Yesterday Andrea aka anubisg1 announced the Live CDs for LXDE, which he built in Build Service with the help of Dmitry Serpokryl. It was a very easy task for me to replace LXDE packages with Xfce ones in kiwi definition, so I can present you the Xfce Live CDs!

I’ve created an entry in our Derivates page and you can download the images from this location. The default user is linux with no password, user root uses the same empty password.

I’ve tested the 32-bit image in VirtualBox and hit some issues (see below), the 64-bit image is untested at the moment. There’s where I would like you to ask for testing both images. Some points first:

• currently the Qt YaST is used (I had some issues with GTK one)
• after the login a warning message is shown (about putting “linux” into /etc/hosts)
• you can install the system to hard drive using the Live Installer icon on the desktop
  • unfortunately this blocks us from enabling autologin (installed system expects “linux” user which is present only on Live CD and login ends in loop, the bug in YaST is being worked on)
  • also some message dialogs about locked storage subsystem are shown during the installation steps

If you hit a new issue, please report it to me. Also if you know how to fix any existing ones, please don’t hesitate as well! Thank you!

The Xfce development team announced today the release of the long-awaited 4.6.0 version of their Xfce Desktop Environment. There is also a very nice Visual Tour prepared by Jérôme Guelfucci and Jannis Pohlmann, which highlights some of the new and exciting Xfce features. For me, the most vivid change is the complete rewrite of the Settings Manager together with its configuration backend, but I’m sure that everybody will find his/hers own favorite .

It took me longer to prepare the updated packages than I expected, because of the busy BuildService, but they are finally ready in our X11:xfce BuildService project and I would like to encourage you to try them. If you encounter any problems, either upgrade issues from distribution 4.4.x series, issues with clean installation from repository or any other defects, please do not hesitate and contact me. Thank you very much and I’m looking for your comments and responses!

Instructions (command-line):

1. add X11:xfce repository if it is not already added:

   zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/xfce/openSUSE_11.1/ xfce

   (replace 11.1 with your openSUSE version)

2. refresh this repository:

   zypper refresh xfce

3. get new packages
   • if you have Xfce 4.4.x installed – upgrade the packages from xfce repo:
     zypper dist-upgrade --repo xfce
   • or install the Xfce packages directly:

     zypper install Terminal mousepad orage ristretto thunar thunar-volman xfce4-appfinder xfce4-desktop xfce4-mixer xfce4-notifyd xfce4-settings xfce4-taskmanager xfce4-volstatus xfconf xfwm4

Instructions (one-click install):

just click on the link with your distribution:

• openSUSE 10.3
• openSUSE 11.0
• openSUSE 11.1