LXDE, A stable and lightweight desktop environment.

LXDE is the abbreviation for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. LX also stands for LinuX. You will find it different from other desktop environments, due to its discrete components, which can be used independently and with few dependencies.

The LXDE project aims to provide a desktop environment which is intuitive, lightweight and useful, while also keeping system resource demands low. Development focuses on a balance of usability, speed, and memory usage.

LXDE has number of advantages and excellent features:
    * Lightweight, runs with reasonable memory usage (After X11 and LXDE are started, the total memory usage is about 45 MB on i386 machines.)
    * Fast, runs well even on older machines produced in 1999 (The hardware requirements of LXDE is similiar to Windows 98)
    * Good-looking, gtk+ 2 internationalized user interface
    * Easy-to-use, the user interface is simple, intuitive and functional.
    * Desktop independent (Yes! Every component can be used without LXDE)
    * Standards compliant, follows the specs on freedesktop.org
    * Suitable for old machines ( Though LXDE itself has low hardware requirements, other X applications have higher resource demands. For example, Firefox and OpenOffice.org 2 are quite memory-hungry. It is therefore recommended that you have more than 128 MB RAM.)

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 LXDE Project, but it's used as 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 LXDE Project, but you are suggested to use this as default archiver).
    * LXNM (still under development): Lightweight network manager for LXDE supporting wireless connections (Linux-only)

Installation:

OpenSuSe 11.1

Use "1 click" installer to install LXDE: here

OpenSuSe 11.0
Swyear from Taiwan provides a SuSE repository with LXDE packages in it.

    * http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/

Installation via zypper is available for Open SuSE 11.0.

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_11.0/ swyear
# zypper in lxde-desktop

Fedora 9
Install LXDE with

# yum install lxde-common

This will install the LXDE core components: lxde-common, lxpanel, lxsession, pcmanfm and openbox. You might also want to install additional applications:

# yum install gpicview leafpad lxappearance lxtask lxterminal xarchiver