Installing LXDE Light Weight Desktop Environment on openSUSE 11.2

Recently the openSUSE team announced that LXDE (Lightweight Desktop Environment) would be included as an option in the installer on openSUSE 11.3.

In the openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1 Release, they tout LXDE as

“the “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is a new player in the openSUSE desktop selection. It is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. It comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM than other environments. It is especially designed for computers with low hardware specifications.”

You can find more about LXDE in general at http://lxde.org.

Being as impatient as I am, I decided to give LXDE a shot prior to waiting for openSUSE 11.3. The LXDE team makes this quite easy to do with openSUSE 11.2. My experiences (although on my test machine memory is not an issue) were quite pleasant. Not only was less memory consumed, but everything I tried was more snappier and more responsive. I’ll talk more about that in a following blog entry.

So here’s how you’d install it:
Set up the lxde Build Service Repository:

su -c ‘zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/lxde/openSUSE_11.2/ openSUSE\ 11.2\ LXDE

Now you can install the LXDE pattern (a pattern is a meta file with the group of packages that make the installation complete):

su -c ‘zypper in -t pattern LXDE’

Wow, that was easy wasn’t it? It seriously can’t get any easier can it? .. Well since you asked.. Yes Yes it can. The LXDE team has provided 1 click installs for LXDE on openSUSE 11.0 – 11.2

openSUSE 11.2

openSUSE 11.1

openSUSE 11.0

After you install it you can choose your session to be LXDE at your login screen (ie your KDM or GDM screen).

I’ll post more about configuring certain things while in LXDE. Like wrapping your desktop switching, changing your OpenBox fonts and your LXDE Appearance fonts etc.