[CentOS-devel] Xfce for CentOS group

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Anders F Björklund
<afb at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Hi list!
>
> Since the Alternative Desktop SIG didn't happen, we thought we would
> make a more focused effort and improve the Xfce desktop environment
> experience on CentOS. That might end up being a dedicated CentOS SIG,
> or just a couple of improvements to the existing packages from EPEL.
>
> Once upon a time, or more precisely: back in the CentOS 5.0 days,
> Xfce 4.4 was available in Extras and it was a pretty simple install
> that just worked "out of the box". Now, there's the newer versions
> available via EPEL - but the experience is nowhere near painless...

I still bundle vtwm build tools over at
https://github.com/nkadel/vtwm-5.5.x-srpm for RHEL based systems. It's
much lighter even than XFCE, and stable as granite, and has a *much,
much smaller* dependency tree than most modern desktop environments.
Much of the pain these days is unweaving all the Gnome-ification from
the xinitrc and similar tools.

> Going to try to meet up with other interested parties during FOSDEM,
> to see if we can't improve upon that and at least fix the low hanging
> issues. And get some better Xfce testing and feedback going, as well.
> A more long-term goal is make it an alternative to GNOME (Workstation).
>
>
> I've rounded up some of the issues, that currently exist:
>
> * The theme and icons are wrong, either missing or just ugly
> * The background image is wrong, ending up with a single color
> * X11 and Fonts are missing, so just adding the group doesn't work
> * Some bugs need backporting or fixing, like in Terminal or Xfwm.
>
> See http://afb.users.sourceforge.net/xfce/centos/centos-xfce.html
>
> Right now, one starts with a Minimal (or Server) install of CentOS.
> Then adds Base, X11 (including fonts), and finally Xfce (from EPEL).
> Once the aforementioned problems are taken care of, that should be it.
> Eventually, it might even end up being a "spin" or available image ?
>
> As mentioned earlier, here are the applicable versions of each:
>
> * CentOS 5 - Xfce 4.4 (in CentOS Extras)
> * CentOS 5 - Xfce 4.6 (based on Fedora 6)
> * CentOS 6 - Xfce 4.8 (based on Fedora 12)
> * CentOS 7 - Xfce 4.10 (based on Fedora 18)
>
> To replace GNOME PackageKit there's the Yum Extender, and to replace
> GDM there's LightDM (more work is needed, to make a CentOS-6 version).
> The GNOME icons and GNOME themes will probably "work" to start with,
> but one can probably improve upon that as well (as a lower priority).
>
> Something like http://afb.users.sourceforge.net/xfce/xfce-brave.png
>
>
> If you are interested in helping out with testing, packaging or
> developing (backporting, fixing the upstream issues, and so on)
> then please say so. I'll try to have some more detailed lists and
> updated packages with me, for the FOSDEM meetup in the weekend...
>
> * http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Fosdem2015
>
> --anders
>
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