Sunday, May 03, 2015

Using XFCE4 on Fedora 21

I recently took my Walmart Red Acer and added a 256GB SSD drive at a cost of $109.  The result was an incredible increase in performance.  Boot time when from about 1.5 minutes or more to right around 30 seconds.  Applications pretty much pop up almost immediately and my colleagues at work were impressed.

I was using Gnome-shell as my desktop but I got tired of all the mousing.  There were a few performance issues that I think were related to Gnome-shell so I switched to my favorite XFCE.  I was disappointed to learn the bluetooth applet was no longer supported.  The solution was to install the bluedevil-autostart package.  This added a startup that gave me a bluetooth icon in the notification icon tray of XFCE.  While I need to manually turn on the bluetooth device using the Acer touchpad (I grew up with a ThinkPad so a touchpad is a challenge for me).  I am sure there is a way to automate the powering on of bluetooth.  I think bluetoothctl is the right place to start.

One more thing...  While I was switching to XFCE in Fedora 21 as my default workspace, I also switched from gdm to lightdm as my desktop manager.  The process for doing this is much similar now.  All I had to do was disable gdm and enable lightdm via systemctl and reboot my laptop.  Here are the commands I used just to be sure:

sudo systemctl disable gdm
sudo systemctl enable lightdm
sudo reboot

Beware of changing the background at the lightdm signon page.  The image mush have an alpha channel in the image.  After some Googling, the magic is to run this command to make sure it has the alpha channel:

 convert wallpaper.jpg wallpaper-with-alpha-channel.jpg

I copied the wallpaper-with-alpha-channel.jpg to /usr/share/backgrounds as root user just to rule out any permissions issues.  The background= line in /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf need to be updated with this new file.

My Walmart Red Acer is now a much faster machine.