Adding Xfce to LM18 Cinnamon

[JChristensen]

I've been using LM18 Cinnamon (64-bit) and love it, and I thought it would be fun and interesting to check out the other DEs. I installed the mint-meta-xfce package but when I choose Xfce at logon, I get a black screen with the mouse cursor. I can do Ctrl-Alt-F1 and get into the console, reboot or whatever from there.
I tried this on three different machines running LM18 Cinnamon with the same results.
I tried installing LM18 Xfce on one machine to its own partitions (dual boot with the Cinnamon edition) and that worked fine.
I tried installing the mint-meta-mate package and that worked as expected on all three machines.
I'm not sure where to look for the problem. Any help appreciated.

[Cosmo.]

Mixing several DEs in Mint is likely to produce problems. If you want to test another DE, install VirtualBox and install the Mint edition of your choice as a virtual machine.

[richyrich]

I'm not sure where to look for the problem..

It is a conflict with the Window Managers, including a conflict between Nemo vs xfwm4. I agree with Cosmo, either dual-boot or use virtualbox.

[JChristensen]

Thanks @Cosmo and @richyrich. I understood that having multiple DEs installed and selecting one at logon to be standard functionality. It seems to work with Cinnamon and MATE. I have a dual boot now, one OS being Xfce and the other being Cinnamon with MATE added to it. I'll go with that for now as long as I don't encounter more issues. Virtualbox is on my list of things to try!

[richyrich]

Yes, Cinnamon and Mate are much more closely related than Xfce. I suggest that you check the Tutorials section or the Mint Community website for any good Virtualbox tutorials.

[JChristensen]

Well it is a pretty good trick, I'm not surprised that there are issues. I was pretty impressed that I could add MATE to Cinnamon (I actually tried that before Xfce). Virtualbox ... so much to learn but I'll get there. Am enjoying the heck out of Linux Mint so far!
PS: I tried installing the additional DEs based on recommendations from a couple folks on IRC. One person claimed to be running Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce and KDE all on the same image.

[Flemur]

FWIW, I installed the Mint18 Mate version before the Xfce version of M18 came out, then installed Xfce on top of that; both DE's worked. I didn't install mint-meta-xfce.

Code: Select all

$ dpkg -l *xfce* | grep ii
ii  gtk2-engines-xfce    
ii  libxfce4ui-1-0     
ii  libxfce4ui-common   
ii  libxfce4util-common   
ii  libxfce4util7  
ii  libxfcegui4-4   
ii  mint-info-xfce  
ii  mint-user-guide-xfce  
ii  xfce4-appfinder   
ii  xfce4-cpufreq-plugin   
ii  xfce4-eyes-plugin   
ii  xfce4-mailwatch-plugin 
ii  xfce4-panel  
ii  xfce4-places-plugin  
ii  xfce4-quicklauncher-plugin 
ii  xfce4-screenshooter  
ii  xfce4-screenshooter-plugin 
ii  xfce4-session   
ii  xfce4-settings   
ii  xfce4-systemload-plugin  
ii  xfce4-terminal 
ii  xfce4-time-out-plugin
ii  xfce4-timer-plugin 
ii  xfce4-verve-plugin  
ii  xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 

Then I uninstalled Mate:

Code: Select all

$ dpkg -l *mate* | grep ii
$

[jimallyn]

Years ago, that used to be standard procedure. The first Linux distro I ever used (Mandrake) installed both KDE and Gnome and you could select whichever one you wanted at login. But apparently it's not so easy anymore. VirtualBox is pretty easy to use. Last time I counted, I had 25 different OSes installed in VirtualBox on my main computer.