Introduction
LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which
is lightweight and fast. It's not designed to be powerful and
bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the
resource usage low. Different from other desktop
environments, we don't tightly integrate every component.
Instead, we tried to make all components independent, and
each of them can be used independently with few dependencies.
Features
- Lightweight, runs with reasonable memory usage
- Fast, rund well even on older machines produced in 1999
- Good-looking, gtk+ 2 internationalized user interface
- Easy-to-use, the user interface is simple, but usable enough
- Desktop independent (suprise! Every component can be used without LXDE)
- Standard compliant, follows the specs on freedesktop.org
- Suitable for old machines
Components
- PCManFM:
File manager, provides desktop icon
- LXPanel:
Feature-rich desktop panel
- LXSession:
Standard-compliant X11 session manager with shutdown/reboot/suspend supports via HAL and gdm
- LXAppearance:
LXAppearance is a new feature-rich GTK+ theme switcher able to change GTK+ themes, icon themes, and fonts used by applications
- Openbox:
Lightweight, standard-compliant, and highly-configurable window manager (This is
not developed by us, but we use it as our default window
manager). This can be replaced by any other window manager like icewm, fluxbox, metacity, ...etc.
- GPicView: A very simple, fast, and lightweight image viewer featuring immediate startup.
- Leafpad:
Lightweight and simple text editor(This is
not developed by us, but we suggest using this as default text
editor).
- XArchiver:
Lightweight, fast, and desktop-independent gtk+-based file archiver (This is
not developed by us, but we suggest using this as default archiver).
- LXNM (still under development):
Lightweight network manager for LXDE supporting wireless connections (Linux-only)
System Requirements
LXDE has been tested under following hardware configurations, and runs well.
| CPU |
RAM |
Hard Disk |
Speed |
| Pentium II 266 MHz |
192 MB |
5400 rpm |
moderate - fast |
| VIA 400 MHz |
256 MB |
5400 rpm |
moderate - fast |
| Pentium III 600 MHz |
512 MB |
4500 rpm |
fast |
| QEMU emulation on AMD Athlon 1.6 (1.4 GHz) |
128 MB |
QEMU disk image |
fast |
| AMD Athlon 1.6 (1.4 GHz) |
512 MB |
7200 rpm |
very fast |
Recommended configuration
- The hardware requirements of LXDE is similiar to Windows 98 (Maybe a little bit higher). So an old Pentium II CPU is enough.
- After X11 and LXDE are started, the total memory usage is about
45 MB on i386 machines. (This value may be higher or lower according to
different system configurations.)
- Though LXDE itself doesn't require better hardware, other
applications under X do need it. For example, Firefox and
OpenOffice.org 2 are quite memory-hungry. So it's recommended that you
have RAM more than 128 MB.
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