[xfce] I should've left well-enough alone

[spacehaven]

In my quest to build a desktop that is perfect for my tastes, I spent lots of time evaluating every window manager and desktop, including Ion, WindowMaker, Afterstep, Gnome, KDE (spent a lot of time with KDE), and finally XFCE. I fell in love with XFCE from the moment I installed 4.1.99.3. Slick design, clean interface, consistant, just enough parts to make a working desktop environment, etc.

So after all the other evaluation, I figured I would go back and wipe my disk and reinstall gentoo from scratch, building the box the same way with the same versions, only not installing all those other products of course. Bzzzt! Bad move. Now my dual 700mhz PIII feels like a 90mhz P1. Aside from merely being slow, XFCE doesn't feel right. Things are missing (cpu and memory load applets), sound doesn't work (no it's not muted, clicking on the sound icon in the control panel kills the control panel), I get random errors, etc.

Yuck.

Any advice to building a solid xfce4.2 box? FWIW:

USE="-arts -esd X aac aim alsa avi bash-completion exif gif icq imap jabber imlib jpeg -kde -qt mad mmx mpeg ncurses png ssl sse svg sox usb wmf xinerama xml xml2 xosd tiff xv xvid xpm wxwindows truetype spell quicktime offensive divx4linux yahoo doc emacs"

Dual Intel P3 700mhz
512megs/ram
Dual nVidia Geforce2's (xinerama)

Maybe I should wait for the non-beta xfce package.

[Sith_Happens]

I'm not sure why you decided to do a complete reinstall, and not just emerge --update --deep --newuse world, but I can say I did just about the same thing, and came to the same conclusion XFCE4 (4.1.99) rules. I'm not really sure why you have so many use flags, I mean I have only a few, and things like xvid movies and true type fonts work fine in all my applications. As for the cpu monitor, for some reason that wasn't included in the 4.1.99 ebuild, so I had to install that seperatly. Also, you mentioned XFCE 4.2, why don't you try out the new ebuild and see if that fixes anything. Maybe if you included some info on how you went about rebuilding your system, maybe there will be some clue as to whats wrong.
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