LXLE on a Dell Latitude D430

Until a few days ago, my Dell Latitude D430 was running Elementary OS, but I was getting frustrated at it's layout and decided to have a change of distro. A friend of mine recommended a distro called LXLE. It's a lightweight distro always based off the LTS release of Lubuntu, the LXDE desktop flavour of Ubuntu. It has various PPAs added and extra software, (useful codecs, applets etc) added. I've tried Lubuntu before but I didn't really like it for some reason. However, upon trying LXLE as a virtual machine in Virtualbox, I found LXLE to have a much better out-of-the-box experience than Lubuntu, so I decided it would be ideal for my D430.

LXLE feels more more consistent and overall neater than Lubuntu. Also Firefox is the default browser rather than Chromium. My only real criticism is I can't seem to find the shortcuts for switching desktops, which is usually Ctrl + Alt + Cursor keys for Lubuntu. I also think there are too many little games installed by default though that's only a minor point. Oh and there's no battery applet installed by default. Out the box, there's a panel at the bottom like Windows and a dock-style panel on the left that is set to auto-hide. I have changed the layout slightly, moving the lower panel to the top and the side one to the bottom, (keeping the lower panel in auto-hide mode). I have also installed Guake terminal and Dropbox.

LXLE has lots of tweaks and add-ons by default than Lubuntu like Aero Snap, Quick Launch, and there are "Four familiar desktop layout paradigms" though I stick with the XP paradigm, these can be chosen at the login screen under Sessions. The desktop system monitor and weather applet are neat touches too.

My Dell Latitude D430 has a 1.33Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU with 2GB of RAM which is the maximum supported, which I have found previously to struggle with "full fat" desktop OS and lots of browser tabs open, but it really flies on LXLE! Much like all *buntu flavours, it uses the same familiar installer and all the hardware works out the box. It feels even faster than Xubuntu 12.04 and Elementary OS, and I shall keep LXLE on it for now, I'd definitely recommend it for low end laptops and desktops and ideal to replace the recently unsupported Windows XP.

Enabling a Fingerprint Reader in Ubuntu 12.04

I got this to work with my Dell Latitude XT, but it should work with some Lenovo Thinkpads and some HP laptops that have the same SGS Thomson Microelectronics fingerprint reader or other supported readers. As Thinkfinger isn't available in the Precise repositories, I had to download the Natty packages from here and install them manually with

sudo dpkg -i libthinkfinger0_0.3+r118-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb thinkfinger-tools_0.3+r118-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb libpam-thinkfinger_0.3+r118-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb

You could also try compiling them (which i tried, unsuccessfully!) from the tar available here. Then i followed the instructions on the Ubuntu Wiki for Thinkfinger.

Once that's done reboot and you should be able to tap your username on the login screen, swipe your finger, then tap 'login' and you should be able to login. You can even swipe while doing sudo commands on the commandline! The only slight problem when swiping your finger to login, is it doesn't unlock the login keyring, so you'll have to enter your password once (you can use the Onboard onscreen keyboard if you're using a tablet). There apparently used to be a workaround but that is now long out of date.