moving_from_ubuntu_to_xubuntu

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Moving from Ubuntu to Xubuntu

Unity??? Seriously?? what where they thinking! Also the alternative, Gnome 2 just doesn't seem ready to work with. Let's face it, to productively work with a Desktop computer or a Notebook all those tablet-friendly interfaces with their big icons and no real taskbar are just useless. While unity is entirely impossible to work with Gnome2 at least has some good concepts.. however, there is so much missing in Gnome 2 and it kills me that i don't have a Applications menu with apps sorted nicely in Folders accessible by a single mouse click.. It just got all so complicated for no reason at all and don't get me started on using any of these new interfaces on a multi-head configuration! ridiculous!

but luckily there is Xubuntu which is based on xfce which is a nice clean and fast desktop environment that looks almost the same as good old gnome 1. So if you have a computer to work with and not to show off, i think this is the first choice in desktop environment right now.

changing from one to the other is pretty simple in ubuntu. you simply open synaptic and install the xubuntu-destkop (and maybe also those xubuntu-restricted-* packages). log out, change the desktop environment in your session manager, enter your password and log-in and you are ready to work again.

Annoyingly xubuntu has a few different default applications than ubuntu which for a long time ubuntu user might be hard to adjust to in some cases.

I switched to xubuntu on all my computers and notebooks and this is the place where i will keep track of the adjustments i made to work with it again normally and bring back some of the old tools which might be just a little bit better than the xubuntu default.

while thunar does the job it is still a bit hard to get used to it as a former nautilus user.. so i prefer to get nautilus with its nice bookmarks back. here's how it's done (copied from this post):

  1. install nautilus (in case it isn't there already)
    sudo apt-get install nautilus
  2. replace
    Exec=Thunar %U'' (or similar) with ''Exec=nautilus --no-desktop %U

    in the folowing files:

    • /usr/share/applications/Thunar-folder-handler.desktop
    • /usr/share/applications/bamf.index
  3. in /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop make shure that XFCE is mentioned in the list behind OnlyShowIn like so: OnlyShowIn=XFCE;GNOME;Unity;
  4. run xfce4-settings-manager and go to default applications and set nautilus as your default file manager
  5. edit /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop and bamf.index and change make shure all occurences of nautilus have a –no-desktop behind it

this only happened on one pc where i moved from ubuntu to xubuntu and kept using gdm: when plugged-in a usb stick it did not mount and when i clicked it to mount it in the gui it showed an error saying i was “Not Authorized”.

Unfortunately i did too many things at once to explicitly tell you what fixed it in the end but here are the two things i did:

  1. installed usbmount
  2. edited /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.udisks.policy and changed all <allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive> to <allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>
  • moving_from_ubuntu_to_xubuntu.1330900509.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 04.03.2012 23:35
  • by Pascal Suter