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 > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS-devel mailing list > CentOS-devel at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
