Razor-qt is a lightweight and fast desktop manager based on Qt technologies. It strips out the bulkiness in Gnome and KDE, yet offers you a way to customize and control your own desktop. Best of all, it works great on old machine too.

Installation

Razor-qt is available for a wide range of distro. In Ubuntu, you can install it from its PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:razor-qt/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install razorqt

For installation on other distro, check out the page here.

Once you have installed Razor-qt, log out of your current session. At the login screen, select the “Razor Desktop” from the session selection button (the “Gearwheel” button)

Razor Desktop

This is what you will see once you are logged in. It is almost bare.

There is a panel at the bottom of the screen and on it contained the application menu, desktop switcher and the system tray. You can open the application menu and drag the icon to the quick launch section in the panel. It looks and feels just like the good old Gnome panel, but functions like the KDE panel.

The whole desktop focuses mainly on the context menu (right mouse click). You can right-click anywhere on the screen and access the application menu and/or logout/shutdown the PC. This make me think of the Enlightenment way of accessing your applications.

One bad thing though, this also means that you lose your context menu functionality when you right-click on any file in the desktop.

Since it is based on the Qt technologies, which is similar to KDE, you will also find familiar KDE features here. Right click and select “Edit desktop” and you will be able to add Widgets to the desktop. The big clock widget is a familiar one and you can add icon-view widget to hold any file and folder.

At the moment, there are only 3 widgets that you can use and Icon View is the only useful widget in the list. It would have to come with a lot more widgets for this feature to become very useful.

Conclusion

Razor-qt is still a new project, so it is fairly barebone. However, some of the features, like the panel, context application launcher and icon view widget are well implemented and it seems to me that the developer is grabbing the best from each DE and put them into Razor-qt. Not a bad idea though. As compared to other lightweight DE like LXDE and Openbox, the simplicity and speed of Razor-qt is there, but its lack of feature and plugins could be preventing users from using it as the default desktop manager, at least for the moment. Hopefully, it will get better.

What do you think?

Razor-qt

1. Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell

Let’s get the most obvious choice out of the way first. Historically, Ubuntu has always run the Gnome desktop environment. Gnome was one of the first DEs for Linux, and is still going strong. When they recently released version 3, it was a complete overhaul of both the desktop interface and much of the software behind it. Currently, Ubuntu uses Gnome 3′s backend software with the Unity desktop, but if you want the full Gnome 3 experience you need Gnome Shell.

As regular readers may know, we’ve covered Gnome Shell in detail several times before.

Gnome shell can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center, or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

2. KDE

The other big kid on the block is KDE. It and Gnome have been battling for the Linux desktop for years, each with their own group of avid supporters. As one of the heavyweight contenders, KDE packs a full suite of mature and capable software, a beautiful desktop, and decades of Linux desktop design experience.

All of KDE’s power and flexibility does not come cheap. A full KDE installation is a pretty hefty thing, and for all its fine points, KDE might not be a great option for low end or mobile computers.

KDE can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install kde-standard

or if you want, download Kubuntu, which comes with KDE as the default DE.

3. XFCE

For a long time, XFCE was jokingly known as “Gnome Lite”. It uses similar backend software (such as GTK) and has an overall look and feel similar to the Gnome 2.x series. It’s generally regarded as lighter and faster than Gnome, however most of those comparisons were made prior to Gnome 3. Now the two desktops take such vastly different approaches, and such comparisons would have less meaning.

Still, its resemblance to Gnome 2 is much of the reason why many people (including Linus Torvalds himself) have migrated to XFCE due to dissatisfaction with Gnome 3.

XFCE can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install xfce4

or download Xubuntu which comes with XFCE.

4. LXDE

A lightweight option that’s been growing in popularity lately is LXDE. It’s a desktop environment built around the OpenBox window manager. It includes several small apps and utilities like the PCManFM file manager and a custom panel and terminal.

LXDE is a fairly nice setup, particularly on lower-end machines, but it’s been this author’s experience that LXDE and its related apps always seem to have the feel of being almost done. If you’re the type of user who likes everything to be smoothly polished, feature-complete, and rock-solid – LXDE might not be great for you. If, however, you need something light, fast, and simple – I highly recommend you try it out. It may not be your dream desktop, but it’s almost there.

LXDE can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install lxde

5. Enlightenment (E17)

Once considered a thing of myth and legend, E17 is now a part of Ubuntu 11.10′s online repositories. Many years of development have gone in to this release, and it’s got loads of features. This is a desktop that aims to do it all – high performance, high productivity, extreme flexibility, and loads of eye candy. Chances are it does not much resemble any desktop environment you’ve used before, so if you decide to take the plunge, be prepared for a little bit of a learning curve.

Once you’ve learned to do things the “enlightened” way, it may be tough to switch back. E17 can be installed through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install e17

Conclusion

Each of these has its own pros and cons. Some people love Gnome 3, some think it’s garbage. Some people use KDE every day, others won’t go near it. The beauty of Linux is that whatever you like, you can have it – for free. If it doesn’t exist, make it. That’s what open source is all about: choice. Hopefully this guide has helped you make yours.

The Basic Desktop

When it launches, the Gnome Shell desktop is pretty sparse. In fact, all you’ve really got is a thin panel on the top.

It’s more-or-less like the default top panel you’d find on your average Gnome install. The user text in the upper right corner acts much like the equivalent Gnome applet in Ubuntu.

Things get interesting once you click the Activities button, or move your mouse all the way to the top left. This activates the nuts-and-bolts of Gnome Shell, the Activities screen.

Windows and Applications

If you have no applications open, the Activities screen doesn’t show very much to start.

But once you open a few things, possibly through the sidebar dock, you’ll see one of the features of Gnome Shell: decluttering your workspace.

However many windows you have open on that workspace will be sorted for easy viewing and access. As you may see in the screenshot above, Gnome Shell adds a close button to the window under the cursor, so excess applications can be removed without leaving the Activities screen.

So far that’s just the Windows section. If you look near the top of the Activities screen, you’ll also see Applications. Clicking this brings up the full application screen.

On the right you can choose specific categories of applications, much like the traditional Gnome menu.

The Dock

The sidebar dock provided here is a pretty simple one, and is actually similar in many ways to the one found in Unity. It is a launcher of course and also tracks the open applications, so that if you click the icon when the application is open, it will move you to the appropriate workspace. Items can be added and removed by right clicking to icon to add it as a “Favorite”.

Workspaces

This is where Gnome Shell has always stood above most other desktop environments: its ability to manage multiple workspaces. So far there seem to be three approaches to workspace management. Early builds placed workspaces in a grid layout showing you all at once:

Fedora, and the live CD used for this article, place their workspace icons at the bottom of the Activities screen, and you click the “+” or “-” icons on the right to add and remove new workspaces.

But there are some screenshots circulating of a third method which, to some, may be the best of both worlds.

Enhanced Search

In the upper right corner you’ve got your search box. This can not only pick up applications and system settings, but you can use it to directly search sites like Google and Wikipedia.

Conclusion

As for this author’s opinion – I love it. While I can’t claim to take sides on the Compiz vs Clutter debate, it’s my opinion that Gnome Shell is the best designed desktop environment I’ve yet seen. This is coming from someone who’s very very picky about their interface. In Gnome Shell, all actions are fluid. Windows fade or slide into place. Transitions from one screen to the next are smooth and uninterrupted. To many it may resemble the feel of a modern smart phone more than a desktop. It’s a pity Ubuntu isn’t going to fully back it, they’ve got the best track record of giving a desktop the polish it really needs. I, for one, am very excited about the future of Gnome Shell and can’t wait to see where it goes.

Image credit: Jimmac

How?

When you run Gnome, you’re not running a single application. Gnome launches Metacity (optionally Compiz) to handle window management, gnome-panel to serve as the panel and menu system, and various applets and tools for things like power management and Bluetooth support. Each of these is independent of the others and can be replaced or launched on its own.

What we’ll be doing today is specifying our own list of applications (window manager, dock, etc) to run on login, completely bypassing the likes of Gnome and KDE in favor of our custom apps. There are a few methods of achieving this, and the one demonstrated here was chosen to be functional, simple, and not very distribution-specific.

Designing Your Desktop

To create a functional DE, you’ll need a few basic parts:

• Window manager (Metacity, Compiz, etc)
• Application launcher (Gnome-Do, Kupfer, etc)
• Panel/Dock (Docky, Cairo Dock, PyPanel, etc)
• Wallpaper manager (bsetroot, hsetroot, etc)
• Optional panel applets, desktop widgets, etc

This guide will use Compiz, Gnome-Do, Cairo Dock (with applets), and hsetroot to achieve all the needed functionality. Using Compiz as the base window manager gives us the full set of Compiz plugins like Expo and Zoom. All those packages should be available in the standard repositories of most distributions. Ubuntu users can fetch them from the Ubuntu Software Center or with the terminal command:

sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-plugins gnome-do cairo-dock hsetroot

Most of these applications have been discussed in detail on MakeTechEasier. Use our search box to gather more information on which tool is the best for your needs.

Some other usable setups could include dropping the dock/panel entirely and using Gnome-Do for all app launching needs, or adding something like Conky or Google Desktop for system monitoring.

Creating the List

Now that you’ve got an application chosen for each of the roles above, we can begin creating a list so that they will be run on login. Begin by opening any text editor of your choice, and writing out the names of the programs to be run. End each of the lines (except the last) with a &. This symbol tells Linux to run the program in the background and move on to the next item. Without the &, it would run the first line and wait until that program was completed before running the next. That could, for example, prevent the dock from loading until after the window manager is closed – clearly not what we want.

When finished, save the file to any directory you choose (your home is fine) and take note of the file’s name and location. As my name is Josh, I have the file saved in /home/josh/customDE.sh.

Adding to GDM list

In what I’m sure must be amazing coincidence, we recently wrote a detailed guide on precisely how to edit the GDM Sessions list to let you launch your own desktop environment.

In short, you’ll want to (as root) create a new file in the /usr/share/xsessions directory. The file should end with the .desktop extension, and follow a template similar to the following:

The only really important lines for this scenario are Name and Exec. Name must uniquely identify your DE so that you can recognize it in the GDM Sessions list. Exec must be the name of the file we created in the previous step, such as customDE.sh.

Save the file as /usr/share/xsessions/custom.desktop. Next time you logout, you’ll see your entry in the Sessions list in GDM.

Conclusion

If you’ve followed each of these steps, you created a list of applications you wanted in your DE, saved that list (with appropriate ampersands) into a script, then created a launcher in /usr/share/xsessions to start that script from GDM. Hopefully, your choices have left you with a feature-complete and beautiful desktop. Not only should it meet your specific needs, but there’s a good chance it’ll be far more responsive than a monolithic desktop system like Gnome.

If you’ve got desktop customization stories or suggestions for how to create your own, let us know in the comments!

Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

The current stable version is based on Debian-etch while the version that is under development is based on the recently released Lenny. Knowing the stability and versatility of Debian and the elegant and simplicity of Enlightenment, there are little things that Elive can go wrong.

Testing it out

As the same as any other distros, Elive comes with a live CD that you can use to boot up (and test) in your computer. When you first boot up the Live CD, it automatically detects your hardware and auto-configures it for optimum setting.

If you are using hardware that requires the restricted driver, such as broadcom wireless card and nVidia graphics card, Elive will also prompt you to install the necessary drivers so you can use your hardware straight away. I was happy that it is able to configure my Broadcom wireless card correctly during the boot up. This is one of the few distros that I can boot it up and connect to the Internet straight away, without any configuration or driver installation.

In addition, if you are dualbooting with a Windows partition, or are testing out Elive on your Windows-only computer, Elive will ask if you want to mount the NTFS partition on boot up.

The Frontend

Once you reach the desktop, you will be greeted with the familiar Enlightenment desktop environment (or unfamiliar if you are used to Gnome or KDE). The first thing that you will find missing is the panel (aka as menu or application bar). In case you don’t know, there is no application bar in Enlightenment. You simply click your mouse anywhere on the desktop to access the menu and applications. In my opinion, this is a much cleaner and faster way to manage your applications.

The layout of the desktop is well designed, with clever use of the various corners.

At the bottom of the screen is the e17 iconbar (also known as IBar) that serves as a dock for your frequently used applications.

The left bottom corner is the Xpad where you can quickly fire up to input a short note or access your todo list.

The right bottom is where all the gadgets reside. You are free to add/remove any of the gadgets from the shelf. I particularly like the Internet Configurator that cleverly detect my wireless network without much configuration.

The top right corner is where you can access any of the 12 virtual desktops in Elive. Note that you can easily move an active window to any of the virtual desktop by dragging it to the edges, including the corner. The transition from a desktop to another is seamless. You don’t even notice the differences. Also, one of the best thing that I find it difficult to implement in Gnome is that you can set a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop.

Accessing minimized windows

As mentioned above, there is no menu bar in Enlightenment. When you minimize a window, it will turn into an icon on the desktop instead. To retrieve the window, simply click on the icon and it will maxmize back to its original size.

The following screenshot shows the iconify windows, Xpad todo list, active windows in different virtual desktop and accessing the menu by mouse-clicking on the desktop.

On the application side, some of you (especially me) might be disappointed by the exclusion of OpenOffice. Abiword is used as the default office suite instead. Luckily this distro is Debian-based, so installing OpenOffice on it is just a breeze. The file manager used is Thundar, which is a great replacement for the commonly used Nautilus. Other applications include:

• XMMS
• Mplayer
• Iceweasal (a Debian rebrand of Firefox)
• GIMP
• aMSN
• Skype
• Transmission torrent client
• Avidemux
• Acidrip
• xine
• poedit
• scite text editor
• and many more

On the gaming side, I am surprise to find a collection of several good and interesting games. The Torus Trooper and Tuxpack are two great games that I have wasted countless hours playing. Yes, if you are missing your old console games, the ZSNES Nintendo Emulator, ScummVm and Dosbox emulator are also included.

The backend

On the configuration side, Elive has created beautiful and user-friendly GUI for its user to configure and change any of the system setting. It might take some exploration to find out where all the configuration options are, but once you got that sorted out, everything is just a simple click and select.

On the IBar, there is the Elive Panel where you can access and configure most of the system stuffs. The configuration options are categoried into three main areas:

• Look and feel setting – the place where you customize the desktop theme and overall look and feel.
• Personal settings – the place to personalize your settings, like which applications to load on startup.
• Systems settings – This is where you configure the system setting.

All the configuration options are nicely laid out and there are little chance that you need to hit the terminal to fix things up.

Installation

There are three mode of installation that you can select from: Novice, Normal and Advanced. I must admit that even the Novice mode is not as straight forward as Ubuntu. There are several things that Elive do before installing: partition your hard disk, download the installer file, verifying the system, verifying the installer source. At times, it will prompt you to enter information such as the security code, your username, password etc, which can be quite a hassle.

Various version of Elive

There are currently two version of Elive that are under development: standard Elive and Elive Ecomorph.

The Ecomorph version is a special version that is coupled with Compiz. If you think that Debian + e17 is great, then Debian + e17 + Compiz is even better.

Here is a video on Ecomorph:

Both the development versions are free to download, but are not stable enough for daily usage.

For the existing stable version of Elive, it is more of a donation-ware rather than a freeware. You have to donate (any amount) before you can download the LiveCD.

Invite

Alternatively, you can get invitation codes from your friends who used Elive. For MakeTechEasier readers, on courtesy of EliveTeam, we have 5 invites ready to be given away. If you are interested to try out and install Elive (stable), be among the first to leave your comment below. Remember to include your name and email address.

Conclusion

Elive is a great distro that gives you functionality, stability and beauty. While there are a few other distros that are based on the Enlightenement desktop manager, this is so far the most elegant distro that I have ever encountered. I am pretty impressed by it and I guess it will remain on my computer for a much longer time than any other OS.

For those who want to try out Elive, here are the links:

Elive (stable)

standard Elive (development)

Elive Ecomorph (Compiz)