| XFCE founder interviewed |
Feb. 06, 2009
In an interview, Olivier Fourdan, creator of the XFCE, talks about the desktop environment's growing popularity in netbooks. He also discusses Intel's recent contributions to XFCE, which the Intel-sponsored Moblin project is using, as well as the broader potential for Linux-based environments such as XFCE or Android in netbooks.
In the Slashcode interview, Fourdan describes XFCE as a complete GTK-based desktop environment, including a window manager, file browser, panel, development libraries, and a D-Bus-compatible settings manager, MCS, that doesn't use gconf. Resembling a lighter, faster version of GNOME, the environment seems to be fairly modular, with Fourdan discussing capabilities like using Compiz in place of XFCE's native window manager.
Unlike Android, which Fourdan says is still very centralized at Google, XFCE has, since it began in 1996, attracted a vigorous community of both core and add-on developers. The latter group includes projects such as the lightweight Midori web browser. More XFCE subprojects are listed on its project page and on a separate Goodies site.
Fourdan praises Moblin for its use of existing open source projects, comparing it favorably to Android in that context. He also notes that Intel contributed "interesting patches" to XFCE, in part to enable the five-second boot times it is currently getting with the recent release of Moblin V2 (alpha).
The enjoyable interview can be found here.
-- Henry Kingman
Do you have comments on this story?
Talkback here
NOTE: Please post your comments regarding our articles using the above link. Be sure to use this article's title as the "Subject" in your posts. Before you create a new thread, please check to see if a discussion thread is already running on the article you plan to comment on. Thanks!
Related Stories:
(Click here for further information)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
