Linux Xfce : The Everyman Choice ....Not !

Article = None , personal experience

Ok , so for boxing day I bought an Acer AspireOne netbook , which is kind of like a lap top only smaller. No CD rom or DVD drive. And the hard drive is all flash memory, no heads to crash if you drop it (a good thing actually , though maybe 8 gigabytes is a little low on space)

The thing is running Linux !

Hurray ! Hello Firefox goodbye virii and trojens and other microsoft annoyances.

The thing has this plicking annoying newbie interface , huge icons , a few programs, everything locked down , I hate it. Even my ubuntu linux machine in the living room gives me a nice clean desktop and a menu to choose programs from , and icons on the desk top if I like. And the ability to put up a nice picture .

XFCE , it turns out (I have no idea what that stands for) is a "light" version of linux , designed to run on very few resources so you can use it on cheap , slow , low memory machines and it will run acceptably.

so I find this Linux Article that will let me hack the thing put on a pretty desk top , and get rid of the annoying newbie interface. Why not ?

Alt-F2 brings up the run program window. Aha ! They'd hidden that command from me , it wasn't anywhere on the newbie interface. (equivilant of the run command in windows)
So I bring it up and I type in xfce-setting-show , as directed, and I get this nifty window with all sorts of forbidden options that Acer doesn't want newbies to have access to.

Thats fine. Get a menu going, change the apearance, it's all good.

Next step is to get rid of the gui (graphical user interface, in this case the annoying newbie one)

so I open the terminal application , as directed, and I type in Su , and it askes me for my password.

Doesn't accept it.

Hmm..I never did set a password, now that I think about it. This was a floor demo model, and I remember calling the store and they didn't know the password either.

Oops, I'm toast. Well... what if I did a total reinstall of the operating system ? I got the recovery disk and everything in the box. And it's not like I did anythign but watch youtube.com video's for the last three months on it.

Hmm..put the cd in to my windows machine, because as I said the aspire one doesn't have a drive, boot from the cd (had to play with bios) and it boots into a tiny version of linux , and lets me reformat a usb stick I have on my keychain (1 gig minimum , but I don't think they sell them that small anymore) to become a "boot disk" , ok..boot stick maybe.

Stick it in the aspire and press f2 on boot up , get it to change priorities to try and boot from a usb stick first , then the regular drive later (that way I don't have to keep playing , I can just stick the stick in when I want to reformat and take it out when I want to use it)

Ah ...at last I get to choose my password. Been looking for that for three months.

Mousepad, edit a config file to get rid of the newbie interface. Looks wonderful ! But half the settings don't work. Still can't change the background wall paper.

((edit : "mousepad /etc/xdg/xfce4-session/xfce-session.rc " is the command

comment out ... (by putting # as the first charactar in the line)
Client0_command=xfdesktopnew

and put in ...
Client0_command=xfdesktop-xfce

So that it reads ...

#Client0_command=xfdesktopnew
Client0_command=xfdesktop-xfce

and you can switch back and forth by simply moving the comment symbol
from one line to the other

))

Put the newbie interface back , and the settings work again. Dang newbie interface is running programs in the background that make all your settings controls work. And probably a bunch of other things too.

Hmm..back to the configuration file ..what if I do this , or this , or this ?

System hung. Boots, but no icons to click on , no menu to issue controls. Put the memory stick back in , reformat the whole thing again ...

Did they really claim Linux passed the grandma test ? Maybe the newbie interface did. It worked great until I started fiddling with it.

*sigh* reloaded the whole os again ...

I'll let you know how this turns out ... when I finish fiddling...

EDIT

Aha ! (after a second reformat ...don't update the software by the way , thats a waste of time and just improves the vender lock and makes it harder to by pass their annoying junk) In the desk top manager , set the desktop to show no icons, and reboot, and the newbie interface goes away. But since it's still running in the background, all your menu options and control panels still work.

You wind up with a blank screen though instead of your wall paper. Go to settings > desktop and "tile" the wall paper , and it materializes ! Set it back to stretch , and you have your normal wall paper. Annoying , since you have to do it every time you reboot ... have to work on that ...