LXDE - ArchWiki

# LXDE

Related articles

- Desktop environment
- Display manager
- Window manager
- Openbox
- PCManFM
- LXDM
- LXQt
- File manager functionality#Mounting

From project home page:

  The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. Maintained by an international community of developers, it comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM than other environments. It is especially designed for cloud computers with low hardware specifications, such as, netbooks, mobile devices (e.g. MIDs) or older computers.

## Installation

LXDE requires at least lxde-common and openbox (or another window manager) to be installed. The lxde group from the official repositories contains the full desktop.

## Starting the desktop

### Graphical log-in

LXDM is the default display manager for LXDE and is installed as part of the lxde group. See also Display manager.

### Console

To use startx, you will need to define LXDE in xinitrc:

    ~/.xinitrc

    exec startlxde

See also Start X at login.

## Tips and tricks

### Application menu editing

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Desktop entries.

Notes: please use the second argument of the template to provide more detailed indications. (Discuss)

The application menu works by resolving the `.desktop` files located in `/usr/share/applications`. Many desktop environments run programs that supersede these settings to allow customization of the menu. LXDE has yet to create an application menu editor but you can manually build them yourself if you are so inclined. Third party menu editor can be found in AUR - lxmed

To add or edit a menu item, create or link to the `.desktop` file in `/usr/share/applications`, `/usr/local/share/applications`, or `~/.local/share/applications`. (The latter two have the advantage of putting your application outside of directories governed by `pacman`.) Consult the desktop entry specification on freedesktop.org for structures of `.desktop` files.

To remove items from the menu, instead of deleting the `.desktop` files, you can edit the file and add the following line in the file:

    NoDisplay=true

To expedite the process for a good number of files you can put it in a loop. For example:

    $ cd /usr/share/applications
    $ for i in program1.desktop program2.desktop ...; do cp /usr/share/applications/$i \
    /home/user/.local/share/applications/; echo "NoDisplay=true" >> \
    /home/user/.local/share/applications/$i; done

This will work for all applications except KDE applications. For these, the only way to remove them from the menu is to log into KDE itself and use its menu editor. For every item that you do not want displayed, check the 'Show only in KDE' option. If adding NoDisplay=True will not work, you can add ShowOnlyIn=XFCE.

### Autostart

Applications can be automatically started in several ways.

#### Openbox

See Openbox#autostart.

#### Desktop files

Tip: `.desktop` files can be manipulated with lxsession-edit from the AUR.

See Autostarting#Desktop_entries.

#### Lxsession

Each line in `~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart` represents a command to be executed. If a line starts with `@`, and the command following it crashes, the command is automatically re-executed. For example:

    ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart

    @lxterminal
    @leafpad

Note: Unlike Openbox, these commands do not end with a `&` symbol.

There is also a global autostart file at `/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart`.

Note: If both files are present, lxsession only executes the local file as of v0.4.9

### Bindings

Mouse and key bindings (i.e. keyboard shortcuts) are implemented with Openbox. LXDE users should follow the Openbox wiki to edit `~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml`.

An optional GUI for editing the key bindings is obkey from the AUR. Whle it edits `rc.xml` by default, you can direct it to the LXDE configuration as follows:

    $ obkey ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml

See [1] for more information.

### Cursors

LXAppearance, provided by the lxappearance package, is a graphical tool that can determine a number of aspects of the user interface including the cursor theme. Settings configured using LXAppearance are written to `~/.gtkrc-2.0`, `~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini`, and `~/.icons/default/index.theme`. See also Cursor themes.

### Digital clock applet time

You can right click on the digital clock applet on the panel and set how it displays the current time. For example, to display standard time instead of military time in the format of HH:MM:SS:

    %I:%M

And in YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS format:

    %Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S

If you wish to display standard time with and AM/PM:

    %I:%M %p

See man strftime for details.

### Font settings

See Font configuration. lxappearance-obconf configures LXDE-specific settings.

### Keyboard layout

See Keyboard configuration in Xorg for generic instructions. A keyboard layout applet is included with lxpanel.

See #Autostart programs for a way to automatically start setxkbmap in LXDE.

### Screen locking

LXDE does not come with a screen locker of its own; see List of applications/Security#Screen lockers for alternatives.

`/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart` from lxde-common lists XScreenSaver, which will be launched automatically. See #Autostart when using a different locker. See DPMS on how to control the screen saver without external programs.

### lxpanel icons

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: `.local/share/` preferred (Discuss)

Default icons used by lxpanel are stored in `/usr/share/pixmaps` and any custom icons you want lxpanel to use need to be saved there as well.

You can change default icons for applications by taking the following steps:

1. Save the new icon to /usr/share/pixmaps
2. Use a text editor to open the `.desktop` file of the program whose icon you want to change in `/usr/share/applications`.
3. Change

    Icon=/default/icon/.png

to:

    Icon=/name/of/new/icon/added/to/pixmaps/.png

### Replace Openbox

lxsession uses the window manager defined in `~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf`. If this file does not exist, it searches in `/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf` instead.

Replace `openbox-lxde` in either file with a window manager of choice:

    [Session]
    window_manager=openbox-lxde

For metacity:

    window_manager=metacity

For compiz:

    window_manager=compiz

Note that since openbox dispatches the desktop-wide keyboard shortcuts in LXDE, users who want to replace it and still use these shortcuts will need to reimplement this functionality themselves. A good option is xbindkeys.

### Shutdown, reboot, suspend and hibernate options (LXSession-logout)

This requires installation of upower.

## Troubleshooting

### NTFS with Chinese characters

This article or section is a candidate for merging with NTFS-3G.

Notes: please use the second argument of the template to provide more detailed indications. (Discuss)

For a storage device with an NTFS filesystem, you will need to install the NTFS-3G package. Generally, PCManFM works well with NTFS filesystems, however there is one bug affecting NTFS users that if you have files or directories on an NTFS filesystem, the names of which contain non-latin characters (e.g. Chinese characters) may disappear when opening (or auto-mounting) the NTFS volume. This happens because the lxsession mount-helper is not correctly parsing the policies and locale options. There is a workaround for this:

Create a new `/usr/local/bin/mount.ntfs-3g` with a new Bash script containing:

    #!/bin/bash
    /usr/bin/ntfs-3g $1 $2 -o locale=en_US.UTF-8

And then make it executable:

    # chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mount.ntfs-3g

## See also

- Linux LXDE Guide
- LXDE (Sourceforge)
- LXDE forum

Category:

- Desktop environments