Sunday, August 18, 2013

SuSe 12.3 Update with LXDE


SuSe 12.3 Update with LXDE
Yes it is a revelation.
In good old days when one installs SuSe one had several Desktops to choose with several window managers to run in the system.
With Gnome and KDE having their own packages bundle with, lately one has only one or two desktops (second one is Icewarm good enough for trouble shooting in bash shell, probably) in one system.
I am one who always used KDE.
So I never tried installing other window managers.
Thanks to Peppermint, I tried LXDE on SuSe and in one hour of downloading, I got 400 MiB worth of LXDE.
Beauty is, I can use packages that are in Gnome with KDE and KDE packages in in LXDE (basically Gnome packages, I love, for example Brasero) in one go.

However one must install KDE first instead of LXDE to get the best hardware compatibility.

Since PCLinux destroyed one of my old 128 graphic cards trying Plasma on it without my implied (automatically) consent , I had to retrograde myself to 64 GiB card (I had a spare AGP card, thankfully) since it is hard to find even secondhand 128 or 256 cards now.

Of course KDE in SuSE lets you chose Plasma desktop (not as default), if you have a higher grade graphic card in the system.
I have retired PCLinux for good and now using SuSe and Korora (Fedora based with a new anaconda installation, one has to get used to).

Korora also lets you use LXDE.

I now use LXDE to save energy and resources and use KDE only if I have to do a particular job.

Mind you install KDE (not LXDE) first and later LXDE to make it easier for one to use YAST, the configuration utility.

If one has a good and speedy internet connection one does not have to wait for one hour.

One must always install SuSe it with internet running, otherwise configuring (SuSe does it automatically) the repository becomes a big hassle.

One can install Gnome too if one has left enough space in the root partition.
Good luck with your experiments.