Since XFCE is easier to get into, I’ll explain that. My work machine is a bit of a dog. At least it’s feeling that way. To improve the feel of it, I decided to give a lighter weight desktop a shot and I installed the latest XFCE. To put it simply, wow! What a difference.

Now this isn’t my first experience with XFCE. Back when I had only been using Linux for a month or two, I installed it to take a peek. I was completely dependent on my desktop environment at that time. If it didn’t take care of mounting devices and network resources, I couldn’t use it. Back to Gnome or KDE I went.

I’m more comfortable with Linux now and can either mount devices on my own or edit /etc/fstab to make mounting automatic. That being the case, I can move on to some of the more “manual” desktops (yayy me!).

Installing XFCE was a breeze, su -c 'yum groupinstall XFCE' and a little coffee to pass the time was all it took. After that, log in and start customizing.

One of the first things I had to do after setting up my desktop was to find out how to lock the workstation. XFCE allows you to trigger a lock by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL; that sequence executes /usr/bin/xflock4 which in turn, starts the screen saver (I found/figured this info under Keyboard Settings) .

Unfortunately, that wasn’t working for me. There was no error message or any indication that the key sequence was doing anything. I opened a terminal, found the script and checked it out. The script attempts to run xscreensaver-command -lock or xlock. I didn’t have any executables matching those filenames on my box, so off to google I went. The Gentoo wiki offered me this page. With that info, I created /usr/bin/xlock and added the lines below:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command -l

All that was left to do was to set the proper mode on the file; chmod 755 /usr/bin/xlock (as root). With that done, the magic key sequence locked my box and allowed me to walk away.

***Edit*** I also had to add gnome-screensaver to autostarted applications

Notes:

• I rely too much on Google. If I had taken a minute to think, I wouldn’t have needed the Gentoo wiki to tell me to create the xlock script. This annoys me about myself, I too often look for the easy answer.
• I decided to use the Gnome screen saver because it was already installed and I knew it could do the job.
• I could have just installed the xscreensaver package but that just would have added software I don’t need.

I’ll keep playing and tweaking, so far this is great. I can only complain about the screen lock issue and the fact that adding items to the panel is a little clunky. Other than that, I’m flying around my machine with breakneck speed and it ROCKS. Got some time on your hands? Install it, play with it, see if you like it.