Episode 113: The LinuxFest Northwest Report

News:

Mint is conducting a poll on Desktop Environments. (blog.linuxmint.com)

Linux Mint named one of the 5 best Linux distros over at lifehacker. Some surprises at the other distos included. (lifehacker.com)

Mark your calendars: Texas Linux Fest 2012 will be held Aug. 3-4 at the Norris Conference Center in downtown San Antonio. (texaslinuxfest.org)

LO vs OO. (itworld.com)

XFCE releases version 4.10. (xfce.org)

Vivaldi is nearly here. (aseigo.blogspot.com)

The Main Topic: LinuxFest NorthWest

linuxfestnorthwest.org

Featured Website:

All things Vivaldi. (makeplaylive.com)

Tip: Minty XFCE

Our tip this week comes to us from Michael Torrie in response to Rob’s complaints about after-the-fact installs of desktop environments that weren’t very minty.

If you install XFCE using the software manager or aptitude you don’t get the nice Mint-flavored XFCE configuration. Instead you just get the stock config. I found that the Mint XFCE setup magic is provided by mintdesktop-xfce package and it’s all in /etc/skel. Thus if you start with LMDE XFCE edition, when your home directory is first created, the Mint XFCE configs get copied from /etc/skel into your home directory. If you add XFCE after the fact, your home directory has already been created, and so these files don’t get copied. If you create a new user, however, you’d find the new user has the Mint XFCE settings.

Here’s a formula for installing XFCE and making sure your existing account has the config files:

1. Install XFCE:
– sudo aptitude install mintdesktop-xfce
– sudo aptitude install xfce4-session

2. update files:
– rm -rf ~/.config/xfce4 #for good measure
– cp -a /etc/skel/.config/xfce4 ~/.config/
– cp /etc/skel/.gtkrc-xfce ~/