Mint LXDE - What's Missing

I installed Mint LXDE 5 or six days ago. In a weeks time, I thought I would have a laundry list of software I absolutely must install. This is LXDE after all.

Surprisingly, that is not the case. LXDE is lightweight, but that doesn’t mean limited software. Right out the install box, Mint contains all of the software you might need for almost any task. For word processing Abiword is all you need; Spreadsheets are handled very well by Gnumeric; Gimp provides all of the photoediting capabilities one might need for almost any task.  Exaile is excellent for music and video is handled well by both MPlayer and VLC. Firefox is the go to web browser for any system and it did not require any updates with Mint LXDE 11, which was a nice touch. In fact with this version of Mint, I don’t believe I had more than a couple of updates.

So what did I HAVE to install? I selected Libre Office over Gnumeric and Abiword; however these to pieces of software are so handy that I decided to keep them. Considering all of the options in Libre Office, keeping them is high praise. For web browsers I needed something other than Firefox so I selected Opera and Epiphany-Browser. There is no beating Firefox in my book, but sometimes I need to look at websites in something else. Opera was selected because I last used this on my old Mac. Epiphany was snap decision, I wanted to take a drive with something new to me

The only lack I saw by way of software was a plain jane HTML editor and an ebook manager. Abiword could do it and there is nothing wrong with gedit, but Bluefish is my favourite. As for ebooks, I selected Calibre because it works so well and does so much more.

I hope to do a write up of my new software choices soon, so say tuned.

Mint 13 XFCE - Save HD Space with backdrop file resizing

Mint has always had gorgeous backdrop images for the desktop. The photographs by masterbutler are incredible.

But if you are on a small machine, like my ASUS eee PC, you don't have a lot of hard drive space.

You could just delete a lot of things, such as the backdrop files, but that would be a shame. Instead, I choose to resize them to fit my 800x600 screen. To be honest, I am not missing anything. The images surpass my monitors ability to display them in all their glory.

Since Mint comes with Gimp, this is an easy task. The directory is /usr/share/xfce4/backdrops. I hesitated to "undo the beauty" by reducing the size until I opened the credits file. Masterbutler has thoughtfully provide a link to 80+ pages of wonderful images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/alwbutler/.

Go ahead and scale those images. You may find yourself using the space to enjoy more art by masterbutler.

Mint 11 lxde glitch - Can't delete uninstalled program icons from the menu

Mint 11 lxde is old, but I like it for my Asus EEE PC. It does have one annoying glitch. If you attempt to remove software such as gnumeric, the uninstall process leaves the program's icon in the menu. Annoying but not exactly critical.

There is an easy work around. Go to a convenient location and create a new folder called "deleted icons". Next open the /usr/share/applications folder. Go to tools and select "Open current folder as Root". This displays a new window. Find the offending software and select cut. Go to the deleted icons folder and again, select tools and open as "Open current folder as Root". Paste in the offending program and close all windows.

By shifting the icon via cut-paste, you retain the option of reinstalling the program.