HOWTO: Lightest XFCE - Making XFCE lighter and faster

[vermaden]

XFCE is generally light out from the box but it can be a lot more light, to have most of its functionality we need only these 3 processes running:
VSZ RSS COMMAND
14080 9300 xfwm4
23448 12020 xfce4-panel
19836 9512 xfce4-menu-plugin

mandatory ports: [thanks to lvlamb (http://bsdforums.com/forums/showpost.php?p=249290&postcount=4) ]
/usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4-wm
/usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4-panel
/usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4-desktop # to get xfce4-menu-plugin
/usr/ports/x11-fm/thunar # to have nice and light file manager
/usr/ports/graphics/feh # to have wallpaper and nice ultra light/fast image viewer.

to start XFCE with only these processes we will use this ~/.xinitrc:
xfce4-panel & pid=$!
{
xfwm4 --compositor=off --daemon && killall -9 xfce-mcs-manager &
random_wallpaper.sh ~/gfx/wallpapers &
}
wait $pid

my random_wallpaper.sh script:
#! /bin/sh

walls="${1}"
count=`ls ${walls} | wc -l`
random=`( time ps aux ; date +"%S" ; w ) 2>&1 | cksum | awk '{print substr($0, 0, 5)}'`
choosen=`expr ${random} % ${count} + 1`
feh --bg-scale ${walls}/`ls ${walls} | sed -n ${choosen}p`

In XFCE generally all settings like current theme icon theme and so are handled by xfce-mcs-manager but we kill it and use pure old ~/.gtkrc-2.0 for that:
gtk-icon-theme-name = "Tango-Blue-Materia"
gtk-theme-name = "Luminance"
gtk-font-name = "Sans 10"

here are links for that themes if You like them:
gtk-icon-theme-name: http://vermaden.go.pl/tmp/xfce-icons.tar.gz
gtk-theme-name: http://vermaden.go.pl/tmp/xfce-theme.tar.gz

icons dir: ~/.icons/Tango-Blue-Materia
theme dir: ~/.themes/Luminance

to end work with XFCE You can traditionally hit CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE or hit EXIT on XFCE panel.

the END RESULT looks like that:

http://th07.deviantart.com/fs15/300W/f/2007/050/5/c/FreeBSD_6_2___Lightest_XFCE_by_vermaden.png (http://toya.net.pl/~vermaden/gfx/vermaden-2007.02.19.jpg)

Have Fun. :rolleyes:

[s2scott]

the END RESULT looks like that:
http://vermaden.go.pl/gfx/screenshots/xfce-light.png... is 404, not found. :(

[vermaden]

These links were dead loong before now, I just moved these HOWTOs to daemonforums.org but I fixed the link you pointed.

[Carpetsmoker]

You can attach files to your posts, please use this feature since it ensures the files will still be available in a few years.

[mmusang]

thx alot! it will benefits the community

[aleunix]

thx alot! it will benefits the community

I have done some small change on ~/.xinitrc:

xfce4-panel & pid=$!
{
xfwm4 --compositor=off --daemon
}
wait $pid


This is my screenshot:
http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/7b3cd736074394c2eae322f073052e192g.jpg (http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=gtxj5nyd5xm&thumb=4)

[vermaden]

I have done some small change on ~/.xinitrc

killall -9 xfce-mcs-manager &
I needed to kill xfce-mcs-manager process because it was useless if you use ~/.gtkrc-2.0 fot GTK2 configuration, mabye now it does not load by default.

random_wallpaper.sh ~/gfx/wallpapers &
Just sets some random wallpaper as the script name says.

[Oko]

I fail to see how your "light" Xfce-desktop is any different than xfce-panel running
along any window manager. You would get the same screen shoot with
.xsession (I use XDM) which looks like



feh --bg-scale /home/oko/mywallpaper.jpg &
xfce4-panel &
exec openbox