Tag Archives: lxde

LXDE on Ubuntu

The laptop won’t let me dual boot. That’s coz the lappy isn’t actually mine, it’s the office laptop. So I was running Ubuntu in Virtualbox all this time. Ubuntu 9.10  (I know!). But then I switched to 12.04 – Precise Pangolin. Unity is pretty cool now compared to what it was back then in 11.04. However it’s a no-no for running in a VBox. Switched to gnome classic sans effects which improved the performance drastically.

I had used LXDE for a few months about an year back in my netbook. So I thought, why not give it a go again? Without removing the existing gnome packages, I typed,

sudo apt-get install lxde-core

into the terminal. It gave me the LXDE desktop, but that’s as far as it went. Just the desktop. No Leafpad, no PCMan, no LXTerminal, nothing. Hey, that isn’t LXDE! What’s LXDE without Leafpad or PCMan? So I went ahead and typed,

sudo apt-get install lxde

and, voila, here I have what I wanted. (Lesson: don’t install lxde-core, just use lxde and it gives you everything)

LXDE desktop on Ubuntu
From left to right, Leafpad, PCMan file browser and LXTerminal (click to enlarge)

Okay, the interface isn’t as polished as that of gnome, that’s a given. It’s only supposed to be lighter and faster. But unfortunately it felt like the system isn’t much comfortable having LXDE around. It felt like the kernel’s carrying a bulk. Not as smooth as the classic gnome experience. I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen, so I’d try this for two or three days and switch back to gnome. Good thing I didn’t remove the gnome packages before installing.

Oh wait, perhaps it’s a good time to try out XFCE!

The Kewl desktop environment – KDE

So I wanted to get some first hand experience on KDE. To install KDE in Ubuntu what you need is to install the kde-desktop (or  kde-netbook in my case) package from the repos. Once installed, log out and choose KDE before logging in.

KDE is the sex! There’s absolutely nothing so beautiful like it! Due to the restrictions in my netbook most of the effects won’t work for me, but still it looks marvelous. Sad to find that it’s being underrated in the FOSS world.

KDE desktop in my netbook

KDE’s however not so sweet with resources. The environment is heavy, perhaps even heavier than gnome. But I can’t make up my mind to leave it and go back to LXDE. The performance loss is quite worth the sacrifice, if you ask me.

Moving to Lubuntu

The restrictions in my netbook made me convert my Ubuntu install into a Lubuntu. For this, you don’t need to manually download Lubuntu and install. All you need is to install Ubuntu first and run the command in this Psychocats page titled ‘Remove Ubuntu’.

And, voila, you get a pure LXDE desktop!lubuntu desktop

It may not look as pleasing as classic Gnome or Unity, but it’s quite usable and has a memory footprint as low as 100MB. PCManFM replaces Nautilus as the file manager. The window manager becomes Openbox.

The main problem I had to deal with was connecting to internet using my USB modem. The solution was to install the script they give in www.sakis3g.org. It automatically recognized my Dialog broadband connection. I

There is no Software Center in Lubuntu, only the Synaptic Package Manager. If you want you can search and install software-center from the Synaptic Manager.

 WARNING: When you install lubuntu-desktop with the above method, most of the apps that come bundled with Ubuntu are uninstalled. eg: LibreOffice is completely removed and AbiWord is installed instead.