How to activate Xfce4 desktop environment?
 

How to activate Xfce4 Desktop Environment? I executed
it downloaded a a large amount of files, but when finished, it do not show any notifications, not even reboot promt, just stay.
I rebooted, but debian show the default terminal window with tty1 login prompt. Does it require to perform additional steps? I tried to run startx command, but it not recognized as valid command.

Is there way to load debian straight to Desktop environment? (why this not implemented by default?)

Did you do a minimal install?

Packages like "goodies" may or may not pull in dependencies for the full desktop environment.
will install the desktop environment and a display manager so you can get started.

Yes, I did minimal Debian install (if minimal means installing from debian-7.6.0-i386-netinst CD). How I can know that xfce4-goodies is not sufficient. Do I need now uninstall this xfce4-goodies?

You don't need most of those "goodies" but they are handy.

You need the Xfce desktop environment installed. Xfce is very modular and you can install many of its features by themselves. I, for instance, used to use the xfce-panel package to supply a panel under the OpenBox window manager before learning the joys of tint2. So the xfce-goodies package has a bunch of xfce related stuff none of which depends on xfce4.

The command given by goumba will do that installation fine. This will too;
They both install the same meta package.

I would leave the goodies package installed. When you get to the desktop you could open synaptic and look at the package, find the depends (it is a meta package and has no code connected to it, just depends on a list of the goodies) and then look at those packages to see if you want them. If not purge the buggers.

There are a number of other ways to do the same thing using the cli but I am too lazy to list them with directions. Sorry, been a long day.

In a default install of Debian, runlevels 2-5 are all treated as if they were runlevel 4. That's a fancy of saying Debian by default boots into a graphical display manager, that is, a GUI. (runlevel 3 is the terminal.)

If your Debian is not booting into a GUI, someone has modified it. I would therefore expect to find an .xinitrc file in your home directory--that file is used to specify the window manager/desktop environment. You would need to modify .xinitrc appropriately to start XFCE. This article will tell you more: https://wiki.debian.org/Xinitrc

If such modifications have been and and if you want to boot directly into the GUI, you must modify the file /etc/inittab and change the number in the following line from 3 to 4. This requires root privileges.

Whoa. Slow down there. He said that if he types 'startx' he gets an error, meaning X likely isn't even installed. He even stated that he did a minimal install, so none of this will do anything but confuse the poor guy.

mintvx, yes, the command I gave you will install XFCE and X (the stuff responsible for presenting you with a GUI). Install it, reboot, and you'll get a graphical login screen provided everything else installed correctly.

Nice catch. I missed the part about a "minimal install."

In my admittedly weak defense, I will say that, in my post, I specified a "default Debian install."

But, still, nice catch. I think your post will help OP. And thanks again.

If you want a Debian with XFCE already set up and ready to go, take a look at this site,
http://mepiscommunity.org/mx

Thank you for advice. I installed Xfce desktop. Does the LibreOffice is part of Xfce Desktop?

No. Debian boots to runlevel 2 and the command line by default.

In Debian, sysv run levels 2 - 5 are the same - multi-user.

Run level 1 is single user and 0 and 6 are halt and reboot.

Changing the default run level to anything between 2 and 5 will make no difference (unless someone has modified the run levels to start/stop certain rc scripts e.g. using sysv-rc-conf).

When you install a display manager it's rc script gets installed and enabled at runlevel 2.

No, it's not, but installing that is just as simple.

That should get you going.

Edit: You may also want to look at wht other packages LibreOffice has to offer, for example, the i10n packages for different languages if your native language is not English.

Also, installing something like synaptic will give you a GUI to Debian's package management, which you can search, read descriptions of packages, etc. much easier for a new user than the command line.

Synaptic will show up in your menu, typically under either System or Administration.

Just an aside from the topic a little bit;

I have heard that the disadvantage of perhaps using Xfce as the default DE for Debian is that it is not a full featured DE with a lot of packages that go with it such as LibreOffice, Gimp and so forth.

Most of those packages are added by the distro not the devs of the DE unless the packages are from that project.

If you install using the official Debian CD1/DVD1 LibreOffice is installed by default. This is part of the desktop environment that Debian thinks needs to be there. So is Gimp and most of the packages you would expect on a Debian default install.

I also see that those added packages are installed as recommends by the "task-xfce" package but not by the xfce4 package. Makes sense to me.

When I ran Ubuntu I would install without the ubuntu-desktop package in favor of the gnome-desktop package. Was lighter because it only included the default Gnome packages.

I am, by the way, a convert to Xfce. I absolutlely love the xfce panel. It is what the gnome panel always wanted to grow up to be.

No, the LibreOffice and Synaptic Package Manager come with this "task-xfce-desktop" package.
I just thought there was an option to select the "light" version of Xfce Desktop Environment, without much extras. What is difference between task-xfce-desktop and xfce4 packages?

With xfce4 you will have just the basic DE no office, no internet, minimal sound & also will have to configure how different files are opened/treated. With gnome everything is pretty much setup for you at point of installation.