I have been running Xfce4 + Debian 5.0 on a desktop at work since March. Since replacing the hard drive in my laptop I had not installed any flavor of Linux (which I normally do). I was going to go with Ubuntu, but I thought I would add a twist this time and opted for Debian + Xfce4 instead.
I ran into my first challenge right out of the gate: Wifi. Since I did not want to move from my place in front of the media center I needed to get wireless working on my WPA secured network. To make things more challenging I only downloaded the Net Install ISO, which only contained enough system to boot into base system. After a little searching I found out about the wpasupplicant package and the non-free firmware for my Intel wireless card (firmware-iwlwifi). After grabbing these packages + prerequisites and loading them from my thumb drive I configured my card as per the Debian Wiki Wifi entry.
From there I installed the xfce4 + slim (Simple Log In Manager) packages, which gave me a base xfce4 system.
This brings me to issue #2, wireless management. I needed a decent utility to manage my wireless connections, since I do jump between connections when I travel, etc. After some searching I found wicd in the Debian backports repository, since it is not part of the Lenny release. As a side note one of my goals was to keep from running a mixed system, which can be problematic when on the road. I chose wicd since I used it before in Ubuntu and it does not conflict with my already edited /etc/network/interfaces configuration. As a footnote for a user to run wicd they need to be a member of the netdev group.
At this point I realized that my laptop was running through the battery like gang busters. This was by far the most difficult issue to solve without installing Gnome power management utilities. Since I was trying to stick with either Xfce native or GTK applications I went on the hunt. Only to find out that Debian is distributing a fairly old version of Xfce by default (4.4.2). In order to use xfce4-power-manager (which is still in the beta stage), I needed at least 4.6.0 installed.
This is where the unofficial Debian Desktop project comes in. They distribute the latest desktops in repository form for the current releases of the Debian distro.
After adding the Xfce 4.6.0 repository to my sources.list I ran a apt-get dist-upgrade. First thing I noticed is that most of my panel icons are missing. My suggestion (and that of several other people) is to install a new theme (besides the default Rodent theme) and switch to it using the Xfce4 Settings Manager. I switched to Tango, which I think is snazzier. Apparently there is some issue with icon themes during upgrade and the fact that Rodent does not exist in the newer versions of Xfce. This has been fixed in development and will fixed upgrades in future releases.
After that was out of the way I downloaded xfce4-power-manager directly from the SVN (because I felt like being on the bleeding edge). Built and installed it, only to discover a bug dealing with the version of Gtk I had installed (2.12). I posted the issue to Bugzilla and it was fixed before I got out of bed this morning.
After fiddling around and adding myself to the powerdev group I am now a smooth operator hyper-miling my laptop with Xfce 4.6.
This experience has taught me a few things, one of those being how to configure a wireless network adapter; two that the Xfce project has some great developers; and three Xfce4 is fast, allowing more of my resources to be focused on applications and less on the window manager which adds pep to my laptop + experience.
