One of those who disparaged my choice to run Etch mentioned LXDE. Frankly, I knew nothing about it. So I did some reading and it sounded almost useful. Given I live in a somewhat fluid situation at the moment, my estimate of my needs could shift a little now and then. My estimate of LXDE and of my needs made them appear close enough to try it. So I installed Lenny from the XFCE/LXDE disk. I already know I don’t like XFCE 4, so that’s not an option.
To be honest, LXDE looks like IceWM-GNOME. Only it appears less configurable. Aside from my preference for a darker hue (Dirty Ice) I prefer fairly vanilla stuff. I removed the wallpaper and other decorations. Why LXNM is not installed by default is a mystery and a mistake. However, I can understand the hesitation to bundle Wicd. However, I think if the installer knows we are doing “laptop” and LXDE, excluding Wicd is almost stupid. It’s possible to live without a power manager, simply because I seldom have any use for it, actually. My laptop is most often plugged in, and I already have suspend modes working to my satisfaction.
By the way, for the Inspiron 4100 using the Radeon M6, you add these lines to /etc/hibernate/suspend2.conf
USuspendRamForce
RadeonTool yes
EnableVbetool yes
VbetoolPost yes
Suspend (s2ram) works every time, and Hibernate (s2disk) does without tweaking.
I’m still poking around with this and will probably find more things which could have been done better. Also, on a low power laptop like mine, it makes no sense to use a heavy browser. Opera gets just about all my graphical business, but the heavy lifting is with the latest Elinks (0.12pre3). Unfortunately, Blogspot and WordPress require graphical browsers with JScript and so forth or you can’t access all functions. The former uses a popup window for comments and the latter throws up errors when you try to post or comment. That’s using Elinks with SpiderMonkey built into it.
See, I can be told, and I can learn from others. I’d rather not have to bother with a GUI in the first place, but there are too many things which just can’t be done… for now.
Update: The LXPanel is broken. I made some changes to replace LXNM with Wicd and it went into race condition. Because of all the other little annoyances in LXDE, I tossed it. It’s been replaced with IceWM. I’ve used it far longer, know more about configuring and fixing it up, and it’s less likely to go nuts on me.
