Bring back the little mouse!

In the late 90s there was a joke. Two CPUs talk: – How much is 2+2? – 5! – Ain’t right, it’s 4! – But I was fast, wasn’t I! The same happened to the custom desktop environment I was writing about earlier.

Lxpanel turned out to be buggy with icons on 64 bit, so I had to compile the lxpanel4 beta. Which in turn refused to show the menu after every X start until it was restarted. Lxsession had a funny behaviour to launch the lxpanel with the LXDE profile before the user xinit, but it was quite ok. PCManFM refused to drag&drop when maximizied, and even if not, XArchiver didn’t recognized that feature. And the complete showstopper: the desktop wasn’t resized to the second monitor. Not even with lxrandr. Which is essential for rapid coding and testing. I felt enough desperate to use an environment which would be more heavy on resources but usable.

While I used the openbox+lxsession combo, XFCE 4.6 arrived into Debian Sid. What a relief! A was using Lenny, but the installation didn’t required much update of the libraries, only 70 megs were downloaded. The experience got a little better, but it sometime still hangs on startup, and there are some bugs here and there, but it works out of the box. I tweaked it a bit, but it required still less time than lxsession. And for surprise after restart it only consumes around 260 megs of RAM. Lxsession too wasn’t lighter, so I remain a happy XFCE user :).