This is a list of frequently asked questions about Xfce. Feel free to improve and/or extend this page, but keep it clean and easy to read for other users.

Xfce is a desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms (such as Linux, Solaris or BSD). Xfce is “Designed for productivity. It loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.” (Olivier Fourdan). This philosophy should appeal to anyone looking for a fast, modern, and efficient working environment for a *NIX box.

“Ecks Eff See Eee”. The name Xfce originally stood for XForms Common Environment, but since then, Xfce was rewritten twice and doesn't use XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but the F is nolonger capitalized (not “XFce”, but “Xfce”). Currently the acronym doesn't stand for anything (suggestion: X Freakin' Cool Environment).

A mouse, obviously, for all kinds of reasons like world domination and monsters and such.

Xfce is developed to be versatile. It is currently supported on Linux, Solaris and BSD, but has been known to run in some shape or form on IRIX, MacOS X, and Windows.

Xfce 4 components are licensed under free or open source licenses: GPL or BSDL for applications and LGPL or BSDL for libraries. Read the documentation, the source code, or the Xfce homepage for more information.

There is no set schedule, but there are goals the developers try to meet. That said, the creation of deadlines does not lend itself well to those working without compensation. So the overall goal is to release a new version as certain goals are reached. Unfortunately, that does not allow the advanced statement of any release schedule. Please check back often to read any news releases about the product.

Xfce can be installed in at least three different ways:

• From source code - build the environment by yourself.
• From the package manager of your distro - it will provide you the pre-compiled binaries or install instructions to build from source.
  • Arch: pacman -S xfce4 (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce#How_to_Install_Xfce)
  • Fedora: sudo yum groupinstall XFCE (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xfce)
  • Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop (package description; direct install)
  • Mythbuntu: sudo apt-get install mythbuntu-desktop
  • Debian: su -c “apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies”
  • Gentoo: emerge -avt xfce4-meta (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xfce-config.xml)
  • FreeBSD: pkg_add -r xfce4 (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html)
  • MidnightBSD: pkg_add -r xfce4
• From the graphical installer provided by os-cillation - just follow the instructions on this page.
• From the Shaman GUI provided by The Chakra Project - just follow the information found at this page.

Some distributions have separate -devel packages for libraries. The Xfce installer needs those package for compiling the Xfce desktop environment. When, for example, the dependency for glib is missing, make sure you have both the glib and the glib-devel package installed.

This error message tells you that the configure script was unable to verify that the C++ preprocessor is setup properly on your system. You can most probably fix this problem by installing the g++ package for your distribution.

For some reason the installation wizard is not able to connect to an Xserver, which is required for the installer. This usually happens when you use su, and su in turn doesn't pass the DISPLAY environment variable properly. Try to use the commands:

$ xhost +localhost
$ su --preserve-environment
# ./xfce4-4.2.1.1-installer.bin

or

$ xhost +localhost
$ su
# env DISPLAY=:0 ./xfce4-4.2.1.1-installer.bin

Instead (replace :0 with your display name if required).

There are three different ways to do this:

• You can just login with the command startxfce4
• You can add exec startxfce4 to your .xinitrc in your home directory and simply use startx.
• You put the following in your .bash_profile/.bashrc if you want that Xfce is started automatically when you login on tty1:

if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" -o "$(tty)" = "/dev/vc/1" ] ; then
  startxfce4
fi

If you want to avoid Gnome or KDE dependencies and a more attractive interface than XDM, you can give SLiM a try. Read the SLiM manual for more information.

If you installed Xfce system-wide and you want to use the GNOME Display Manager (gdm) to start your Xfce session, you will have to create a .desktop file to teach gdm how to start the Xfce session. This is a sample desktop file, Xfce.desktop:

  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Name=Xfce 4.4 Session
  Comment=Use this session to run Xfce 4.4 as your desktop environment
  Exec=/usr/local/bin/startxfce4
  Icon=/usr/local/share/pixmaps/xfce4_xicon1.png
  Type=Application

It is usually enough to simply copy the example file to the Session directory used by gdm; this directory is usually located in /etc/dm/Sessions, /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions, /usr/share/xsessions, /usr/X11/share/gnome/xsessions or some other location, refer to the documentation of your system for details. You need to restart gdm after you created the file.

If you installed Xfce system-wide and you want to use the KDE Display Manager (kdm) to start your Xfce session, you will have to create a .desktop file to teach kdm how to start the Xfce session.

First you need to find where kdm searches for its .desktop files:

  locate kde.desktop

Common locations are /usr/share/apps/kdm/sessions or /usr/local/share/kdm/sessions. Once you found the kdm session directory, you need to create a new file Xfce.desktop with the following:

  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Type=XSession
  Exec=/usr/local/bin/startxfce4
  TryExec=/usr/local/bin/startxfce4
  Name=Xfce 4.4
  Comment=The Xfce 4.4 Desktop Environment

Xfce simply wants your hostname to be in /etc/hosts. Example input: 127.0.0.1 localhost

For some reason, your X applications can not connect to the session manager. Possible causes are: your hostname cannot be resolved (see Login problems section), your home partition or partition containing /tmp is filled up, your hostname contains non-ascii characters (no umlauts allowed, in particular) or that either ~/.ICEauthority or /tmp/.ICE-unix has wrong permissions. Also check .xsession-errors for clues.

Assign a key with the Keyboard Settings → Shortcuts to the command xfdesktop -menu. (This does not work reliable since Linux Kernel is tickless, so xfdesktop -menu needs a fix) The menu will popup where your mouse is located. You can also use xfce4-popup-menu to popup the panel menu (also provided by xfdesktop and make sure you have the plugin in your panel ^_~).

Assign a key to the command verve-focus

The windows button (also known as the superkey) not working as a modifier is related to the toolkit, GTK+ in the case of Xfce. If you want to have the windows-key working we recommend you to upgrade GTK+ to at least version 2.10.0.

There are two possibilities to achieve this. Or you should use a display manager that turns the numlock on (eg. gdm, check the settings) or you can use a little program called numlockx, adding numlockx on in your .xinitrc will do the job.

Use xmodmap to assign keycodes to your Media keys to make them available for the Xfce shortcut editor:

To determine keycodes of the multimedia keys use the program xev. Create a .Xmodmap file in your $HOME directory containing those keycodes and assign keysyms to them. Example:

 keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
 keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
 keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
 keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
 keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
 keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
 keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
 keycode 237 = XF86AudioMedia
 keycode 230 = XF86Favorites
 keycode 236 = XF86Mail
 keycode 178 = XF86WWW

All possible keysyms can be found in /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB or /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB. To ensure that the .Xmodmap file is loaded when you start Xfce add /usr/bin/xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap to your .xinitrc or .xprofile file. When you start the shortcut editor the assigned keysyms should show up when you press one of your multimedia keys. Now it is possible to assign a command to them. Note: Several problems with auto-loading of .Xmodmap files at xfce startup have been reported (also when issued as autostart command). Search the xfce bugzilla sites for current problems. As a workaround, run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap by hand every time, or try out editing the somewhat less straightforward xkb configuration files.

There are several options. One is to use xfce4-xkb-plugin, see http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-xkb-plugin . You can also use the setxkbmap command with the two letter keyboard code as argument; you can edit your X server configuration file to choose a different keyboard layout (change the value after Option “XkbLayout”, e.g.: Option “XkbLayout” “dvorak”).

Yes, of course… Keyboard shortcuts are defined on two locations. The shortcuts to handle the window manager are defined in the Settings Manager > Window Manager Settings > Keyboard. The Default theme can not be changed, but when you add a theme you can change that one. More global keyboard shortcuts, like volume adjustements, can be found in Settings Manager > Keyboard Preferences > Shortcuts. Again you need to add a new theme before you can start customizing it.

You can't.

Menu accelerators let you set a keyboard shortcut to a menu item or entry. To enable menu accelerators go to the main menu and select:

Settings → Appearance → Settings tab

and select the 'Enable Editable Accelerators' option.

Alternatively you can run the command xfce4-appearance-settings from a terminal or from the Alt-F2 run command instead of using the menu to get to the appearance settings to enable accelerators.

Use kiosk mode (see xfce4-session and panel docs).

The left-button single-click menu button display speed is linked to the double click speed. If one wants the menu to appear quicker, just change the double click speed in the Xfce 4 Settings Manager Mouse properties to be faster. Or, one can right click on the title bar to get the menu displayed almost instantly without adjusting the double-click speed. The menu will display both ways.

There are two possibilities. The first is by middle clicking on the desktop (if you have xfdesktop running) or you can add the window list plugin to the panel (is provided with a xfce4-popup-windowlist command).

cp ~/.cache/xfce4/desktop/menu-cache-name-of-the-generated-file.xml ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/menu2.xml
cd ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/
cat menu.xml > menu3.xml
cat menu2.xml >> menu3.xml
mv menu.xml menu.orig.xml
mv menu3.xml menu.xml

Now, you already have a menu with all the categories in the main tree with some duplicates, but you must first edit menu.xml with your favorite editor and remove the 4 following lines in the middle of the file, otherwise the menu editor will complain about a wrong format:

</xfdesktop-menu>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xfdesktop-menu>

<xfdesktop-menu>

That's all. Now you can run the menu editor, remove the few duplicates and edit all as you like.

Settings > Desktop > Menu > Menu Editor

Notes: by removing the “system” line, you will remove all the duplicates menu entries from the auto generated file. So, if it is changed in this auto generated file, they don't appear anymore, but you will get rid of most of the duplicates.

To restore the original menu, just do in a terminal:

mv menu.xml menu3.xml; mv menu.orig.xml menu.xml

Please see this wiki entry.

You can find more information about Thunar on the homepage or in the wiki.

No, you can not. But you can do for example:

1. use 'SHIFT + del' to bypass the trash bin and immediately delete something for real.
2. use cron to clean the trash every now and then.

Thunar allows you to edit menu accelerators by simply hovering over the chosen action and by clicking the new keyboard shortcut you want to assign. To activate the editable menu accelerators select the “Editable menu accelerators” entry in the User Interface Settings plugin.

Thunar is following the freedesktop standards in this. Following the links below you can find out more of this freedesktop specifications. Read more here and here.

You will find your deleted items in ~/.local/share/Trash/files

Two possible ways. First, You'll need to build thunar with support for gconf (GNOME thumbnailers) and install one of the available movie thumbnailers for GNOME, i.e. Totem includes the totem-video-thumbnailer. Second, You can get thumbnails without GNOME by installing thunar-thumbnailers plugin.

It already does! Just mount your shares and go to them with Thunar! Just kidding.

You are obviously asking about Thunar being able to discover remote machines on a network and mount/unmount shares from them. What you are asking for is nice, but there is no common framework for it yet that Thunar can build on.

Thunar is designed to be a file manager, not a network file system manager. Once such a beast exists, Thunar and all other applications will be able to use it, and you can browse your samba or NFS shares in firefox or emacs, whatever.

Short answer: not any time soon unless you write it yourself.

For Linux users, and especially Xubuntu users, the following thread can help: Xubuntu How to: Thunar Native Windows Network Browsing. You will need fusesmb. For me it worked like a charm with Feisty. You should read the post from EatMorePie, as it avoids unnecessary steps.

Yes, in Xfce 4.4 you can hide some of the desktop icons. You can read more about those hidden settings here.

• Xfce 4.2: You will need a third party program to provide you the icons. Suggestions are: pcmanfm, rox, nautilus etc etc… Beware that those programs will kill xfdesktop and the ability to use the right click menu.
• Xfce 4.4: You can enable the icons in : Settings > Desktop Preferences > Behavior > Desktop Icons. You will need to build xfdesktop with thunar-vfs and dbus support. (./configure –enable-thunar-vfs –enable-exo)

Xfdesktop faq @ spuriousinterrupt

When a new tab is opened from an external link in Firefox, it asks the WM to show the window containing the new tab. If the window that has requested to be raised is not on the current desktop, the Xfce Window manager will bring it to the current desktop by default. If you do not want this behavior, there is a hidden option to control this behavior. For Xfce 4.4 in ~/.config/xfce4/xfwm4/xfwm4rc you can put the following:

  activate_action=bring|switch|none

For Xfce 4.6 you can go to Xfce Menu > Settings > Window Manager Tweaks and go to the tab Focus, or you need to use the xfconf-query tool to change the setting:

  xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/activate_action -s bring|switch|none

As the name suggests, the “bring” option moves the window requesting to be raised to the current workspace, the “switch” option switches workspaces, and the “none” option takes no action.

The Xfce Window Manager has a feature called smart placement which can be adjusted based on the window size. Basically it will automatically center windows that are below a certain size and once they get bigger than that, new windows will try to be arranged automatically in the best place to have coverage. You can adjust the minimum size setting under Settings → Window Manager Tweaks → Placement.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: If the application supports it, it will restore itself at the location and size you last specified (example: Terminal or Thunar). If the application doesn't support it you can use a window matching application like devilspie or wmctrl

wmctrl is a commandline tool that can switch workspaces, move windows between workspaces, move window positions, maximize windows, etc.

libwnck is a library that does similar things.

If display compositing is enabled, the Xfce Window Manager allows you to adjust the opacity of a window by hovering your mouse over the title bar, holding down the Alt key, and using the scroll wheel (down lowers the opacity, and up raises it). So use Alt+ScrollWheelUp to reset the transparency.

There are two possible reasons why the application is started: It is saved in the last session or it is listed in the auto started applications. Follow 1 of the two steps below to get rid of the applications.

• Start the xfce4-autostart-editor and remove the application(s). You can also manually delete those files in ~/Desktop/Autostart and ~/.config/autostart.
• Most of the time closing all the applications and save your session when you logout is sufficient. If this doesn't work, remove the content of the ~/.cache/sessions/ directory when you're not logged in. And if you don't want xfce remember every session you should turn off (uncheck) “Automatically save session on logout” in Settings Manager → Sessions and Startup (tab General)

There are two way to fix this: sudo and hal/dbus. Default starting from version 4.4 is hal.

You have to allow the user(s) to execute $installdir/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper with sudo. Install sudo and run visudo (root) and add the following line (replace prefix with the correct path):

 %users ALL = NOPASSWD:<prefix>/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper

Add the user to the users group (root):

 gpasswd -a <username> users

When you logout and login again, the shutdown and restart buttons should be sensitive. For more information you can referrer to the xfce4-session and sudo documentation.

Make sure that the hal and dbus daemons are started on boot, and that you are running a recent version of dbus (at least 1.1). Refer to your distribution for exact steps.

In the steps below the groupname “power” is used. This is DEPENDING ON YOUR DISTRIBUTION.

Your /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf should contain a section similar to this:

<policy group="power">
  <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement"/>
  ...
</policy>

Add the user to the power group (root):

 gpasswd -a <username> power

When you logout and login again, the shutdown and restart buttons should be sensitive.

Enable the checkbox “Prompt on logout” in the session manager settings.

Just don't run it at startup…

• If you use the session manager, kill the taskbar, save your session on logout, and the taskbar will be gone when you'll log back in.
• If you don't use the session manager, comment out the xftaskbar4 line in your $sysconfdir/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc or ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc.
• If you use the session manager and want to remove the taskbar system-wide, comment out the taskbar line in the $sysconfdir/xgd/xfce4-session/xfce4-session.rc file.

If you select this option, the window manager will show an hourglass while the program is loading. The startup notification libraries have to be installed. They are probably available with your distribution. This feature is only supported by modern applications (Gtk2.x and Qt3.x based).

Please note that the API is not yet frozen, and therefore Xfce 4 is only guaranteed to work with the startup-notification library version >= 0.5.

As Xfce is modular by design all of those visual elements are actually separate processes. You can just start their process again to regain them. If you want to make sure that they are started again next time you login you should check the “Save session for future logins” in the logout dialog or check “Save session automatically on logout” in “Sessions and startup settings”.

There are at least 6 possibilities:

1. The xfce4-screenshootern:
   • Add it to your panel and click to make a screenshot, or use the xfce4-screenshooter stand-alone application.
2. Salasaga - http://www.salasaga.org/
   • Dedicated application for doing screenshots and application captures
   • Add a keyboard shortcut (i.e. Control-Printscreen) for the “salasaga_screencapture” command
3. The Gimp
   • In the Acquire menu: http://www.gimp.org/
4. scrot: http://linuxbrit.co.uk/scrot/
   • e.g. “scrot -s -t 150×150” (either select a window or select a rectangle with the mouse)
5. Import from ImageMagick
   • e.g. “import image.png” (select a window with the mouse)
6. Using good old xv with grab function
   • http://www.trilon.com/xv/downloads.html#src-distrib

It is more likely that the icon theme you are using renders too many SVGs making it very hard to scroll. Switch to another icon theme.

For NVidia users, add this to your settings:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=0 -a GlyphCache=1

For all users, your driver may not support argb visuals very well. You can disable it for Terminal by exporting the environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1. To disable it for Terminal only, put the next lines inside ~/bin/Terminal for example (given you have a personal bin directory, you can also put it inside /usr/local/bin):

#!/bin/sh
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 /usr/bin/Terminal

The gtk-xfce-engine-2 package has to be installed using same prefix as Gtk2 itself. When installed from sources, the engine is, by default, installed in /usr/local, while Gtk2 is often installed in /usr. Just install gtk-xfce-engine-2 again using ./configure –prefix=/usr, and the themes will hopefully become available.

You can read everything about changing themes in the How to install new themes wiki page.

Enable the Composite extension in the X11 config file and make sure Xfwm4 is compiled with embedded compositor (xfwm4 -V).

 Section "Extensions"
   Option "Composite" "Enable"
 EndSection

Pay attention: recent versions of X.org turn composite on by default. If you experience speed problems or any other glitches you have to disable it explicitly:

 Section "Extensions"
   Option "Composite" "Disable"
 EndSection

If you have a reasonably new X.org (7.1, possibly 7.0) and your graphics card is listed as “supported” at X.org's EXA status page, you should also enable EXA by adding this line to the card's Device section in your xorg.conf:

   Option "AccelMethod" "exa"

Enabling EXA will normally provide a speed increase for compositing and font rendering, but may cause a small reduction in OpenGL rendering speed.

Once the Composite extension is activated, go to Settings → Panel and Settings → Window Manager Tweaks.

ATI R3xx/R4xx (9500 to X850, X1050) users may also need this in the device section for the card:

 Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
 Option "AccelDFS" "true"			# but see radeon(4)
 Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
 Option "EnableDepthMoves" "true"

NVidia users may also need this in the device section for the card:

 Option "RenderAccel" "true"
 Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

Read /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx/README.txt.gz (and search for “RenderAccel” and “AllowGLXWithComposite”) to see if they are recommended at all for your system. At least for recent NVidia GLX drivers, “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” is only for X servers older than X11R6.9.0, and “RenderAccel” “true” is the default setting, and therefore not required. If you are running a recent NVidia driver and a recent xorg-server, you do not need these settings (and should not use the “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” setting).

It's not possible. This setting has to be managed by the application itself.

First, try another Gtk theme, since some themes override the color. If it doesn't solve the problem, you probably have an old ~/.gtkrc-2.0 : remove it and try again.

In order to improve focus management this option was removed.

You need to add the Orage Clock to the panel. Then you can middle-click the clock to open the “Global Time” window, to which you can add any number of clocks.

You can report bugs here or ask on the mailing lists or forums for help. If you want to report a bug please read the Xfce debug guide and the Pidgin get a backtrace to ensure your bug report actually makes sense and is useful.

Whenever we feel like it is ready to be released. If you are unhappy with this you can always choose to hire the whole Xfce developer crew and pay us (we accept VISA/MasterCard, but not American Express)… Then we can even tailor it to your liking…

2 possibilities:

• Give it time. Maybe the responsible developer is on vacation, maybe he didn't check the mailing list / bugzilla yet. Keep in mind that someone may be having a bad day and may not care to respond at all. Time can help.
• Try givng more detailed information. Perhaps no one can figure out what it is you are trying to say, and they just don't want to take the time to contact you or reply to your post to find out. Usually, the more information, the better.
• Maybe you have been disrespectful when asking your question / reporting a bug. While you are totally allowed to rate a product just as you please, you do have to realise that in the case of open source products you didn't pay for the product or the support on the product, and the developers may not value your feedback. So when you report something that affects you, you are actually asking a favor. When reporting such a problem you can improve your chances on goodwill of the developers by asking your question in a polite, respectfull way. Do realise that even if you do so the developer might not be interested in/lack time to implement the feature/fix the bug you reported. A patch that fixes the issue might still convince him to spend time on it. |Read what Jannis has to say on the topic
• When you are reporting a legitimate issue, it is understood that you are taking your valuable time to offer feedback to the developers. That does not mean that they will appreciate it, so don't have any expectations for a particular type of response. Sometimes you must just roll with the punches and meet them on their own terms. Unreasonable expectations often lead to bad feelings, so you are better off just not having them in the first place. Everyone thinks differently, and you should expect that your issue and/or approach may be misunderstood.