[Tfug] LXDE under Ubuntu Karmic

[Jim March]

I'm about at the point where I'm fed up to here with Gnome.  I know
for damnsure I ain't the only one :).

KDE always struck me as messy, never took a liking to it.  Started
poking around for something else.

I had tried Openbox on the "Crunchbang" slight Ubuntu fork and found
it decent but lacking.  The low-powered machine I'd installed it on to
my mind benefitted from doing "sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop"
and that user (on a very minimal "ghetto PC", P4 1.6, 512megs RAM) is
doing well on XFCE.  But...that didn't feel quite right either.

I decided to try LXDE.  So far there's no official "Lubuntu" with it
all nicely packaged, but you can add LXDE.  It then needs minor tuning
and tweaking (add nm-applet if you want WiFi running fr'instance) but
nothing involving programming or even config file tweaking.

I have it in a workable state now and...hey, this ain't bad.  Audio
glitches still left in Ubuntu are at least lessened based on minimal
tests...under Gnome VLC fr'instance has a nasty audio crackle,
pulseaudio puking again.  Gone under LXDE - either it's not using PA
or it's somehow fundamentally faster, I dunno which yet.

Overall...yeah, I'm gonna run this for a bit, see how it goes...ARG,
dangit, found one "gotcha" - no dual monitor (extended desktop)
support.  You can mirror so as to drive a projector but that's it.
Sigh.

Jim