desktop environment such a nice place to work.

Look at what I have running in Xfce 4.4 on my OpenBSD 4.4 laptop. Do you think I should stop some of these Xfce services that I have in my panels? There are maybe seven or eight in there that use about 10 MB of RAM each. On this 768 MB system, should I be giving up 70 MB of RAM to panel apps in Xfce? I like seeing them in the panel. I like knowing when the CPU is spiking, seeing how the network is running and how I'm doing on disk space (I'm monitoring both /usr and /home in the panel).

The desktop looks like this, only more so — I've added a few apps to the panel, plus the Xfce notes app.

But clearly I could turn all this junk off and free up some memory (and probably some CPU, too).

Do you run your desktop with lots of little widgets?

load averages:  0.57,  0.39,  0.29                                     16:43:12
53 processes:  1 running, 51 idle, 1 on processor
CPU states:  8.8% user,  1.4% nice,  1.4% system,  0.1% interrupt, 88.2% idle
Memory: Real: 224M/344M act/tot  Free: 396M  Swap: 0K/306M used/tot

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    WAIT      TIME    CPU COMMAND

 5255 steven     2    0   44M   71M sleep    poll      0:26 11.08% firefox-bin

26867 steven    34    0   18M   32M run      -         9:53  4.05% Xorg

26938 steven     2    0 3864K   12M sleep    poll      0:08  0.15% xfce4-panel

10055 steven     2    0   41M   69M sleep    poll      2:39  0.00% thunderbird-

19491 steven     2    0 2324K 9260K sleep    poll      1:11  0.00% xfce4-netloa

22662 steven     2    0 2292K 9224K sleep    poll      0:53  0.00% xfce4-system

  643 steven     2    0 2456K 9268K sleep    poll      0:29  0.00% xfce4-netloa

26276 steven     2    0 4456K   15M sleep    poll      0:15  0.00% xfdesktop

 8416 steven     2    0 2340K 9148K sleep    poll      0:13  0.00% xfce4-diskpe

 6606 steven     2    0 2900K   10M sleep    poll      0:09  0.00% xfce4-menu-p

12216 steven     2    0 2992K   10M sleep    poll      0:09  0.00% xfce4-fsguar

16991 steven     2    0 2980K   10M sleep    poll      0:09  0.00% xfce4-fsguar

30681 steven     2    0 5456K   16M sleep    poll      0:07  0.00% Terminal

11545 steven     2    0 2156K 9872K sleep    poll      0:06  0.00% xfwm4

21196 steven     2    0 5464K   16M sleep    poll      0:05  0.00% Thunar

28220 steven     2    0 2752K 7108K sleep    poll      0:04  0.00% xfce-mcs-man

11890 steven     2    0 2928K   11M sleep    poll      0:02  0.00% mousepad

15329 root       2    0 1160K 1436K sleep    select    0:00  0.00% sendmail

 2150 steven     2    0 3104K   10M idle     poll      0:00  0.00% xfce4-notes-

 7773 _ntp       2    0  468K  732K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% ntpd

21843 root       2    0 1232K 2496K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% cupsd

30306 steven     2    0 1256K 3768K sleep    select    0:00  0.00% xterm

13675 steven     2    0 1500K 6484K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% xfce4-sessio

 2409 steven     2    0  936K 3120K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% gconfd-2

 8113 steven     2    0  676K 1376K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% top

12504 _syslogd   2    0  536K  664K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% syslogd

 9988 root       2    0  516K  792K sleep    select    0:00  0.00% cron

17621 root       2    0  676K  776K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% ntpd

 2399 steven    18    0  444K  404K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% ksh

 6990 steven     2    0  420K 1092K idle     netio     0:00  0.00% gnome-pty-he

29096 steven     2    0  628K 1220K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% dbus-daemon

 5514 steven    18    0  480K  396K sleep    pause     0:00  0.00% ksh

13069 steven    18    0  480K  428K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

23547 steven    10    0  416K 1056K idle     wait      0:00  0.00% xinit

32715 steven    18    0  580K  412K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

20774 steven    18    0  460K  404K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

16958 steven    18    0  416K  460K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

11067 steven    18    0  592K  396K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% ksh

    1 root      10    0  396K  272K idle     wait      0:00  0.00% init

10244 steven    18    0  588K  460K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

 3423 root       3    0  312K  756K idle     ttyin     0:00  0.00% getty

24277 steven     2    0  412K 1264K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% dbus-launch

31493 root       2    0  388K  692K idle     select    0:00  0.00% inetd

19182 root       3    0  212K  756K idle     ttyin     0:00  0.00% getty

10476 root       3    0  212K  764K idle     ttyin     0:00  0.00% getty

I've written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol' GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware.

In last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about, And in the latest Distrowatch, the idea of running "minimal Xubuntu (and Ubuntu)," is discussed.

Basically, the idea is that you use the regular Xubuntu CD but instead of the full install, you start with a command-line-only system and build it up from there. It's something that many Debian users have been doing for years (and which I'm done a couple times myself): start with what in Debian is called the "standard" install (and purposefully NOT including the "Desktop" group of packages), then use apt or Aptitude to build up from there, adding only what you want. You start with X and then build up from there.

This week's Distrowatch article included some timed benchmarks, as well as a table of how much memory is used in Debian 5 with Xfce, the standard Xubuntu, the minimal Xubuntu and Xubuntu with the same packages as Debian with Xfce.

You save a lot of time and RAM with the leaner Xubuntus.

In running Ubuntu vs. most other systems with leaner desktop environments, you can see right away by running the top utility in a terminal. In Ubuntu 8.04, I start out the session with over 100 processes. Right now, in OpenBSD 4.4 with Xfce 4.4 — and with the Opera browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, a terminal window, a couple Mousepad editor windows and way more Xfce widgets than I need (they eat about 10MB of RAM each, so I'm probably going to turn off most of them soon), I only show 53 processes in top.

And when I'm running the default Fvwm2 window manager in OpenBSD, I probably start the session with between 20 and 30 processes (I'll have to check on that). Just running the console before starting X, there are less than 20 processes running (again, I'll check and confirm).

From my experience, Xfce in Debian and Slackware is more like it is in OpenBSD as I have it configured and less like in Xubuntu.

The "problem," although I really don't see it as such, with Xubuntu is that a whole lot of GNOME services are running. The same is true in the KDE-based Kubuntu. The Ubuntu team keeps a lot of the services the same, everything from the Synaptic package manager to the Network Manager, so the experience across the various Ubuntu derivatives is more similar than not.

And I do remember being jarred a bit after installing both the Xfce and KDE versions of Debian. I never could get used to the graphical package manager in KDE. (Kpackage? That's my guess.) And in the Xfce version of Debian, you have to use apt or Aptitude (but you could add Synaptic with these very utilities if you really, truly missed it).

I did use Debian with Xfce for a good period of time, and that provided me with the opportunity to learn more about Aptitude, which more than a few users prefer over apt due to Aptitude's record-keeping ability. (I guess that means Aptitude writes more log files, but I never really looked into it that closely.)

But as I said in my last entry on the topic, If you install Slackware but leave out all the KDE sets, you still end up with a bigger installation than if you use Debian with Xfce. And as I said then, you even get OpenOffice, compared to no office suite in Slackware, and still the install for Debian is smaller. That doesn't really matter for most instances, but this particular install needed to fit on a 3 GB hard drive, and that's pretty tight for many distributions.

Not to hate on Slackware at all. I do grumble about not having as many tools to manage the box when you choose not to install KDE (and I may indeed do this very install in the near future because I still love Slackware and believe I'm better equipped to deal with it now than ever). And while I'm not happy about having to search for prebuilt binary packages or use Slackbuilds for some of the apps I need, Slackware is still a super-fast Xfce system. In fact, Slackware is my No. 1 system for when I (or you) do want to run KDE.

(Small aside: Slackware does include the Koffice suite in the KDE sets. If at the time I was using Slackware the heaviest — the 12.0 days — Kword in particular ran better, I very well could've stuck with it. I can't say anything about more recent Koffice builds, but I haven't heard about it getting much better, not that I've heard much at all. I did end up adding Abiword to my Slackware install with binary packages from Robby Workman's site.)

And if you want to take the time during the install, you can go through Slackware file set by file set, package by package, and install exactly what you want from the CDs/DVDs. So you can have a truly custom installation out of the box without needing to use a network mirror. (Caveat: It seems as if this would take forever to do.)

I don't think you can do the same thing with apt in Debian, but you certainly can start with the minimal or "standard" install (I think some just do the absolute base and don't even use the whole "standard" list of packages) and then build slowly up from there.

Before I lose the thread of exactly what I wanted to say about Xubuntu. I don't know if I spelled it out in the last entry, but in my tests, Xubuntu doesn't really give you much of a speed advantage over standard Ubuntu. I did used to really like the look of Xubuntu; around the 7.04/7.10 era, when I ran a lot of Xubuntu, I really liked the way they had Xfce set up, from the color scheme to the panels (when I could get the panels to stick on the screen ... another story).

But once I saw how Xfce ran in other distributions, I never really looked back. If you prefer the way Xubuntu looks and works over Ubuntu, it's a legitimate choice, but I don't think you'll save a lot of CPU or RAM by choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu.

However, if you really like Ubuntu/Xubuntu and have a compelling reason for using it over Ubuntu — perhaps your hardware just likes Ubuntu more, maybe you want to run the LTS of Ubuntu, or there are some packages that either you can't get in Debian or are more up to date in Ubuntu — doing one of these minimal Ubuntu/Xubuntu installs can be worth it.

As for me, things are going very well in OpenBSD 4.4. I'll probably upgrade when my CD set arrives. And my Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba laptop is also running well.

Ubuntu maintenance aside: On our girl's Gateway laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, it crashed over the weekend (most probably a hardware issue; possibly a flaky power-supply plug) and I had a corrupted root filesystem. I used "recovery mode," and was able to see the dmesg on the terminal. The system dropped me into a root shell, I fsck'ed the root filesystem, which in my case goes like this:

# fsck /dev/sda2

And after that I rebooted and everything was back to normal. I thought that running a journaling filesystem (ext3 in this case) meant you didn't have to fsck, but in this case I most definitely needed to do so. My recent forays into fsck in OpenBSD are also due, I believe, to hardware issues; every once in awhile this Toshiba laptop (again, I have two identical Satellite 1100-S101 models) dies right at the beginning of the boot, no matter what the OS, and in the case of OpenBSD, I easily fsck the root filesystem and commence booting.

So ... what I'm getting around to saying is that I can easily see pulling the hard drive from one of the Toshiba laptops, shoving in a new one and using the entire drive for either Debian or Slackware and doing a long-term test of whichever distro I end up choosing.

Endnote: My complaints still stand about distro reviews — including my own — being nothing more than cursory looks at how a system installs and whether or not the hardware worked and not much more.

I think a lot of this discomfort with quickie reviews stems from my own decision to do much less distro-hopping. I tend to use distributions/projects that offer a lot of packages, a lot of flexibility, plus longevity and relative stability. The operating system must support most or all of the applications I need to get my work done. And since I'm not running a lot of test machines at the moment, anything I do in terms of distro/project testing needs to serve these goals as well as hold my 1 GB of Thunderbird e-mail and about 1 GB of "other" files.

So I've stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 on two laptops (both in fairly frequent use), OpenBSD 4.4 on one laptop (heavy use), OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13 on one laptop (light use — this one needs an upgrade; it ran Debian before and probably will again) and Debian Etch on two desktops (light use).

I used to get a lot of traffic with quickie distro reviews, especially when I managed to get a Distrowatch link. I do miss the traffic, but I didn't feel right cranking out a review within the first day/week after an install. It's certainly important to let people know how goes the installation of an operating system, but I just didn't have the time or desire to burn dozens of ISOs and do installs all the time.

And since my days of distro-hopping, I've depended on FOSS operating systems and applications more than ever before for my day-to-day work. And between Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Debian, I've found a nice combination of comfort (for me as a user/technician) stability, flexibility, application availability and, for the most part, relative speed.

I know I spent half of this entry on how slow Ubuntu can be, but I've run MANY distros that appear to be much slower; I think Ubuntu hits more of a happy medium than others when it comes to the bloat/features equation, I just run hardware that's old enough to need all the help with CPU, RAM and disk space I can get.

The real endnote: The preceding few paragraphs attempted to explain why I'm uncomfortable with the standard distro review, both as a writer and a reader. I hope I got the point across at least a little. When you see one of these reviews, you'll know it. Not that there's no value in rolling a new Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva/Slackware/etc. distribution onto a box and writing about what's different/better/worse. If the writer has been running a given distro/project all along, I tend to take more notice even of a quickie review. But if you run, let's say Slackware, throw the latest Ubuntu on your box and talk all about how Ubuntu is different from Slackware and how everything's in the wrong place, and you do this a few hours after the installation, that I feel is usually of very little value.

So the next time I do this very thing, feel free to write a comment at what a hypocrite I am.

I've done this sort of thing before, but luckily somebody else is comparing the Xfce environments of Debian Lenny and Xubuntu/Ubuntu.

Results are not surprising and are in line with what I found over a year ago when I did a major comparison of everything from Xubuntu and Debian to Slackware and gOS, as well as Wolvix and standard Ubuntu.

Back then, Slackware and Debian with Xfce are indeed very, very fast systems. And while I didn't test them at the time, I expect ZenWalk and Vector with Xfce to perform as well or better.

That said, I've always liked the look of Xubuntu (especially in the 7.04-7.10 era), but it does run a good deal slower than other Xfce-equipped systems — and in fact didn't do much better than Ubuntu with GNOME in my test. Thus I've pretty much just used Ubuntu when I want it, although I did have some issues with crashing on my Gateway laptop that appeared at the time to be solved by adding Xubuntu to the install and running Xfce instead. (Since then, we've been running Ubuntu with GNOME — version 8.04 — on the Gateway, and it has been running very well.)

Despite all of this, I still have two Ubuntu 8.04 installations running right now. Sure Debian and Slackware are faster, but I'm quite happy running GNOME, and I find performance in Ubuntu more than acceptable. But what keeps me running Ubuntu is the ease of installation, configuration (I'm running with no xorg.conf — and perfect video out of the box — on both installs) and patching of the system. Despite all the talk of Ubuntu shipping before everything is "right," I can't remember suffering from a broken app or feature in recent memory. And it seems that even if a new app isn't available for some reason in the Ubuntu repository, the developers behind it are quick to create a package that's designed to run in Ubuntu (even though I prefer to run what's in Ubuntu's own repository).

All things being equal, I prefer Debian, but since Lenny all things have not been equal on my Gateway and Toshiba laptops (both made around 2002-3), with which I've had unsolvable video issues in both Lenny and at least on the Gateway in Slackware as well. No amount of tweaking xorg.conf, installing new drivers, etc., would make Debian Lenny play well with the Intel video in the Gateway, and when a quick Lenny install on the Toshiba brought up the same issue, I ran quickly to the welcoming, trouble-free arms of Ubuntu. Of course OpenBSD 4.4 is running virtually trouble-free on my second, identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, and if OpenBSD can get xorg running perfectly with no configuration (and no xorg.conf needed), you'd think that Debian and Slackware could do the same.

In all fairness, I haven't tried Slackware again since 12.2 came out, so maybe things have changed, and I also haven't tried Lenny since it went stable (my experience was during the three or so months leading up to that point). Put simply, Ubuntu worked, so I use it.

And as I've also said before, many of the replies to requests for help in the Ubuntu Forums might be less than helpful, but the sheer volume of those messages means that finding the answer to your question/solution to your problem not just for Ubuntu but also for Debian is easier than you might think.

Now that I've pretty much got my Xfce 4.4 desktop where I want it in OpenBSD, I've been spending more and more time not in Xfce but in the Fvwm2 window manager that's the default for this OS.

Sure, Fvwm isn't as full-featured as Xfce, it's not as pretty, but it works very well, the documentation is excellent, and most importantly, it doesn't use nearly as much memory.

Don't get me wrong, Xfce is no hog, especially compared with GNOME and KDE, but when I looked at top in a terminal and saw more than a half-dozen little Xfce widgets/apps using 10 MB each, I started to get a little squirrely about it.

Not that system performance was poor, since it was and is anything but. I'm happy with Xfce's look, feel and speed on this 1.2 GHz/768 MB laptop, and I'm not in danger of running out of memory. And if I'm that bugged by it, I could remove all the stuff from my panels that is using that memory. A leaner Xfce just might be in my future now that I've gotten the full-panel look out of my system.

And I did enjoy monitoring my network interfaces, disk activity, swap space (which I don't think I've needed to use, ever, on this machine), and CPU and RAM use.

But I don't really need all that stuff.

So today I started the laptop and launched X with Fvwm as my window manager.

And there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

While I'm in a griping mood, I'll say that while I like the look and feel of Xfce's Terminal and Mousepad applications, for the former I can get along just fine in Xterm, and for the latter I chafed at Mousepad's inability to open multiple documents with tabs (and the seeming inability to default to UTF-8 instead of ASCII).

Sure I could easily use Geany as my main editor in Xfce, and I did have Geany in the panel right next to Mousepad.

I still like Xfce's Thunar file manager, although I'm more than comfortable with the Rox-filer.

And even in Fvwm, I could easily continue running Thunar, Terminal and Mousepad just as easily as I could use Rox, Xterm and Geany in Xfce.

And thinking that Xfce is "heavy" when I could very well be using KDE or GNOME is just geeky BS on my part. I was only reacting to what I saw in top, not actual system performance. And again, I can easily lighten up Xfce's load by dumping all those doodads from the lower panel.

But right here, right now, Fvwm is getting the job done. But geeky users are fickle. I could be back in Xfce tomorrow. And if I did a reinstall and had 20 GB set aside for /usr rather than the 6 GB I have now, I could roll GNOME onto the box and try that, too.

So why am I OK with GNOME in Ubuntu but not in OpenBSD? I guess that the OpenBSD philosophy of starting out with a minimal install and building up from there (the same philosophy with a "standard," non "desktop" installation of Debian, now that I think about it) makes it seem more natural to add the X apps I like best to the system rather than try to re-create some huge GNOMEish configuration.

Not that I don't have GNOME-based Debian and Ubuntu installations on three other boxes in my stable.

What I want to say at this point in this rambling entry is that the freedom to roll so many desktop environments/window managers into a Unix-like system is something that really sets it apart from the Windows and Mac OS X environments. And it's something we should celebrate — and educate the non-Linux/BSD-using public about in an effort to let them know what alternatives are out there.

/usr/local/share/xfce4/README.OpenBSD

Click the image above for the 1024x768 version of my Xfce desktop in OpenBSD 4.4.

After many months in OpenBSD 4.4 with the project's default window manager, Fvwm, I decided to finally try one of the more popular "desktop environments."

I could have gone with one of the two biggest projects — GNOME or KDE, but instead I chose Xfce not so much because it's lighter on resources but because I like the way it looks and works. One consideration was disk space, since I'm using roughly half of a 20 GB drive, leaving me with only 10 GB and a /usr partition with 2.52 GB remaining at the moment.

As with most things in OpenBSD, adding Xfce to the operating system isn't as easy as it is in Debian, Ubuntu or many other Linux distros. There is no "meta package" in OpenBSD for Xfce. I believe that with GNOME and KDE, it's possible to add one or two packages that call in everything you need for the desktop environment.

To install Xfce, however, you must use pkg_add to install about three dozena number of Xfce packages. I went through the entire list of packages for OpenBSD in i386 and installed just about everything I thought I needed. I still missed somewhere around four packages that were required to make Xfce look and work the way it's supposed to.

I did work off of a list I found on the Web, but it didn't exactly match up with what's in the OpenBSD repository for version 4.4 of the OS.

I finally did get everything I need installed on the laptop. I happen to really like Xfce's applications, including the Thunar file manager, the Mousepad text editor and Terminal (capital T — that's what they call it) terminal. The Terminal terminal — a bit awkward?

Besides having a nice look and feel, these Xfce apps are incredibly quick to load.

I opted to keep many of my other apps, and in my lower panel I still have icons for the Geany text editor, ROX file manager and even a little menu that springs from the panel next to the Terminal icon for xterm.

Rather than drop individual icons for all the OpenOffice components into the panel, I opted for a single OO logo that starts soffice, from which I can chose any of the OpenOffice apps I need, say Writer (swriter), Calc (scalc) or Impress (simpress).

Curiously, Xfce picked up most of my applications and placed them in the menu automatically. A few programs didn't make it, and I added many of them to the panel. I found icons for most of them by exploring /usr/local and drilling down to find .png icons. For a few apps, including Opera and OpenOffice, I couldn't find icons in the system. After a bit of Googling, I found fairly good-looking icons out there on the Web and used them to add items to the lower panel. The Opera icon has a bird in it, which is quite unusual, but it looks OK.

One nice thing about Xfce in OpenBSD is that when I add a new application, it generally goes into the menu automatically. It worked with Inkscape at any rate. I got used to adding things to the Fvwm menu, and it's nice in a way to have everything exactly the way I want it, but I'm lazy enough to allow the system to do it for me. I always seemed to have trouble in Debian with some apps having their menu item placed in a very awkward portion of the menu hierarchy. I'll be watching for similar behavior. Thus far, I've noticed that Dillo, Xmms, Xpdf, Adobe Acrobat Reader and most console apps didn't make it into the Xfce menu in OpenBSD. That's OK for now. I wonder if removing and reinstalling the Dillo browser, for instance, will make any difference. Since I have no sound at present, the Xmms music player isn't something I have any use for.

I've never done this much work setting up a desktop environment before, but like most things in OpenBSD, the net result of having to do a lot of things manually is a much deeper knowledge of the software that will serve me not only in OpenBSD but in every system I use.

As you can see in the image above, I added quite a few widgets/plugins to the panels, mostly to the lower one. I'm able to monitor disk activity, free space on /usr and /home, both of my network interfaces (wireless is wi0, wired is rl0), plus CPU activity and memory and swap usage.

I picked up the wireframe puffy OpenBSD image for the desktop wallpaper a while ago on some Web site dedicated to such things, and I can't remember the URL, but Googling for OpenBSD wallpaper should turn up this one and more. I do have a second 1024x768 image ready in case I get tired of this one (I do have the shirt, and if I'm wearing it while using a desktop with the same image, that pushes me further into OS-geek territory).

If you want to install Xfce in OpenBSD, here is a list of all the packages I installed. I didn't add everything since this laptop has a dead sound chip, but this is just about everything Xfce-related that's in the OpenBSD packages repository. I used pkg_info to generate the list:

$ pkg_info | grep xfce
exo-0.3.4p4 extension library for xfce4
gtk-xfce-engine-2.4.2p2 theme engine for GTK2
libxfce4mcs-4.4.2p2 settings management library used by most xfce4 modules
libxfce4util-4.4.2p2 basic utility library for xfce4
libxfcegui4-4.4.2p4 widget library for xfce4
mousepad-0.2.13p2 really simple text editor for xfce4
notification-daemon-xfce-0.3.7p4 notification daemon for Xfce4 desktop
orage-4.5.12.2p3 advanced calendar for xfce4
ristretto-0.0.20p1 lightweight image-viewer for xfce4
terminal-0.2.8p2 lightweight vte-based terminal for xfce4
thunar-0.9.0p4 lightweight file manager for xfce4
xfce-mcs-manager-4.4.2p3 settings manager for xfce4
xfce-mcs-plugins-4.4.2p3 settings manager plug-ins for xfce4
xfce-utils-4.4.2p4 essential utilities and scripts for xfce4
xfce4-appfinder-4.4.2p3 xfce4 application finder
xfce4-clipman-0.8.0p3 clipboard history plugin for the xfce4 panel
xfce4-dict-0.4.0p1 query a dictionary service for words or phrases
xfce4-diskperf-2.2.0p1 displays instant disk performance in the xfce4 panel
xfce4-fsguard-0.4.0p3 monitors a chosen mountpoint for free disk space
xfce4-genmon-3.2p1 generic scriptable monitor for the xfce4 panel
xfce4-icon-theme-4.4.2p2 icon theme for xfce4
xfce4-mailwatch-1.0.1p3 monitor various types of mailboxes
xfce4-mixer-4.4.2p3 volume mixer module for xfce4-panel
xfce4-mpc-0.3.3p1 simple client plugin for Music Player Daemon
xfce4-netload-0.4.0p2 displays load of a network interface in the xfce4 panel
xfce4-notes-1.4.1p5 sticky notes for the xfce4 desktop
xfce4-panel-4.4.2p3 panel for Xfce4 desktop
xfce4-places-plugin-1.1.0p1 gnome-like places plugin for the xfce4 panel
xfce4-session-4.4.2p5 xfce4 session manager
xfce4-systemload-0.4.2p3 displays cpu/memory/swap/uptime in xfce4 panel
xfce4-verve-0.3.5p3 command line plugin for the xfce4 panel
xfce4-wavelan-0.5.4p0 displays stats from a WLAN interface
xfce4-weather-0.6.2p3 see temperature/weather conditions on the xfce4 panel
xfce4-xkb-0.4.3p3 xkb layout switcher panel plugin for xfce4
xfdesktop-4.4.2p4 xfce4 desktop manager
xfprint-4.4.2p3 printing helper for xfce4
xfwm4-4.4.2p2 xfce4 window manager

Creating a meta-package or at the very least a script that installs all of these packages is something I'm very interested in doing. That would make installing Xfce in a new system a lot quicker and easier.

As I've written many times in the past few months, I do have a fondness for the default window manager in OpenBSD. Fvwm2 is a pretty nice, extremely light app, and I think it's a great light alternative to Fluxbox.

One thing in Fvwm I could never figure out was how to change the key bindings for switching between desktops from CTRL-arrow to CTRL-ALT-arrow. Whenever I was in a text-editing program such as Geany or OpenOffice Writer, I'd habitually use CTRL-arrow to skip from word to word and instead skipped from screen to screen.

In Xfce, I'm back to using CTRL-ALT-arrow to switch windows, and CTRL-arrow moves the cursor from word to word, just like in the other 99.99 percent of OSes out there.

A word on display managers: On this OpenBSD install, I didn't start out using XDM, GDM or KDM, the three display managers used to start a session with a login in X rather than at the console. Among the things a display manager can do for you is allow for easy switching between a number of desktop environments/window managers.

But since this installation started out with a console login, I decided to keep it that way.

Now when I type:

$ startx

That logs me in with Fvwm as the window manager.

When I type:

$ startxfce4

That logs me in with Xfce.

It just seems easier to keep the console login and choose between window managers at the command line. In theory anyway, if I decided to add GNOME, I could start it with:

$ gnome-session

or KDE with:

$ startkde

Shutdown ... sometimes: In OpenBSD with Xfce, I can choose "Shut Down" from the Quit menu, and the script will completely power off my Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop. I never expected this to work. I tried it again this morning, and the Shut Down button was grayed out. All I could do was click Log Out.

All I can think of is that perhaps the Shut Down feature is somehow connected to using sudo. I used sudo for all kinds of things during my previous sessions in Xfce, but this morning I just checked e-mail with Thunderbird and used Firefox for a few quick checks. No sudoing ...

Later: I confirmed my suspicion. If I open up a terminal and use sudo for anything, even something innocuous (I did sudo pkg_info, which doesn't require root privileges), Xfce will allow you to completely shutdown or reboot the box from the GUI. Otherwise your only option is to log out and shutdown as usual from the console.

I decided to start adding apps to the Self-Reliant Thin Client, which is running Debian Etch from an 8GB CF card as the boot drive with a 1 GHz VIA CPU that insists at running at 500 MHz, plus 256 MB of RAM.

I used aptitude to add the Geany text editor and the Fluxbox window manager.

Fluxbox runs great, as usual, but I really don't see any app-speed improvement with Iceweasel, OpenOffice, Geany or Gedit.

In previous tests, I saw a real advantage to using Fluxbox or Xfce over GNOME, but here in Debian, GNOME is running well enough that I'll probably use it quite a bit. I'll continue testing Fluxbox, but I imagine that GNOME will continue to be my main window manager on this box (as it has been when running off of a traditional hard drive).

It definitely depends on the specific box, and especially on the available RAM. I guess that 256 MB of RAM is enough for good GNOME performance. With 128 MB of RAM, Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm or other lightweight window managers might dramatically improve performance vs. GNOME.

One thing I have to do is run top when running the same apps in both GNOME and Fluxbox. If the same amount of swap, relatively speaking, is being used in both window managers, that tells me why my GNOME performance is so relatively good. But if there was a lot more swap used in GNOME vs. Fluxbox, then I'd know that the lighter-weight window managers are really making a difference.

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian's Xfce installation didn't exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack.

Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

And any little utility that Wolvix has can probably be added in Debian. And Aptitude is very good. It's not graphical, but it represents the best of Debian.

And I still trust the security team for Debian more than I do most others — this despite the OpenSSL problem that has recently plagued every Debian-based distro in recent weeks. (At least somebody figured it out, and the whole incident should tighten up things considerably in the Debian Project).

And in Debian, I can easily install all of our little girl's educational programs, although she is fairly vocal about preferring to use the newer, faster $0 Laptop, a 1.3GHz Celeron-based Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM.

The only "stopper" is Google's lack of willingness to easily let users install Google Gears in Mozilla-derived browsers not named Firefox. That means it's a pain in the ass to install Gears with Iceweasel, the Debian-derived, noncopyrighted equivalent to Firefox.

And I haven't tried Debian on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt since I boosted the RAM from 64MB to 144MB. Responsiveness in X could be a lot better with such a relative overabundance of RAM.

So as far as the Compaq goes, I'm down to running Debian or Wolvix on the hard drive and Puppy as a live CD. Like I said previously, I don't want to kill out OpenBSD just yet, so I'll need either a second hard drive or a 4GB Compact Flash card with CF-to-IDE laptop adapter (the latter available for a quite-reasonable $10 at LogicSupply.com). I might even spring for a second hard-drive caddy for the Compaq, should I be able to find one, to make swapping the drives that much easier.

Or I could bite the bullet, get rid of OpenBSD for the time being, try out Debian and Wolvix on the hard drive, and narrow things down. I'll continue to run Puppy, with a separate partition for its encrypted pup_save file.

I've taken to using the Leafpad text editor in Puppy (I'm using it now), and the Leafpad-derived Mousepad editor in Xfce is just as fast, if spartan. Xfce's Terminal app has similar attributes. And I have no problem running xterm or rxvt.

It's really about the text editors and browsers I use, the software my daughter likes to run, stability, security, encryption and ease of maintenance.

Moreover, it's about speed on old hardware. These things look very different on newer computers. My 2002-era Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu very well. I doubt I could even boot Ubuntu on this Compaq. Even the Xubuntu live CD won't boot. With Debian, I have no problem.

On the Gateway, Ubuntu's polish as compared to Debian makes Ubuntu a better choice. But on this older Compaq, Debian's flexibility and added speed (don't ask me why it's faster, it just is) are much needed.

Next moves: I need to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card since I don't have regular access to WiFi. While I'm at it, a PCMCIA card for USB is something I should also look into. Sure, I could transfer files over the network, but USB is ... easier. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

I've come to the conclusion that GNOME is not quite ready in Debian Lenny. A lot of strange things have been happening on my screen. There's the ghosting in the upper menu bar, as well as various hard-to-describe funky things happening in other windows opened by various applications on the screen.

I've had Fluxbox installed in Lenny for awhile, and I have used it from time to time, but today I decided to see how Xfce is progressing in Lenny.

It was easy to install in a root terminal with Aptitude:

# aptitude update
# aptitude install xfce4
# aptitude install xfce4-goodies

And so far Xfce looks pretty darn good. I had used Xfce quite a bit in Debian Etch, and it also works great in Wolvix. So using it in Lenny is a bit of a no-brainer.

All display weirdness is gone, and Xfce remains incredibly fast.

And if GNOME didn't run so damn well in Ubuntu 8.04, I'd probably try Xfce there, too. I just might do it anyway.