Monday, September 14, 2009

LXDE on Fedora 11 Diskless Machine

I have a five year old machine without a hard disk which I boot using a liveusb.

I have been creating a custom livecd by adding a multimedia components from the rpmfusion repository. I decided to explore the option of lxde on the liveusb after reading an article on Lubuntu in Linux Magazine. I modified the fedora-livecd-multimedia.ks replacing @gnome-desktop group by @LXDE group. As before, I retained mplayer and the gstreamer bad and ugly plugins.

The creation of the livecd and the liveusb was smoothe.

Booting created one problem. Instead of gdm, slim was used as a simple login manager, which would not give me the option to switch from gnome-session to LXDE session. I just created a file /home/liveuser/.xinitrc with one line -
startlxde

That was it.

Anyway, I normally use this machine in init 3 setting, and usually use it start a remote X session on my main desktop.

Icewm is restrictive. Advantages of XFCE has been diminishing as it has become more functional. So, LXDE does seem to be a very good compromise. I am now also using it as the default session for remote X sessions. The snappiness of the desktop is impressive and ideal for the work I do from the diskless machine.

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