Installing the lightweight LXDE-QT desktop

EDIT: Instructions updated 09 May 2014 to fix the 14.04 installation instructions and also update the minimal install instructions.

Following on from my recent article about installing a minimal XFCE based desktop I thought I would take LXDE a spin.  For an extra challenge I’m interested for this article the next generation LXDE called LXDE-QT.

The LXDE team have now merged with Razor-QT – both teams have a similar goal of producing a very lightweight desktop and they have chosen QT as the toolset rather than something like GTK3.

As this is very experimental at this stage, my recommendation is to use something like Virtualbox to play-around with this brand-new but still developing desktop interface – you can easily snapshot various check-points and use the rollbacks to back out of stuff.

Lets begin.

The challenge here is to take the already lightweight LXDE-QT desktop and slim it down to its core components … and yes … lightweight LXDE (lightweight X11 desktop environment) is one lightweight too far but describing it as lightweight XDE-QT just looks too weird 🙂

N.B. – if you are just interested in playing with the desktop as designed by the LXDE & Razor-QT development teams then the following will work in a standard Ubuntu install:


sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/lubuntu-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lxqt-metapackage openbox
sudo apt-get install lxqt-panel


IMPORTANT NOTE: 14.04 users (as of 08 May 2014) the packaging is still buggy but will install if you follow the above. Installing lxqt-metapackage openbox will appear to crash out with a lxqt-config package failure. However, after installing lxqt-panel again, the rest of the setup for the desktop will complete successfully.

Note the desktop shown has been installed on-top of Unity and thus you can see both Gnome applications as well as LXQT applications.

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Below, the intent here is to pick apart the desktop to look at its core components.

First download the minimal ISO.  This is a tiny basic installer containing very little itself.  Everything is downloaded from the internet.  So make sure you are using a wired connection – no wireless at this stage.

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

Write this to a CD using your favourite burning software such as brasero.  Alternatively use unetbootin to write it to a USB stick – or if using Virtualbox, attach the ISO to a new virtual machine.

On boot you will receive a screen like this:

Press Enter and just answer each of the questions posed.

When you get to this screen you have a choice  of choosing one of the standard desktop environments or just continuing to a basic text only interface.  Lets choose the latter:

Let the wizard complete and install the remaining basic packages.

Reboot – remove the CD/USB/virtual CD drive and login using your username and password you defined during the text wizard stage above.

Next – make sure the repositories are up-to-date:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade


Lets ensure we configure our system to not install suggested packages or recommended packages:

cd /etc/apt
sudo nano apt.conf


Type in the following:

APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";

Save and quit nano – CTRL+O, CTRL+X

Quick Tip: when typing package names, type the first few characters and press TAB. This will either autocomplete the package name or display the matching package names allowing you to narrow down the correct full package-name.

Lets now install the basic graphics stack:


sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xfonts-base xinit x11-xserver-utils x11-apps x11-session-utils x11-utils xinput xorg


Now we need to add a PPA where the development LXDE libraries and QT stuff can be found.


sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/lubuntu-daily
sudo apt-get update

Now lets install the basic LXDE-QT packages such as the file-manager (pcmanfm-qt), session, panel


sudo apt-get install lxqt-metapackage lxqt-policykit  lxqt-runner lxqt-config lxrandr-qt obconf-qt lxqt-session pcmanfm-qt lxqt-powermanagement openbox


Finally lets install a basic graphical login manager – lets stick with lightdm:


sudo apt-get install lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter


Reboot and login graphically:

sudo reboot --


That is the basics. Everything else that follows is your customization requirements.

Lets make the desktop aesthetically beautiful

sudo apt-get install oxygen-icon-theme

These will install some very nice icons for the menus and panel and also allow you to change the appearance of the desktop.

Next, lets give the menu’s less of a windows 95 look…

sudo apt-get install kde-style-qtcurve

Remember to reboot for these to take effect.

Next install your chosen browser – in my case the lightweight QT based Qupzilla.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nowrep/qupzilla
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install qupzilla

Logically you’ll also need sound… so lets install the QT sound mixer (qasmixer) plus standard alsa libraries used for various applications:

sudo apt-get install qasmixer gstreamer0.10-alsa gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good

Use qasmixer and ensure that the master channel and the appropriate channel for your soundcard is 100% and not muted

If you love youtube you’ll need adobe flash.

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg


Finally lets add a QT based media-player for our music – lets download sayonara from google-code

sudo apt-get install libcurl3 libnotify4 libtag1-vanilla
sudo dpkg -i sayonara*.deb

I want some nice automatic recognition of inserted USB sticks and disks by pcmanfm (reboot afterwards)

sudo apt-get install gvfs gvfs-backends policykit-1 udisks2

Remember to reboot to for these changes to take effect.

For Virtualbox you should also install dkms before installing the guest-additions:

sudo apt-get install dkms

Remember to add the permissions for your user:

sudo usermod -a -G vboxsf <username>

Final Result

 

This desktop runs well with 256Mb – and brilliantly smooth at 512Mb