Peter Cannon wrote:
pacman -Si xfce|less
and looked for a package that might get me to a minimal desktop I could work with. I thought maybe xfdesktop...
pacman -S xfdesktop
Why have you done this? If you look at the 'man' page you will see http://linux.die.net/man/1/xfdesktop
xfdesktop manages the desktop itself in the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment.
You should have done pacman -S xfce4
By the sound of it you've only installed part of the desktop environment.
Looks like xfdesktop packages doesn't specify some of its dependancies (which is probably provided in the xfce4 group). http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=xfce4 should also include that there's a group with that name. I don't think it was a bad expectation from his part, looking at pacman -Ss xfce output. And even then, it could have worked, would xfdesktop have taken as dependancies the whole desktop. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com