Xfce Forum

Lawrence

Member

From: California, USA

Registered: 2012-07-28

Posts: 5

Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

Good evening, forums.xfce -

I am a GNOME refugee who recently installed Xubuntu 12.04 hoping to find something similar to GNOME 2.32. I am very impressed with what I have found.

While Xubuntu is quite speedy on my HP Pavilion dv6000 laptop, some cursory browsing of this thread has led me to consider a switch.

I am hoping to find a pure (non-Gnome) XFCE distribution - not Debian XFCE. Debian does not include restricted packages such as unrar & libmad, and codecs required for the playback of mp3 and other non-free formats by default, and Flash is a nightmare to run.

Is there some non-Debian pure XFCE distribution available that includes these restricted packages by default?

I apologize if this is a basic question, but I am not as well-versed in these things as some others here may be.

Thank you,

Lawrence

Last edited by Lawrence (2012-07-31 02:57:39)

gnome_refugee

Member

Registered: 2010-01-15

Posts: 169

Re: Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

Hi, Lawrence.

I run Debian Xfce and am very happy with it. Installing those extra packages is very simple and instructions are on the Debian wikis. Basically, all you do is add repositories to your package sources list, then install those 'non-free' packages from those repositories. Having done that, you have all the codecs you need to play videos and music, Adobe Flash works fine, etc etc

There are lots of distros, tho, that are easy for beginners, come with all the bells and whistles and also come in Xfce versions, like Linux Mint 13 Xfce, Vector Linux Xfce, PCLinuxOS Xfce.

HTH

Sideburns

Member

From: Trinidad, CO

Registered: 2011-03-30

Posts: 467

Website

Re: Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

If you want to make a complete break with Debian, you might consider Fedora.  Although it's primarily Gnome-centric, you can install a completely Xfce system in two ways.  First, you can install from the Xfce spin LiveCD and second, you can use the install DVD and make sure Xfce is the only DE selected.  Fedora is, of course, strictly free, but it's easy to add the third-party repo needed for the 'non-free' packages, just like in Debian.  However, you need to be aware that there's a new Fedora release every six to nine months, and only the two most current are supported, with no updates, even for security reasons, to older versions so you pretty much have to upgrade at least once a year, if not twice.

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MekkaGodzilla

Member

Registered: 2011-03-05

Posts: 9

Re: Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

You can install Arch if you really want to avoid Debian, but I feel that your bad experience with debian is strange.
I installed debian wheezy with xfce last week-end and it went like this :

Install the beast.
When prompted about software sources, choose to allow non-free software (or edit sources.list to include non-free)
Boot it.
For music, I installed quodlibet as player. It seems it pulled all the dependencies needed to play mp3.
For flash, a simple install of "flashplugin-nonfree" was enough.

secipolla

Member

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 393

Re: Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

Updated Fedora 17 images can be found at http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/live-respins/
As MekkaGodzilla said about Debian, you can do the same while installing Fedora, adding the rpmfusion.org repositories.

jens

Member

Registered: 2012-03-20

Posts: 26

Re: Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

www.salixos.org

based on slackware. xfce edition in download section.

wes300

Member

From: Brazil

Registered: 2012-11-30

Posts: 4

Re: Recommended non-Debian pure XFCE distribution?

Manjaro is a stable arch friend distro, sabayon XFCe

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