Neural Advance

This article looks at how to install XFCE 4.8 on Arch Linux. I assume that you have a clean install of Arch Linux. If you do not you may already have some of the packages installed but it won’t hurt to follow the instructions exactly as shown.

The first task is to configure Arch Linux using the official installation manual which is excellent. I won’t be covering anything that is included in the installation guide as the provided documentation is already good enough.

Once you have finished with the initial configuration of Arch Linux we should move on to installing the requirements. We will be using SLiM as our login manager as that is nice and lightweight.

Run the following command to install all the requirements to get XFCE up and running:

pacman -S xfce4 ttf-liberation xorg-server dbus slim

you will also need to install the correct graphics drivers for your card. The following are the likely options:

xf86-video-ati
xf86-video-nvidia
xf86-video-intel

so install the correct one for your system like so:

pacman -S xf86-video-ati

now that is done you simply need to copy /etc/skel/.xinitrc to your home directory (and for all the other users you wish to be able to login using SLiM) like so:

cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~/.xinitrc

and uncomment the following line:

# exec startxfce4

so that it looks like this:

exec startxfce4

if the line does not exist in the file then simply add it to the bottom of the file and make sure that all other exec lines are commented out.

Now all you need to do is add dbus and slim to your list of daemons by editing /etc/rc.conf like so:

DAEMONS=(... dbus slim)

it is vital that dbus and slim are the last two entries in the daemons list. Simply restart your computer and you should be able to login to your new XFCE 4 desktop environment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 at 1:54 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.