LXLE

[Taco.22]

I have a confession to make, and one that I thought would never happen.  I am now running an Ubuntu distro!!!  Long story short, I switched my Openbox Serqet spin to Debian Testing and promptly lost workable nvidia drivers.  Then I had issues with mounting CDs, USB sticks and SD cards.  Upon a lot of googling I discovered that I was not alone.  In the meantime the Stable Serqet spin on my wife's computer started to show similar device issues.  I'm not sure what the issue with Debian Wheezy is but I was getting sick of updates borking a system that I spent a lot of time building and had been working quite well.  So on my wife's computer I went almost the whole hog and installed Mint 16 xfce.  It works a treat but the one thing I discovered is that xfce is almost impossible to modify - so much stuff is hard-coded into the DE.  However it works great and I discovered one other pearl.

One of my biggest bugbears over the years of using Linux is setting up nvidia drivers.  Sometimes they work straight up out of repo, other times I have to go to the nvidia site and do command line stuff.  Occassionally it just won't work, which is what happened on my system.  Ubuntu has a gui tool called "jockey-gtk" that just "works".  It worked great in Mint, so all I needed was an LXDE spin that I could modify to my own Openbox look.

After a bit of looking around I came across LXLE, which is based on Lubuntu 12.04 LTS.  It came with most of the software I needed and had positive reviews.  So I downloaded it, backed up all my data and configs and installed it.

The first thing I tried was installing nvidia drivers.  Oh joy!!  Painless - now googleearth works again, and I use it quite a bit.  It didn't take long to install Thunar, conky, urxvt, openbox-menu, pytyle, gigolo and other software, bring across all my Openbox configs, and then set things up.  I put pcmanfm in the background - no point removing it.  I minimized the panel to just a systray.

All-in-all it works well and looks just how I want it.  Keyboard commands and shortcuts are all in place.  The Openbox root menu works as it should, urxvt is embedded in the desktop and the lxde parts of the system are all hidden under the bonnet.  There have been a couple of issues though.  I can't stand sudo, so I run the same su and sudo password for convenience.  Cheese doesn't work, and torrent magnets in Chromium don't work - no one has a working solution for those.  However I was able to find and install wxcam, an app I'm really happy to catch up with again after a few years.  I also had to switch off the absent floppy drive in the BIOS as gparted just hung when checking discs.

I guess old age is starting to catch up!  I'm tired of fighting driver issues so it's really nice to not have to think about it for once.  In the meantime the system just rolls along - who'd have thought it - living with Ubuntu!! 

Screenshots below - click on them to open full size.  From left to right - desktop showing embedded urxvt, conky and lxpanel systray.  Then we have the Openbox root menu.  Last is a number of open apps tiled thanks to pytyle.

   

[melodie]

Hi,

I wanted to test LXLE and then I met with a specific request to be able to get it. I didn't want to go through the specific request just for a test, so next I wrote to the dev, and got answers by mail which were quite unpleasant. Finally I accidently met him on IRC and that revealed even worse.

One question, why didn't you try the latest Bento I had put online if in need of a Ubuntu 12.04 spin? I took the time to write a full presentation both in English and in French last time:
http://linuxvillage.org/en/2013/11/bento-ubuntu-remix-rc/

I am about to upload a newer version, more up to date and so, I am just delayed with some issues, such as the hard drive where I was doing it broke, then I met with the finest whdd methods to get the system back:
[whdd-users] Use of the copy feature

and now my ISP network is somehow broken so Adsl has lowered during the last week/10 days from 15MB to 11 then 7.999 then 5.353 then 2.745 (or close) and now is 1.023 MB!

I am just waiting for them to fix it before uploading anything new.

The actual version is available on 3 repositories. Let me know if you want to give it a whirl and get direct links? (And new scripts to manage the Xsnow and xcompmgr transparency effects which don't play well together).

/Debian safe way is the stable version… I am sure you knew about it

[Taco.22]

Hi mélodie,

Commiserations on your hardware/network issues.  There are times when the Universe seems to conspire!

To be honest Bento did not cross my mind, but the issue was brought to a head when the Stable Debian Openbox Serqet started to play up.  I don't know what it is about Debian at the moment but they still seem to be having problems with Wheezy.  I remember switching from Squeeze to Wheezy when doing Scorpio and having to deal with so many issues.  The obvious one was needing a login manager for file managers to mount partitions!!  That was all part of the consolecrud debacle, and no sooner was that in place and made standard then it was replaced with some other "great idea".  Not Debian's fault, but the implementation is still dodgy.  I should have been able to switch to Testing after six or eight months without too many issues but that was a complete bork-up.  It becomes really annoying building a spin from ground up, fine-tuning and refining it, and then have it broken on the next dist-upgrade!

Just an example here.  Did dist-upgrade one day and all seemed OK.  Next time I booted though the computer logged into a full-blown Gnome session!!!  On reflection I thought the upgrade download size seemed a tad big, but there you go!  On googling I found I was not alone.  So off I went and removed ALL the Gnome desktop crud that the Wheezy repo had accidentally installed.  Sheesh.

So when it came to my wife's computer I was ready to go all the way, but not Ubuntu.  Mint was the obvious choice and I went the xfce model because it is a bit more resource light, and has Thunar!  It's been working fine but as I mentioned previously, it is impossible to configure the xfce DE to the look or functionality that I am used to.  If Mint did an LXDE version I would have gone for that.  One of the advantages of a big distro is that there is a team devs keeping things on track, not just one operator trying to keep up with everything.  Mind you that's no guarantee either!!  Various distros including Ubuntu and Debian have shown that they are perfectly capable of screwing up a new release!

So what I was looking for was Ubuntu/Mint based LXDE with a full suite of software, including Gimp, Libre-office and Thunderbird.  LXDE fitted the bill, although I had to install Chromium over Firefox and throw out a lot of games and extraneous apps.  Don't know why builders have to double up and clutterfy their apps list.  Sorry to hear about your run-in with them, because the spin is reasonably well thought out.

and now my ISP network is somehow broken so Adsl has lowered during the last week/10 days from 15MB to 11 then 7.999 then 5.353 then 2.745 (or close) and now is 1.023 MB!

Just out of curiosity, are the MB figures referring to the downloads speeds per second?

[melodie]

No, the value is not MB, it's Kpbs. We have 1 MB left, which means the best dl rate is 126 kb/s and the best up I don't dare try. If I would that would be a very tiny Bento, to avoid uploading during days and days.

You definitely should give a whirl to Bento, and if you are not in a hurry as it seems, you might want to wait for a tiny one to come.
(The ISP issue will find an end hopefully not too far in the future).

Have you read the description?

About Debian, I don't know because I just have a testing with a little bit of sid in it, that was for tests purpose. Indeed, Mati75, a packager from the Linux Mint community, packaged openbox-menu ! \o/
I helped him by testing his packages.

openbox-menu is therefore also available now for the next Ubuntu Trusty, while it will stay in sid some time.

For the thing of internal partitions I setup a polkit file ; for the thing of gnome apps and desktop I check what I install when using the command line: if it wants to install a bloat I seek for the guilty package (will test installing a few which are presented in the batch to see what has a guilty dependency).

From there it has to be told to the debian developers so they warn the one packager responsible for the package. (In an ideal world, we *have* the time to do such steps. )