Minimal installation of Xfce on Debian

Introduction

I’m using Openbox (see my Openbox installation notes, but it may be desirable to also have a “heavier” desktop environment installed, as some users are not comfortable with a minimalist environment. Xfce is a good compromise, closer to a full desktop environment but still lightweight.

Installation

When I installed Xfce, I had already Openbox and X.org installed.

I followed Craig Coonrad’s recommendation to install Xfce manually instead of using the Debian package selection (tasksel). I just installed the xfce4 package:

apt-get install xfce4

This triggered the installation of the LightDM display manager, which is fine.

If you don’t like the default behaviour of the system with regard to automatic screen locking, install xfce4-power-manager, and you’ll get access to the power manager settings panel, which makes it possible to tune the automatic screen locking feature:

apt-get install xfce4-power-manager

Theming

The installation of xfce4 also triggered the installation of the desktop-base package which provides the Debian themes.

Browse the /usr/share/desktop-base for an overview of the available themes, with for example:

xzgv /usr/share/desktop-base

Select your preferred theme (as root) with the Debian alternatives system:

update-alternatives --config desktop-theme # As root.

Similarly, you can select the Grub theme with:

update-alternatives --config desktop-grub # As root.

Then run update-grub.

Showing (or not) the user list on LightDM login screen

The greeter-hide-users option in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf determines whether the system user list is visible or not on the LightDM login screen.

On a Debian GNU/Linux system at least, this option is absent (well, commented out) by default and the user list is not visible on the LightDM login screen.

Uncomment the option (greeter-hide-users=false) as root and reboot the system to make the user list visible on the login screen.