Fedora Core 1 and xfce4 - misc. comments/settings/questions

[Marc Schwartz]

[Note: this is a re-send of a post from yesterday, which I sent under
the wrong "From" address, so it probably got rejected. Apologies in
advance for the duplication, if the original comes through as well.]

Hi all,

After the recent issues with xfwm4 under FC1 and Gnome, I now have xfce4
running. Still playing around with some things getting "comfortable". I
thought that I would offer some comments that might be helpful, some of
which might make sense to add to the xfce4 FAQ. I also have a couple of
follow up questions that are still open issues.

I should note that I installed xfce4* from a FC1 yum repository
(NewRPMS.sunsite.dk) using precompiled FC1 RPMS. This included the xfce4
"goodies" RPMS.


Comments:

1. Changing the default use of xterm to gnome-terminal:

Change environment variable TERMCMD to "gnome-terminal".

Use: export TERMCMD="gnome-terminal"

I did this in ~/.bashrc, but you can do this in /etc/xfce4/xinitrc or
~/.xfce4/xinitrc, as an alternative I suppose. If you prefer a different
terminal app, modify the above accordingly.



2. Adding xfce4 to the xdm login sessions menu:

You need to copy 10XFce4 in the following manner as root:

cp /etc/X11/wmsession.d/10XFce4 /etc/X11/dm/Sessions/10XFce4

Then xfce4 will be available from the init 5 xdm login screen under
"Sessions".



3. To set xfce4 as the default desktop, I am still playing with this,
but I have found some scripts and settings that may be of help to folks
as an interim step.

First, the script file /usr/share/apps/switchdesk/Xclients.xfce4
does get created via the installation that I used. However, this file,
which does the desktop switching to xfce4 from a Gnome session, does not
get picked up by the scripts that build/use the desktop switcher GUI and
therefore does not show.

What I have done so far is to create the file ~/.Xclients containing the
line:

startxfce4

With this in place, I can now run xfce4 as the default desktop without
having to select it from the xdm menu each time.



4. I am running on a Dell i8200 laptop with a 1600 x 1200 lcd panel
(NVidia 64Mb card). I copied /etc/xfce4/xinitrc to:

~/.xfce4/xinitrc

So that I could edit it locally for me, even though I am the only user
of the system.

In playing around with the Xft settings in the above file, I finally
came up with some that yield the same results that I had using the Gnome
font-config GUI.

These are:

xrdb -nocpp -merge - << EOF
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.dpi: 133
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.rgba: vrgb
EOF


Anti-aliased fonts are much easier for me to read on lcd panels, so this
setup may be of help for others, trying to replicate their Gnome
settings. You will need to modify the above of course to your taste and
screen resolution.


Question:

1. I have tried to add the RHN notification applet to the system tray in
the xfce panels.  I can do this using rhn-applet-gui& from a console
without problem.

However, when trying to get this to happen automatically at login, I
tried both adding the command to the end of ~/.xfce4/xinitrc and putting
a symlink to the command in ~/Desktop/Autostart. Neither method worked. 
Any ideas?



I suspect that I will have other questions and tweaks over the coming
days, but thought that I would offer these for now.

To Olivier and the other developers, well done! This is a change from
Gnome of course, but I'll get over it...just like forcing myself to use
emacs as a front end (ESS) for the statistical package
(http://www.r-project.org/) that I use.


Best regards and thanks,

Marc Schwartz