This page is meant as guide for the use of Virtual Machine images created for Xfce developers and users who wish to test and preview the latest builds of Xfce coming from GIT Master branch. The images are based on openSUSE Xfce RAT, which is the Xfce Development OBS Repository for Tumbleweed. The build process is fully automated and happens regularly giving users qcow2 disk images with Xfce's latest builds based on openSUSE's rolling release Tumbleweed.

Currently there are qcow2 images for KVM & Xen but support for Virtual Box, VMware and Vagrant are in the works.

The “vanilla” disk image ships Xfce completely unmodified from Git sources and without any openSUSE visual tweaks.

* VM image for KVM & Xen image “vanilla” version

Once downloaded, these qcow2 can be used “out of the box”. The most convenient way is to import them in gnome-boxes aka Boxes, which is a simple application for managing virtual machines through QEMU, KVM and libvirt. Boxes imports and boot the images easily and focuses on getting things working out of the box with very little input from user. Read more about it on their website.

When these images are imported they can be launched and a “first time boot” wizard will guide you through a basic setup.

Once inside the guest virtual machine up and running, you can maintain the setup and update it like a regular Tumbleweed system by running the following command in a terminal.

sudo zypper dup

This command will fetch all the latest packages from both the Tumbleweed distribution and OBS X11:xfce:rat repo.

Although Xfce components come in pre-compiled packages regularly updated, it is possible to build directly from source code. Fetching all the necessary dependencies can be easily achieved by the commands

zypper source-install

or

zypper si

followed by package name. Example:

sudo zypper si libxfce4ui

The command above fetches all the dependencies needed to build libxfce4ui. Other commands and examples for the Zypper package manager can also be found in this cheat-sheet.

While Boxes is the easiest way there are of course quite a few others like virt-manager, virt-install or Cockpit Web console. All of them are expected to work like any other solution supporting qcow disk images.