[Solved] Need to instakll Xfce.

[gardenair]

hi,
In my Oracle Virtualbox, I am using Gentoo Linux amd64/23.0/desktop/systemd (stable) with Gentoo Linux 6.6.35 and 6.6.32 -gentoo-dist.
I normally boot from 6.6.32 -gentoo-dist . My question is what are the key steps to install Xfce? I want to use a keyboard mouse, and sound volume and when I mount USB it may show on the desktop as well in my Guest Gentoo Linux.
Well, you can view my "emerge--info " output at https://bpa.st/IWLQ and "/etc/portage/make.conf " output at https://bpa.st/3ITA Any change you think to add or remove in my "/etc/portage/make.conf " guide me.
Please guide me on what key steps I may take.

[fedeliallalinea]

You have already selected a desktop profile and this should enable the minimum use flags for a graphical environment.
To install xfce you can start by looking at the related gentoo wiki page.
An other interesting wiki page is gentoo as guest on virtualbox.
_________________
Questions are guaranteed in life; Answers aren't.

[lars_the_bear]

Hi

I found that installing as described in the documentation worked fine, except that I had to disable the pre-compiled binary for libxfce4ui, and force it to build from source. That's because the binary requires Wayland support, but says it doesn't. There's a bug open for this, as I recall.

EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--usepkg-exclude 'xfce4-base/libxfce4ui'"

If you want USB drives to auto-mount, you'll need `gvfs` or something similar, in addition to whatever configuration VirtualBox needs to show the USB to the guest OS. There's some stuff in the Thunar documentation[1] about having Thunar being able to mount/unmount drives dynamically.

If you're using Pulse, there's a Pulse applet for Xfce that should take care of volume controls. I don't use Pulse, so I don't know how well it works. I just map the keys manually to `alsactl` commands. I guess you could do the same with `pactl` if the applet doesn't work.

In general, I find that Xfce4 works pretty well in Gentoo, but it needed a lot more tweaking than it does on Ubuntu. But the Ubuntu install includes a heap of Gnome stuff, which I'm excluding in Ubuntu, so I expected the extra work.

BR, Lars.

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Thunar

[gardenair]

Well, I have removed USE flags from /etc/portage/make.conf as I was already using systemd desktop profile. I apply

[lars_the_bear]

I'm afraid I don't know why this happens -- it will need somebody with more expertise than me to figure that out, I think. I find that Gentoo on VirtualBox just hangs sometimes, and it's nearly always while I'm compiling a big package. Sometimes I have to take two or more tries, to get these packages to build.

I've tolerated this because I don't really expect to use VirtualBox in the long term -- I used it to experiment before setting up real hardware.

[pietinger]

Try:

[gardenair]

Thanks all for your replies. Well, I increased the amount of RAM in my VM and eventually, I was able to install Xfce.