Features/LXDE

LXDE

Summary

LXDE - Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment

Owner

• Name: ChristophWickert (feel free to add yourself)

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 10
• Last updated: 2008-10-31
• Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast. It's not designed to be powerful and bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the resource usage low. It consists of

• PCManFM: File manager, provides desktop icons (in Fedora, maintained by Mamoru Tasaka)
• LXPanel: Feature-rich desktop panel (in Fedora, maintained by Sebastian Vahl)
• LXSession Lite: Standard-compliant X11 session manager with shutdown/reboot/suspend support via HAL and gdm (in Fedora, maintained by Christoph Wickert)
• LXAppearance: LXAppearance is a new feature-rich GTK+ theme switcher able to change GTK+ themes, icon themes, and fonts used by applications (in Fedora, maintained by Christoph Wickert)
• LXTask: Lightweight task manager derived from xfce4 task manager with all xfce4 dependencies removed, some bugs fixed, and some improvements of the UI (in Fedora, maintained by Christoph Wickert)
• LXTerminal: Desktop-independent VTE-based terminal emulator (in Fedora, maintained by Christoph Wickert)
• LXLauncher: Open source replacement for the Asus Launcher on the EeePC (in Fedora, maintained by Christoph Wickert)
• LXNM (still under development): Lightweight network manager for LXDE supporting wireless connections (no plans atm)
• LXRandR (still under development): Monitor configuring tool. (no plans atm)
• Openbox: Lightweight, standard-compliant, and highly-configurable window manager. This can be replaced by any other window manager like icewm, fluxbox, metacity, ...etc. (in Fedora, maintained by Miroslav Lichvar)
• GPicView: A very simple, fast, and lightweight image viewer featuring immediate startup (in Fedora, maintained by Marc Wiriadisastra)
• Leafpad: Lightweight and simple text editor (in Fedora, mainained by Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams)
• XArchiver: Lightweight, fast, and desktop-independent gtk+-based file archiver (in Fedora, maintained by Christoph Wickert)

LXDE uses a modular approach: Each component of LXDE can be used independently, so you don't need to install the whole Desktop, if you don't like it.

Benefit to Fedora

Another desktop below Xfce that can run well on

• elder computers
• Netbooks like or the Eee PC
• the OLPC
• embedded systems

Scope

• Package Reviews
• Comps: new group with id "lxde-desktop", name "LXDE", description something like "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment"
  • mandatory: lxde-common, lxpanel, lxsession-lite, openbox, pcmanfm
  • default: gpicview, leafpad, lxappearance, lxtask, lxterminal, obconf, xarchiver
  • optional: epdfview, galculator, lxlauncher, obmenu, parcellite
  • maybe some more proposed light applications from the Fedora LXDE Spin , but I wonder if apps like dayplanner, quodlibet, sylpheed etc fit well under 'Desktop'.
• OLPC: I'm planning to maintain LXDE packages for the XO and already did some porting.

Test Plan

As most of the packages are already in fedora they are proven to be stable. So we need to

1. get the 2 missing packages into rawhide ASAP so they are included in the F10 Beta (done)
2. add packages to comps (done)
3. test that installation with yum-groupinstall works correctly (passed)
4. test fresh installs with the beta (passed)
5. do more testing on different arches (PPC) (passed)

LXDE should be ready for Fedora 10

Things to test

• Do all launchers in the panel work? Do they have icons?
• Do all applications work (lx*, gpicview, leafpad, ...)?
• Do all panel plugins work?
• Does "Log out" work? (Note: No PolicyKit in LXSession, so if you choose to shutdown/reboot if another user is still logged in you will be returned to GDM instead of being asked for password. However user switching works.)
• Do you have icons in the logout dialog?

User Experience

Screenshots

• 

  Default LXDE Desktop in Fedora

• 

  LXDE with some of it's applications

• 

  Installing LXDE with a single click in pirut

• 

  Optional LXDE packages in pirut

• more screenshots upstream: http://lxde.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
• While yum groupinstall LXDE installs the complete LXDE Desktop, the core components lxpanel, lxsession, pcmanfm and openbox can be installed with yum install lxde-common. lxde-common contains the necessary configuration files and and pulls the lxde-icon-theme.

Videos

• short descripton of the desktop environment LXDE 06:54min
• short descripton of the file browser PCMANFM 03:47min
• short descripton of the image viewer GPicView 01:47min
• short descripton of the task manager LXTask01:57min

Note: None of these were taken on Fedora.

Dependencies

• lxde-common (in Fedora >= 8)
• lxsession-lite (in Fedora >= 8)
• lxappearance (in Fedora >= 8)
• lxtask (in Fedora >= 8)
• lxterminal (in Fedora >= 8)
• lxlauncher (in Fedora >= 8)
• lxde-icon-theme: optional because we use Fedora's artwork (tbd, no review yet)

Contingency Plan

Not needed: All packages are independent of each other. If we don't get lxde-common into Fedora 10 it will do absolutely no harm to the rest of the packages, they will work in other desktop environments just fine.

Documentation

lxde-common contains manpages for all LXDE components, so there is not much we need to care about.

Upstream documentation:

• http://wiki.lxde.org/
• http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXDE:Questions
• http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Fedora

Release Notes

This release of Fedora comes with an additional desktop environment named LXDE. LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast. It's not designed to be powerful and bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the resource usage low. You can install LXDE with the package manager.