LXDE
From project home page:
- The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. Maintained by an international community of developers, it comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM than other environments. It is especially designed for cloud computers with low hardware specifications, such as, netbooks, mobile devices (e.g. MIDs) or older computers.
Installation
LXDE requires at least lxde-common, lxsession and Openbox (or another window manager) to be installed. The lxde group contains the full desktop.
GTK 3 version
An experimental GTK 3 build of LXDE can be installed with the lxde-gtk3 group.
While it works mostly, there are some known issues with gpicview, lxappearance-obconf, lxlauncher and lxpanel.
Starting the desktop
Graphical log-in
LXDM is the default display manager for LXDE and is installed as part of the lxde group. See also Display manager.
Console
To use startx, add to xinitrc:
~/.xinitrc
exec startlxde
See also Start X at login.
Tips and tricks
The application menu works by resolving the .desktop files located in /usr/share/applications/ and ~/.local/share/applications/. To add or edit a menu item, see desktop entries. Third party menu editors can be found in the AUR (e.g. lxmedAUR). There are also official ones like alacarte (GNOME), mozo (MATE), etc.
Autostart
LXDE implements XDG Autostart. Applications can be automatically started in a couple of ways:
- With .desktop files
- Via LXsession
Each line in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart represents a command to be executed. If a line starts with @, and the command following it crashes, the command is automatically re-executed. For example:
~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart
@lxterminal @leafpad
There is also a global autostart file at /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart.
Bindings
Mouse and key bindings (i.e. keyboard shortcuts) are implemented with Openbox. LXDE users should follow the Openbox wiki to edit ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml.
An optional GUI for editing the key bindings is provided by the obkeyAUR package. Whle it edits rc.xml by default, you can direct it to the LXDE configuration as follows:
$ obkey ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml
See [1] for more information.
Cursors
lxappearance is a graphical tool to set GTK look and feel, including the cursor theme. Settings configured with LXAppearance are written to ~/.gtkrc-2.0, ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and ~/.icons/default/index.theme. See also Cursor themes.
Digital clock applet time
You can right click on the digital clock applet on the panel and set how it displays the current time using the strftime format. See strftime(3) for details.
Font settings
lxappearance-obconf configures Openbox settings. See also Font configuration.
Keyboard layout
lxpanel includes a keyboard layout applet. See Keyboard configuration in Xorg for generic instructions and #Autostart to automatically start setxkbmap in LXDE.
Screen locking
LXDE does not come with a screen locker of its own. See List of applications/Security#Screen lockers and #Autostart on how to start them.
The Screen Lock icon executes a script (located at /usr/bin/lxlock) which searches for a number of well known screen lockers and uses the first one it finds to lock the screen. See lxlock on GitHub.
/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart (from the lxde-common package) lists XScreenSaver which will be launched automatically.
See DPMS on how to control the screen saver without external programs.
LXPanel icons
Default icons used by LXpanel are stored in /usr/share/pixmaps/ and any custom icons should be saved there as well.
To change default icons for applications, see Desktop entries#Icons.
The panel's menus can be configured in /etc/xdg/menus/lxde-applications.menu as per the xdg-menu format to work with applications from other sessions (notably MATE) to add some of the function-ability that LXDE lacks.
Use a different window manager
LXsession uses the window manager defined in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf (Openbox by default). If this file does not exist, it searches in /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf instead.
Replace openbox-lxde in either file with a window manager of your choice:
For metacity:
window_manager=metacity
For compiz:
window_manager=compiz
Alternatively use WM --replace as defined in #Autostart, where WM is the name of the window manager executable being started. This means that openbox will be started first on each login and will then immediately be replaced. Note that Openbox and LXDE do not share the same rc.xml and keyboard shortcuts may differ. See xbindkeys.
Using a composite manager
LXDE does not enable compositing by default, which can lead to screen tearing problems. These can be remedied at the cost of a some graphical preformance by installing a composite manager, such as picom.
Troubleshooting
NTFS with Chinese characters
For a storage device with an NTFS filesystem, you will need to install the NTFS-3G package. Generally, PCManFM works well with NTFS filesystems, however there is one bug affecting NTFS users that if you have files or directories on an NTFS filesystem, the names of which contain non-latin characters (e.g. Chinese characters) may disappear when opening (or auto-mounting) the NTFS volume. This happens because the lxsession mount-helper is not correctly parsing the policies and locale options. There is a workaround for this:
Create a new /usr/local/bin/mount.ntfs-3g with a new Bash script containing:
#!/bin/bash /usr/bin/ntfs-3g $1 $2 -o locale=en_US.UTF-8
And then make it executable:
# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mount.ntfs-3g
LXPanel crashes
With some GTK themes, launching lxpanel will lead to the following error:
lxpanel: cairo-scaled-font.c:459: _cairo_scaled_glyph_page_destroy: Assertion `!scaled_font->cache_frozen' failed.
In this case install ttf-dejavu.
If lxpanel crashes when browsing particular unicode web pages, install ttf-droid.
LXPanel Task Bar icon size
The icons of running applications do not match the set Icon size in Panel Settings > Geometry but are 4px smaller which makes some of them blurry. To have clear looking 32px icons in the Task Bar the set Icon size has to be 36px which would blur the icons of the rest of your active Panel Applets. To get around this create additional panel(s) and have them collectively make a single continuous looking panel by adjusting the Alignment and Margin in Panel Settings > Geometry.
Fake transparency in LXTerminal
The latest version of VTE terminal widget library requires a compositing window manager for background transparency. The unmaintained, legacy GTK 2 version of VTE has fake transparency, where the desktop background image will show through the terminal. It you prefer fake transparency, the GTK 2 version of LXTerminal can be installed with the lxterminal-gtk2AUR package.
LibreOffice theming does not work
LXDE overrides the SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN environment variable used for theming LibreOffice in /usr/bin/startlxde. Change the line in that file to set the theme. Upstream bug