Fedora 15 Xfce

June 1, 2011 | Filed under: fedora | Posted by: admin

Fedora 15 Xfce is a Fedora 15 Spin. In Fedoraland, a Spin is an alternate edition of Fedora, “tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations.” Presently, five Spins have been released. These are, in order of popularity, the KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Security and Games Spins.

This article presents a review of the Xfce spin, and it is the first for this edition of Fedora on this site. Fedora 15 sports several new features. Some are not particularly relevant to a desktop user, but others are. Those will be noted in the appropriate sections of this review.

Installer and Installation Process: Like other Spins, Fedora 15 Xfcis available for download as a Live CD ISO image. The boot menu options allow booting into the Live environment, where installation can then be started. Installation is not possible without first booting into the Live environment. Unlike the main (GNOME 3) edition, there is no DVD or bfo installation image for this edition or for any other Spin.
Fedora15Xfce

All the Fedora spins share the same installation program with the main edition. Anaconda 15.31 is the version of Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, that ships with this latest release. The changes I see in this version are just cosmetic. The available disk partitioning methods are the same. Disk encryption is supported (see how Fedora protects your computer with full disk encryption).

LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, is the default disk partitioning scheme. Ext3, Ext4 and XFS are the supported journaling file systems, with ext4 as the default, even for the boot partition. Fedora 15 is the first version to have built-in support for btrfs, the B-tree file System, but it is only available when installing from a DVD or bfo ISO image. (You might be interested in how to install Fedora 15 on an encrypted btrfs file system.)
fedinstall15

Installation of the Fedora 15 Spins, and of the Live CD version of the GNOME edition, is not installation in the traditional sense, but rather, a copying of the Live image to disk. So, what you see on the Live desktop is what you get after installation.

Desktop: This edition of Fedora 15 Xfce ships with Xfce 4.8, the latest stable edition, which was released January 18, 2011. Compared to the latest KDE and GNOME desktop environments, it feels under-featured and slightly behind the times.

It features the traditional menu style, a top panel with four work spaces, and a dock-like bottom panel. The menu has all the major software categories you expect to find in a menu, but there is none for games. That is because there are no games installed. Aside from that, the Education category has just one entry – Gnumeric, a spreadsheet program for GNOME. It is not an educational software. You can find another entry for Gnumeric where it truly belongs – in the Office category.

I think a snazzy dock application, like Cairo-Dock, would have been a better addition for the Xfce desktop than the default bottom panel. The top panel has a clock applet, but no calendar. There is a DateTime plugin with a calendar that has almost the same features as the one on a GNOME 2 desktop that should have been on the panel, instead of the plain clock.

The best feature of the bottom panel is the Directory Browser, which makes it easy to drilldown into any folder in your home directory. Despite its shortcomings, I like the Xfce desktop, but it needs a Cairo-Dock to spice it up a bit. See a screenshot of the Xfce desktop running Cairo-Dock here.

On several occasions, either when attempting to launch an application from the menu, or while logging back in to the system, the panel crashed, generating the message shown in the image below. Clicking on Execute started it back up. Cancel left me with no top or bottom panel.
panelcrash

Installed and Installable Applications: The following are some of the major applications installed by default:

Firefox 4.0.1
Claws Mail, a feature-rich, GTK+ email client
Liferea Feed Reader
Transmission BitTorrent client
Pidgin Internet Messenger
Midori, a lightweight Web browser
Abiword, a standalone word processor
Gnumeric, a spreadsheet application

These are besides the standard Xfce desktop accessories and system utilities. Because Fedora does not ship with proprietary applications, some essential applications are not installed and are not available for installation. Adobe Flash Player, for example, is not installed, and it is not in the repository. You can, however, install and configure it by downloading the latest version (Adobe Flash Player 10.3) from Adobe’s website. Adobe’s Flash Player 10.3 presents some interesting privacy concerns, so be sure to read this before installing it.

If you want to install many more free and non-free applications, enabling RPM Fusion’s Free and Nonfree repositories is the easiest method. With OpenJDK Runtime Environment installed, Firefox and Midori passed the Java test.

Parole is the installed media player, but the system is not configured to detect and launch the appropriate audio or video application when an audio CD or video DVD is inserted. The default settings on the “Removable Drives and Media” preferences is blank.
mediaplayer

Configuring it with my choice of applications did the trick. This is something the developers should have taken the time to configure.
removables

Package Management: Managing applications on Fedora is accomplished by using yum, a command line utility, and the gpk-application, a graphical package manager. Many package management tasks are possible only via yum, that is, from the command line. I find the graphical package manager to be, compared to other graphical package managers, slow, especially when using the search feature. Gpk-application does not require authentication to start, so every attempt to install an application requires authentication. It does, however, allows you to queue applications for installation.
packagemanager

Out of the box, the system is configured to check for updates once per day, and to install security updates automatically. Most distributions are also configured to check for updates daily, but only notify you of updates, and not install them, even security-related updates.
packagemanager1

Be default, only official Fedora 15 repositories are enabled. That limits the number and types of applications available for installation.
packagemanager2

By installing RPM Fusion’s repositories, you can make many more applications available. Also, enabling Adobe’s Flash repository makes applications other than the Flash Player Plugin available. For example, Adobe AIR, a developer-component of the Adobe Flash Platform, is also made available for installation.
rpmfusion1

Graphical Administrative Tools: The desktop-specific graphical administrative tools are available from Applications Menu > Settings, and the system-wide tools are accessible from Applications Menu > Administration, and Applications Menu > System.

Security: Like other Fedora 15 editions, this comes with the firewall enabled. There is a graphical firewall installed and configured. Out of the box, the firewall is configured to allow ssh traffic (port 22) in – from all hosts and networks. Thankfully, the Secure Shell server is installed, but not active by default.

Aside from the ports and services listed on the main window, additional ports from a list of more than 60,000+ tcp and udp ports may be added from the Other Ports window. Like the ssh service, any port you add and enable from here will be accessible to all hosts and networks.
firewall2

You can add custom rules from the Custom Rules window. However, adding custom rules requires loading the rule(s) from a file, which in turn requires that you know how to write IPTables rules.
firewall1

New to Fedora 15 is FirewallD, a firewall daemon with a D-Bus interface, which is being designed to provide a dynamic frontend to the firewall application, so that reloading is not required when a change is made to the firewall rules. It is not installed by default, but if you do, you also need to install its applet. With the applet installed, you can make changes to the firewall from the panel, without needing to launch another application. And if it lives up to its billing, you will not need to reload or apply changes when a new rule or service is added.

If you look closely at the image below, you will see a “Panic Mode” checkbox. I could not determine exactly what enabling that mode is supposed to accomplish, but the applet crashed every time I clicked on the checkbox. I could not find any reference to a “Panic Mode” in FirewallD’s official page.

FirewallD has a very user-friendly command line utility called by firewall-cmd. For example, to enable access to the Secure Shell server, all you need to type is, firewall-cmd –enable –service=ssh. And to enable the same service for, say, 30 seconds, you would type firewall-cmd –enable –service=ssh –timeout=30.

FirewallD is expected to be the default on Fedora 16 onwards. You may read more about it here.

Another new security feature in Fedora 15 is the removal of setuid applications. These are applications that run with the permissions or privileges of the applications owner or group. Potentially, they can be a security nightmare. More about this feature here.

Final Thoughts: There are lots more about Fedora 15 that I have not covered in this review. Because those are the same across the Fedora editions, I will save them for a review of the main edition, which should be published some time next week. Specific to this Spin, I think the developers should have spent more time in customizing the default Xfce desktop. On a modern desktop operating system, somethings are expected to work out of the box. Unfortunately, on the Xfce Spin of Fedora 15, the most basic of those do not. I hope, Fedora 16 Xfce will provide a better, out-of-the-box user-experience.

Resources: Torrent and direct download ISO images of Fedora 15 Xfce for 32- and 64-bit platforms are available for download here. Support questions may be posted here and here.

Screenshots: View a few more screenshots from a test installation of Fedora 15 Xfce.

This is a screenshot of the desktop running Cairo-Dock, instead. looks and feels a lot better than the default desktop.