Linux incognito part two: Windows XP

David M Williams
Saturday, 25 October 2008 05:25

Opinion and Analysis

LXP – “Look XP” – is a SourceForge hosted app. It has been developed as a collection of different pieces of GNU software that have been customised to look and feel identical to Windows XP.

This includes the icewm window manager, xfe and idesk. iDesk is a system that adds desktop icons for people using minimal window managers. That is, LXP does not use GNOME or KDE but switches to a smaller, less functional window manager – icewm – and then beefs it up using idesk. xfe is a lean file explorer.

So that's how LXP works; check it out in action in the screenshot below.

Nicely, LXP is dead simple to install. The download page provides both Debian (.deb) and Red Hat (.rpm) packages which can be used by most Linux distros. For instance, Ubuntu users would opt for the .deb package.

If you’re unsure which one is for you simply download the shell script lxp-setup. This works magic: the script will determine the appropriate package for your system and will download it from SourceForge if you haven’t already done so. It can also uninstall LXP if you later decide to remove it.

LXP has an interesting history and was initially designed because the author was producing a kiosk system. He wanted the stability of Linux but the user interface of Windows XP to tear down one potential barrier that users might face.

Which way should you go? I think you would do well to check out both systems. They both have a number of compelling features. LXP has the edge on ease of installation.

Yet, neither system has been updated for a couple of years. That’s not a problem – Windows XP has been out for coming up to seven years, and its successor, Windows Vista, is coming up to its second anniversary.

In fact, next time we’ll round off this trilogy with a Windows Vista look. See you then!