xfce install woes | Alpine Linux forums

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#1 Tue, 2016-01-19 18:53

DrDavid

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Joined: 2016-01-10

Hi all, I have installed Alpine 3.3 as virtual machine in Oracle Virtualbox.
All working fine, with tweaking networking and updating via cli, but next step was trying to set up graphic desktop environment.
Tried to get desktop following this:

http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/XFCE_Setup

but no good. Didn't find packages alpine-desktop and faenza-icon-theme, but I continued. Did not try to install video and input packages, configure xorg-server, or tweak keyboard layout. When it came to starting lxdm, it utterly failed; when I tried:

rc-service lxdm start

it replied with:

* rc-service: service 'lxdm' does not exist

So there is something OLD and not working about this doc???
Also just for grins I tried:

startxfce4

but this was a disaster, the screen went black and I had to reboot the vm as it became totally unresponsive.

I have searched for other tutorials or related tips but have not been able to make any breakthroughs. Can someone please help?

#2 Fri, 2016-01-29 14:28

ScrumpyJack

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Joined: 2013-06-20

alpine-desktop exists: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/community/x86_64/alpine-desktop

You should try again. Preferably on HDD or fully virtualized. Don't know about VBox much.
Once you take the next plunge (from scratch), apk update && apk upgrade before you attempt it.

setup-xorg-base is a command, not a package to add.
then apk add stuff you need. for XFCE
apk add alpine-desktop xfce4

make sure dbus is started before you launch X, and try launching X on it's own first before you attempt a window manager.
Xorg -retro will give you an idea of what's going on

#3 Fri, 2016-02-19 18:35

schultzter

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Last seen: 1 year 5 months ago
Joined: 2016-02-15

I'm trying to get a desktop working as well, and ran into similar issues, I couldn't add alpine-desktop or faenza-icon-theme. I didn't mind so much that alpine-desktop wasn't found since I don't need/want everything that comes with it. It did occur to me afterwards that perhaps the community repo isn't in the /etc/apk/repositories file by default?

Instead of lxdm I figured I'd go with xdm to keep things tight and lean. Did you try apk add lxdm? It's required by alpine-desktop so since there was a problem it wouldn't have been installed.

For me, startxfce4 works (albeit a severe lack of icons) - I have other issues, but that will in a new post on a new thread.

The basic video and input packages should be installed when you run setup-xorg. I added the video driver for Intel and input driver for Synaptics - until I added the input driver I couldn't use my touchpad. I'm running on bare metal though, not a virtual machine.

#4 Mon, 2016-03-21 05:13

CScottG

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Joined: 2016-03-17

I had similar problems (bare metal), and I've given up on Alpine Linux.

The distro is just to obtuse..

The "setup-alpine" utility is a good idea, the problem is those coding it didn't "follow-through". For instance there should be a default option right at the start of the setup utility that offers 3 different low mem-use GUI's (and ONLY the GUI's and likely dependencies) - with a continuation of "setup" graphically in one of those GUI's.

Worse, it asks to setup ethernet, yet doesn't follow-through with the more common wlan connection and selecting available accesspoints/wireless routers with secure connection/password input.

Also, the directory and reporting of commands is not intuitive, nor particularly accessible with respect to examples/hints.

Finally, the wiki "help" is sorely lacking, and doesn't seem to have any adequate youtube videos for install/configuration.

If the developers "fill-in" these (and other) missing items I'll look into alpine linux again, but until then, nope.

Note: this doesn't mean I've given up on Alpine Linux entirely, rather with respect to bare metal or if requiring wireless networking. I'll probably still try it with VM machines not requiring a local GUI and wireless.

I'm currently looking at DebianDog Jessie:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=101931

It's got a lot of stuff that needs to be removed (desktop apps and such), but it's designed to be like puppy linux - which is very configurable from a GUI (but based on ultra-stable Debian with its large repositories). I'm hoping it works out. Note a fresh "install" to RAM only (no drive) is a bit "piggy" at 203 megabytes (Dec. build) when compared to Alpine, but still quite low for a "from RAM" (live+) distro.

#5 Mon, 2016-03-21 23:15

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Joined: 2016-03-21

Had similar problem. Needed a "apk update" to find alpine-desktop and other packages