Swapping KDE for xfce4
 

n00bie here used KNOPPIX to install a nice, ignorant-friendly (<-- really, now THAT should be the proper term, no? :D) linux on my hd.

Thing is, I've gotten over the initial rush and now find KDE a little too heavy for my ram-weak system (96mb - combined with a cyrix PII clone processor @ 233mhz). So now I want to switch over to xfce4.

I've gone ahead and downloaded Debian's synaptic app (seems pretty cool), and installed xfce4 with it. Now before I click the switch and potentially blow my system to smithereens I want to know:

1) Should I now just use synaptic to uninstall KDE? (is it really this simple?)
2) How do I get my system to use xfce4 now? Will it on boot kick the gui up on its own (as KDE seemed to), or do i need to type "startx" or something at some point?
3) Any sort of tricky not-obvious-to-a-total-n00b stuff I need to be aware of?

Many thanks

1) Can't help you; don't know synaptic. :(
2) In kdm (or whatever login-manager you are using) simply select xfce-4 as session.
If you want to use startx, create a file called .xinitrc with the line startxfce4.
3) If you wan't to run kde-apps, you are probably interested in keeping kde-libs and kde-base. All the other stuff (kde-multimedia, kde-pim etc) you can remove safely.

Thanks, Meldar

It's sort of done the trick. That is to say, I have xfce up, but it's version 3.8 -- def not version 4.X that looks so lovely on the xfce.org web site.

Still fiddling....

Are you sure you have xfce-4 installed? And that you use startxfce4 in .xinitrc (or what you are using)? Both versions can exist at the same time.

Do you think I'm sexy...or crazy
 

Thanks for your tip, meldar. I think you were on to something.

Beginning to feel like quite the distro whore, here. Tried all day sat trying to get xfce4 installed. got latest pkg from debian unstable and got the pkgs it depended on. used a combo of kpackage and synaptic to get em all in (don't ask ;-)), but tho i could find some individual pieces of xfce4 on my system, startxfce4 was nowhere to be found. I have no idea why the install didn't seem to work.

so i gave up and went back to morphix (again). basically took a digital hammer and wedged the "lightweight" module, which includes xfce4 as the standard DE, on to my computer (overwriting everything else).

so, that seems to be working except for the fact that now i have no internet access (some morphix bug w/ broadband access). so, new bug to squash. if this doesn't work, i'll go back to feather linux and try to repeat my xfce4 install on that...