i've been using fluxbox for a while, so i decided to install xfce and try something new. well, the packages for 4.2.x didn't work with slack 10.0 - there was no main menu, the settings gui only listed mouse, keyboard and calendar settings, etc etc. so i installed the official slackware-10.0 package, which i believe is xfce-4.0.2 or something. it seems to work fine, but i have a few questions.

first, the default panel includes 4 launchers to the left of the grahical desktop switcher. the first two are to open a terminal and a file manager, respectively. the second two are for internet and email. in between those two sets is a little arrow that opens a submenu to which you can add more launchers. right now i've got a total of 4 of those little arrows mixed up between my launchers for firefox, etc. how can i get rid of them? there's no right-click context menu for them...

second, xfce seems to ignore my ~/.Xdefaults when it feels like it. i customized my emacs fonts and colors this way, as well as the starting geometry, and it's worked perfectly in fluxbox. when i start emacs in xfce though, it has the default white background with black text, and it opens in a very small window. i also customized aterm and xterm in .Xdefaults, changing the color scheme, geometry, transparency, saved lines, etc. some of these ARE in effect. my aterms are transparent and the colors are correct, but borders reappeared. i think xfce might be forcing the borders, but why is my color scheme for aterm still working, but the one for emacs isn't? they're specified in the same file!

third, can i make the panel stretch to the length of the screen? i can artifically add separators, but that's clumsy and looks like crap.

and, uh, fourth...oh yeah - anyone use the file manager? i took a look at it and it seems kinda cluttered.

and any other comments or suggestions are welcome. i'm curious to see what xfce can do, so far it seems fast and i'm slowly getting it to look the way i want, but i'm sure there are a lot of cool things it can do and i'd love to hear about them.

Right click on the launchers, uncheck "attach menu to launchers". That should take care of the first problem.

Not much idea on the second.

For the third, you can get the taskbar plugin from xfce-goodies. It will make the panel fit the screen horizontally (if you choose to do so).

The file manager looked scary to me at first (I'm using 4.2) but it works . If you're frequently usinf a file manager, you may consider using another one. I don't do that much and XFCE's file manager wasn't a big annoyance to me.

thanks, that solved the first problem perfectly!

for the file manager, i didn't use one in fluxbox, and i'm wondering if there's anything cool xffm can do (is there any reason to keep it?).

Well, I don't know of any particular strengths of xffm. But I don't see a reason not to keep it either , except for disk space. As I said, I don't use file managers much, but still I quickly got used to working with xffm.

Btw, you might be interested in Rox filer, which is something of interest to those who hate bloatware.

I used to hate xffm but now I think it's my favorite- navigation is lightning quick with arrow keys. You can rip through the file system quicker than rox, xfm, mc, etc.

I'm not big on file manager/browsers, but XFFM is the best (sometimes, only) tool I've found to browse via Samba on my mixed home network.

I was pretty happy with the xffm that comes with Slackware 10.2. It's fast and easy to use. The version on Debian stable is POS. I uninstalled it. Gag. I hope it was not the new version.

Xffm on Slackware, rox on Debian.