Got an alternate desktop environment

While I was playing around with Zenwalk, I found that I like XFCE as an alternative. I don't know if I would use it full time or not, but I like having alternatives. So I was pleased to get a reply to my question on the Ubuntu forums. Seems that there is a project to make XFCE the default window manager. There's even talk about there being a Xubuntu distro. It looks like they will be launching that soon, maybe on the next release.

But to get mine working for me, I made use of Synaptic. All I had to do was select the xubuntu-desktop application and it loaded up just fine. It even pulled up all the other packages that had to be loaded. I could have used apt-get also. To do that, I would do this:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

I also logged into my course today and found that I would have to use XP for part of it. They have several applications that I have to load. I could try using Wine, but I don't want to use this as a test to if I can do this.

But I also found that I wasn't able to use RealPlayer to play the audio clips in class. So I had to do some searching. Found it on the Ubuntu WIKI page. Down in there, there's the steps to load up RealPlayer. Basically, you download the .DEB file and then do the following.

cd /
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
sudo dpkg -i realplayer_.deb

That was it. It even configured the system to use RealPlayer as the default for .rm files. This is easier than I though it would be. I originally had issues with the libstdc++ file. This took care of that. It's going to get easier once I find out how to best use Synaptic and apt-get.