Well, here we go!

So, when I last left you I said that I would show you what this thing can do and load a fully functional LXDE desktop from the Ubuntu packages.

You can do this from either inside Maemo, chrooted into your Mer partition, or, if you are still staring at the pretty blue Mer desktop from my last entry.. you can do all this right from the terminal in there.

Note: The commands I use will not include the word “sudo”, and all must be run as root unless otherwise specified.  So “su -” up and lets get started.

First thing we want to do is make sure that our local cache is updated with the repositories, and then install LXDE.

`Well, here we go!

So, when I last left you I said that I would show you what this thing can do and load a fully functional LXDE desktop from the Ubuntu packages.

You can do this from either inside Maemo, chrooted into your Mer partition, or, if you are still staring at the pretty blue Mer desktop from my last entry.. you can do all this right from the terminal in there.

Note: The commands I use will not include the word “sudo”, and all must be run as root unless otherwise specified.  So “su -” up and lets get started.

First thing we want to do is make sure that our local cache is updated with the repositories, and then install LXDE.

apt-get update apt-get --no-install-recommends install lxde libgtkstylus onboard

Note:  If you don’t use –no-install-recommends you will get GDM and several other packages installed.  If you are running an N810, this is actually not that bad, and you can reboot immediately.  You will get to a normal Ubuntu login screen!!  But it’ll force you to change your newly created password.

If you don’t want to deal with GDM, or you have an N800, continue on.

We now need to tell our users account to launch LXDE when it runs startx. So as the user you created run the following:

echo "exec startlxde" >> ~/.xinitrc

Now you should be able to reboot and voila!

Note:  N800 users, before you reboot you will need to install a virtual keyboard of some kind.  There is xvkbd, but it does not show as a menu item in LXDE so you can’t launch it.  When I find a decent one that will allow you to nav to it I will update this post.

Note 2:  Found on OSK that N800 users could use, called Onboard, thanks to andrewfblack at itT.  He also has some files to assist in getting it to launch properly and to fix N810 users keyboards.

And now we have a working LXDE!  Of course, it’s not much just to have a functional LXDE environment, so we need some software!

Unfortunately, I’m out of time for now.. I will be back tomorrow showing any software I am able to get loaded from Ubuntu’s repo’s!  This may or may not be difficult, since I am aware of some conflicts with normal Gnome apps and the Mer packages.  We’ll see!