Installing LXDE on Fedora13 - some adventures

Why: installing LInux on laptop, want complete security - encrypt entire disk and swap, and support from the distro to make this easy. And full support for multimedia.

Summary:

• From the full DVD, do not try to install LXDE or Enlightenment or Openbox or anything other than Gnome (or maybe KDE) as the only desktop. You will spend a lot of time and end up with a half-arsed system.
• Do install Gnome and then the desktop of choice, and maybe later remove the things you dont need.

The adventure

Which Distro?

I've been using Arch as my main distro for some time, but although the flexibility and support from the wiki and forums is tremendous, the constant need to apply updates has become a complete ball-ache. I've got caught between a rock and a hardplace - the tendency for things to be broken after an update leads me to do fewer and fewer updates, and then suddenly I cant install something because I'm too far behind. Hundreds of megabytes a week, and hours of effort just to stand still. Enough.

Tried Mint, and although it makes life easy on the multimedia front. in Isadora it's taken a very bad route, choosing to standardise on some components that basically just aren't ready, e.g. Grub2. Jeez.

Tried PCLinux, but couldn't get it to boot without disabling acpi. Useless for my laptop.

Briefly tried Mepis / KDE but you have to laugh at KDE4. What a joke. (Aside: I see Gnome Shell is going the same way. Sigh)

I've never had a lot of success with RPM based distros, so it was a bit of a surprise to discover that Fedora 13 looked the best candidate. Package management wih yum has come a long way from the rpm-dependency hell that used to prevail.

Fedora 13:
Pros

• Can manage and install to LVM
  
• Good management of other volumes from the running system via palimpsest
• Easy setup for full disk encryption, and non-ugly screen while capturing initial passwords during boot.
• Multimedia works fine, with new codecs found and installed as needed (after adding rpmfusion repos, that is)
• Can remove components of Gnome that on other distros (e.g. Ubuntu) would cause tantrums and attempts to remove more than you intend.
  

Cons

• SeLinux (but it can be disabled)
  
• sudo - wont run in batch scripts (but you can fix this)
• automatic networking needs a bit if a nudge (does work eventually)
• dependencies for desktops other than Gnome and KDE are a bit broken.
• no long-term distro stability - another release every 6 months ... will need to see if that is an irritant or whether upgrading is easy
  

Tried installing from Live spins of Gnome and XFCE. These worked ok, but I've used openbox as a window manager before, so I thought it would be good to have a look at LXDE. Installing it after Gnome (or XFCE) seemed to work (except for some issues with function keys, which I'll get to later), so I set out to do a full install from DVD of only LXDE.

This was a mistake.

And why was I not content with the install from Live?
Because all the Live spins insist on installing the root filesystem to ext4. I think it's a bit early to jump on that particular bandwagon. I don't like the developers' attitude (as I perceive it) that data security is the responsibility of the programmer rather than the file system.

more to come ...

some notes on things installed:

• groupinstall "LXDE"
• sylpheed
• gconf-editor (so we can modify behaviour of Nautilus - which unfortunately is required by palimpsest
• imlib2
• conky
• feh
• qt3 (for dvbcut)

and remove

• evolution