Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Enlightenment DR 0.20 has been released. The most significant change is full Wayland support where E20 can act as its own Wayland compositor and the whole shebang. Enlightenment 0.20 also has better FreeBSD support, introduces Geolocation support, new screen management, and other changes.

jones_supa writes: According to Enlightenment 0.19.12's release notes, it's an important release that fixes over 40 issues, which is quite something, considering that previous versions had only a few improvements, with most of them being minor. However, the big news is that 0.19.12 drops support for the Wayland display server. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment developers have omitted to mention why they decided to remove any form of support for Wayland from this release, and if it will return in upcoming releases of the software.

An anonymous reader writes "Full Wayland support has been added to Enlightenment 0.19. Building upon earlier Wayland support, Enlightenment can now act as its own Wayland compositor by communicating directly with the kernel's DRM drivers instead of having to rely upon Weston. The Wayland support is still considered experimental but it's now the first Linux desktop with full Wayland support." Quick README on building and using it.

An anonymous reader writes "While it took over a decade for E17 to come out, Enlightenment E19 is being readied for release just two months after E18's debut. The Enlightenment DR 0.19 update has a rewritten compositor that can fully act as its own Wayland compositor (not dependent upon Weston). The update integrates OpenGL canvas filters support, contains many bug-fixes, and has other improvements for both X11 and Wayland users. The 1.9.0 alpha1 pre-release was issued today as the initial testing version of the new window manager."

An anonymous reader writes "The Enlightenment DR 0.18 window manager has been released one year after E17. Enlightenment 0.18 provides many new features, with demanding compositing, Wayland client support, improved systemd integration, new Enlightenment modules, and stability fixes."

An anonymous reader writes "The E17 Enlightenment project has released a new version of its Terminology terminal emulator. With Terminology 0.3 comes several fancy features, including the ability to preview video files, images, and PDF files from within the terminal. There's new escape sequences, inline video playback, and other features to this terminal emulator that's only built on EFL and libc."

The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

The Enlightenment front page bears this small announcement: "E17 release HAS HAPPENED!" The release announcement is remarkably spartan — it's mostly a tribute to the dozens of contributors who have worked on the software itself and on translating it into many languages besides system-default English. On the other hand, if you've been waiting since December 2000 for E17 (also known as Enlightenment 0.17), you probably have some idea that Enlightenment is a window manager (or possibly a desktop environment: the developers try to defuse any dispute on that front, but suffice it to say that you can think of it either way), and that the coders are more interested in putting out the software that they consider sufficiently done than in incrementing release numbers. That means they've made some side trips along the way, Knuth-like, to do things like create an entire set of underlying portable libraries. The release candidate changelog of a few days ago gives an idea of the very latest changes, but this overview shows and tells what to expect in E17. If you're among those disappointed in the way some desktop environments have tended toward simplicity at the expense of flexibility, you can be sure that Enlightenment runs the other way: "We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties. Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17. It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for."

Since before all other interfaces, Enlightenment has been making computers look and feel like they're from the future. On December 21, the decade long effort to rewrite Enlightenment will see the first officially stable release. With e17 a few days away, project founder and master of X11 graphics hacking Carsten Haitzler (the Rasterman) has agreed to answer your questions. Ask as many questions as you like, but only one per post please.

In development for the better part of the last decade, the 0.17 release of the Enlightenment window manager is slated for November 5th. Leading up to this, the H has an enlightening interview with project lead Rasterman on what to expect. From the article: "Today Enlightenment offers most of what you get from GNOME and KDE, and probably the same if not a bit more than XFCE. It just doesn't try and ship a suite of apps with it. It is the desktop (Window manager, settings, file manager, application launching and management) minus the apps. ... The biggest thing E17 brings to the table is universal compositing. This means you can use a composited desktop without any GPU acceleration at all, and use it nicely. We don't rely on software fallback implementations of OpenGL. We literally have a specific software engine that is so fast that some developers spent weeks using it accidentally, not realizing they had software compositing on their setup."

An anonymous reader writes "Emacsy is 'a Guile library that provides Emacs-like facilities — keymaps, minibuffer, tab completion, recordable macros, and major/minor modes — for applications natively.' However, to my eyes, it looks more like an attempt to revive the development style done on Symbolics Lisp Machines that survives to some extent in Emacs. Might be a boon to Emacs users, but where's a comparable VIM alternative?" The skeptic in me asks what benefit this would have over just using libguile directly, and how it fits in with efforts to port Emacs itself to Guile and things like Englightenment's pluggable event loop. The example code seems to imply Emacs-like APIs will be used (despite not intending to replace parts of Emacs), even when better alternatives exist. Some of the proposed components seem orthogonal to existing interface toolkits; others seem to compete with components provided by various Free desktop environments.

Earlier today, Tizen, Intel's post-MeeGo mobile OS, announced the availability of their first stable release. The H has a summary of the new features: "The source code for Tizen's Larkspur release has seen a number of new features added. The Web capabilities have now got full W3C/HTML5 specification support with 'key' WebRTC features incorporated and APIs to access the local camera and vibration. ... Tizen's graphics are based on X11 with a compositing window manager based on Enlightenment Foundation Libraries ... The SDK's IDE includes a new browser based tool which offers support for the Tizen APIs within a browser; this should allow developers to run and debug Tizen 'web applications' and see how those applications run with various device profiles. The alpha release of the browser based simulator should reduce the need to work with the emulator for many applications." The SDK release notes and source release notes have the gritty details. A new community wiki has been created, and source is available via git. This release comes just before the first Tizen developer conference, May 7-9th in San Francisco.

Lisandro writes "The Enlightenment crew has finally released the first version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which the E17 desktop is built on." Adds reader mu22le: "Among the Enlightenment libraries hitting version 1.0 are Eina (core data structure), Eet (data encode/decode and storage), Evas (canvas and scenegraph rendering ), Ecore (core mainloop, display abstraction and utility), Embryo (small virtual machine and compiler), Edie (GUI layout and animation), E_Dbus, Efreet (handling of freedesktop.org standards), and Eeze (udev wrapping)." Getting it right can take a while -- a preview of the EFL libraries first appeared in 2004. Enlightenment has never stopped looking cool.

Lisandro writes "The Enlightenment crew has finally released the first version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which the E17 desktop is built on." Adds reader mu22le: "Among the Enlightenment libraries hitting version 1.0 are Eina (core data structure), Eet (data encode/decode and storage), Evas (canvas and scenegraph rendering ), Ecore (core mainloop, display abstraction and utility), Embryo (small virtual machine and compiler), Edie (GUI layout and animation), E_Dbus, Efreet (handling of freedesktop.org standards), and Eeze (udev wrapping)." Getting it right can take a while -- a preview of the EFL libraries first appeared in 2004. Enlightenment has never stopped looking cool.

k-s writes "Linux, the GNU userland and Enlightenment and its foundation libraries (EFL) are known for their resource efficiency and flexibility, key components for embedded products. Today it was announced that such features led them to be used in a fridge that runs Linux and X11 with EFL. The Freescale i.MX25 based fridge by Electrolux (Frigidaire) provides the expected bits such as temperature controls and pre-set modes (vacation, party) as well as a special purpose drawer that cools your drinks and food with a beautiful UI. It also ships with handful applications for contacts, calendar, reminder, digital picture frame and even an illustrated recipe book from a famous Brazilian magazine."

mu22le writes "Enlightenment, the daring window manager that disappeared from our collective radar years ago, is back to bring Ubuntu to ARM. The bet that E developers made years ago to neglect 3D, compositing, and make a fast and versatile 2.5d engine may have finally paid off. The current popularity of ARM-based devices could be a niche that the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries can fill comfortably."

An anonymous reader writes "The Enlightenment window manager project has shared on its website that it now has the backing of a major (top-five) electronics manufacturer that will be actively sponsoring the project and using Enlightenment on its devices. No manufacturer was named, but Phoronix has dug deeper and found out that Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment. Phoronix provides independent confirmation along with citing a new Enlightenment program that Samsung sponsored and then released under the LGPL-3. They also have videos of some of the new work to this window manager that Samsung funded."

StephenJoiner writes "There's a new review on Mad Penguin of the latest VectorLinux release, which includes the in-development Enlightenment DR17 desktop. As far as I know, this is the first time DR17 has appeared on a production desktop... even as a "technology preview". All I have to say is Enlightenment on VectorLinux is absolutely off the scale." Enlightenment was in Slashdot news earlier for both the involvement with Elive and their use of Epeg bits to deal with thumbnailing.

jjrff writes "The Enlightenment project has turned up some really cool bits lately. here is a nifty article about using their Epeg bits to easily deal with thumbnailing. Note that they also have a great deal of sample code for things like canvasing and even dealing with network delivery."

An anonymous reader writes "Elive, the ultra-slick Debian based Enlightenment (16.7 and 17) liveCD project has released version 0.1 for download. See the package and features list for more information. A screenshot tour is also available."

An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)

Lisandro writes "As stated by Rasterman on his site, Enlightenment 0.17's window manager is now available on CVS, which means you can build e17 completely from it, as it is, and give it a try. Of course, it's still work in progress, and lacking in several areas, but it is usable, and looks as gorgeous as ever. Also, in related news, the XFCE team, one of the best 'light' desktop environments for *NIX, has released the first release candidate for XFCE 4.2, with a lot of long due improvements." About e17, Rasterman's note says "It's limited in its support for ICCCM, no NETWM support and it has no iconification, virtual desktops, shading, keybindings or button bindings, but it does WORK (just). it's also fast and beautiful."

Anonymous Coward writes "The Enlightenment Project, far from dead, is pleased to announce the DR16.7.1 release of the Enlightenment Window Manager. With tons of fixes, a massive overhaul of the internals, and several new features this release is a must try for those who haven't run E in a long time. The window manager that redefined the way a desktop can look is still going strong."

Anonymous Coward writes "The Enlightenment Project, far from dead, is pleased to announce the DR16.7.1 release of the Enlightenment Window Manager. With tons of fixes, a massive overhaul of the internals, and several new features this release is a must try for those who haven't run E in a long time. The window manager that redefined the way a desktop can look is still going strong."

Anonymous Coward writes "The Enlightenment Project, far from dead, is pleased to announce the DR16.7.1 release of the Enlightenment Window Manager. With tons of fixes, a massive overhaul of the internals, and several new features this release is a must try for those who haven't run E in a long time. The window manager that redefined the way a desktop can look is still going strong."

HandyAndE writes "For everybody out there who has been waiting for Enlightenment 0.17 or been thinking what alternatives are there to Gnome/GTK and KDE/QT this is an important day for you. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) today have an (albeit pre) release named Asparagus. From the E site: 'We are pleased to announce the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries Preview Release, codenamed "Asparagus"! After years of work, we've come to a place where it is time to start opening these powerful tools to the wider world to use.' " Read more for more information.

Libraries included in todays release are:

• ecore-1.0.0_pre7 (loops, timers, X, evas and config abstraction)
• edb-1.0.5 (database library)
• edje-0.5.0 (powerful theming library)
• eet-0.9.9 (theme compression format)
• embryo-0.9.0 (embeded scriptiong for themes)
• emotion-0.0.1 (DVD / video wrapper for libxine)
• epeg-0.9.0 (super-fast JPEG thumbnailing etc)
• evas-1.0.0_pre13 (canvas library)
• imlib2-1.1.1 (image manipulation)
• imlib2_loaders-1.1.1 (image loaders)

Get your browsers pointed to sourceforge for a copy and see what EFL can do for you!

An anonymous reader writes " The first milestone of xouvert, the X-server replacement has been released. Xouvert includes MAS giving the X server its very own sound server. Nice. :) Also, just noticed that enlightenment quietly released an update to the 0.16 series. " (Here's a link to the Xouvert download page.)

Neon Spiral Injector writes "Rasterman of Enlightenment fame has finally updated the news page of his personal site. It seems that the behind the scenes work for E is coming along. He is investigating rendering backends for Evas. The default backend is a software renderer written by Raster. Trying to gain a little more speed he ported it to the XRender extension, only to find that it became 20-50 times slower on his NVidia card. He has placed some sample code on this same news page for people to try, and see if this is also experienced on other setups."

Neon Spiral Injector writes "Rasterman of Enlightenment fame has finally updated the news page of his personal site. It seems that the behind the scenes work for E is coming along. He is investigating rendering backends for Evas. The default backend is a software renderer written by Raster. Trying to gain a little more speed he ported it to the XRender extension, only to find that it became 20-50 times slower on his NVidia card. He has placed some sample code on this same news page for people to try, and see if this is also experienced on other setups."

ChrisJones writes "According to rasterman, Enlightenment has hit 1.0! Tarball is available here. Happy building!" And you guys all thought it would never happen! BGDM!

ChrisJones writes "According to rasterman, Enlightenment has hit 1.0! Tarball is available here. Happy building!" And you guys all thought it would never happen! BGDM!

ChrisJones writes "According to rasterman, Enlightenment has hit 1.0! Tarball is available here. Happy building!" And you guys all thought it would never happen! BGDM!

Once in awhile a story comes along that warrants mention just so that people know to be careful. Mosfet is a KDE coder (who has had tension with KDE in the past and left some ill will over there). He was hired by Future Technology to continue work on his Liquid KDE style and theme (my personal favorite). But they never paid him, so he removed their name and mentioned it in the Changelog. Now FT is threatening legal action to get the Changelog off the net. But it's more bizarre because MandrakeSoft is the host, and the site remains up. Keep reading if you're interested in a few more bits.

I've been a huge fan of Liquid for some time. I've been compiling releases and using on my laptop. The project isn't nearly as ambitious as Enlightenment, but it has some interesting UI ideas and it looks good. I was really pleased when I found out that Mosfet was going to have a shot at continuing the development of the program for FT under the KDE License. At this point, FT ("The Total Linux Company," according to their website) mentioned a few of the features in Liquid as being part of the benefits of FT's distribution. This was to set them apart from "Other" distributions, although even at the time I found it funny, as The final decision in selecting one RPM based distribution over another would rarely be tipped in favor of the one with translucent menus ;)

Anyway the Changelog contains the following line:

* Future Technologies' name has been removed. They hired me to do KDE development, but failed to pay me after promising to do so three times over the span of several months :( I still haven't seen any of the paychecks they said they would send me, and they even went as far as sending me a fake FedEx number. Now they are saying they can't afford to pay their employees.

And soon after Mosfet's website announced that he was leaving Linux and Liquid was dead. Unable to afford to develop Liquid for free, he was seeking work in the windows world.

According to the site, on 10/28, Dr. Giovanni asked Mandrakesoft, the host of Mosfet.org to take down the site, under threat of legal action. But since I see the site still there, it looks like they are standing their ground which is a good thing.

Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story is, beyond a warning to keep both eyes open. There is a lot of questionable stuff that goes on in this world. Be careful.

(I've emailed Giovanni from FT but have yet to hear back from him.)

JigSaw writes: "The team consisting of TheRasterman and Mandrake (among others) are hard at work to bring Enlightenment 0.17 to the Linux desktop. E17 will be a lot more than a window manager, something closer to a complete GUI solution for X. OSNews hosts an interesting interview with Rasterman and also features some (unseen-before) screenshots of E17. Some say that E17 will be the next big thing in the GUI design (even if Rasterman states in the interview that Linux won't probably take over the Desktop), with plans to incorporate libraries like eVas, which look very modern in concept, design and implementation."

David Findlay writes "Found this cool website that has heaps of RealAudio and MPEG clips of the Apollo missions. You can listen to Apollo 12 being hit by lightning and having to restart the computer, or Apollo 13's O2 tank blowing up. Some good pictures that would make great wallpapers for Enlightenment as well. Just follow the links to "Multimedia" and "Image Gallery"."

SirFlakey writes: "Just browsing the Patents database at delphion I came across this patent from a couple of weeks back. Apparently Apple Computer has patented a method of theming the OS. I wonder how this affects theming on Linux ?" Perhaps unsurprizing, considering Apple's general unhappiness with Apple-like themes, and that they convinced themes.org to remove Aqua, AquaX and others. Apple obviously has a lot tied up in their look-and-feel, but the patent's actual claims strike me as pretty thin. Sounds like Apple wants to be the sole owner of complex desktop customization, which I think some people might object to.

physicman writes: "This weekend (3 & 4 Feb.) the first edition of the Open Source and Free Software Developers' European Meeting will be held in Brussels, Belgium. I think it is the first time that such a meeting occurs in Europe and it is very exciting to see what will come out of gathering at the same place people working on very different projects like Fyodor of nmap fame, Jeremy Allison from Samba, Rasterman (Enlightenment) and many others (full list here). Richard Stallman will also give a keynote about the danger of software patents. So, if you're in the neighborhood (for instance at the LinuxExpo in Paris) don't miss the opportunity to talk and hack (yes, there will be a hacking room too) with some of the top developers of the Open Source and Free Software movement!"

renai42 writes: "Rasterman gave a very interesting speech about his new EVAS canvas software at Linux.conf.au this week. This LinuxToday.com.au article gives a fair idea of the gist of the speech. EVAS is interesting stuff for the Linux community - a hardware accelerated X desktop with anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending." They've been claiming that the next Enlightenment will be the fastest WM around thanks mostly to EVAS.

Totally Offtopic Side Note 1: I find it amusing that LinuxToday.com.au snatched my X icon: I always thought it was probably the crappiest Slashdot icon, and I never dreamed anyone would want to take it. My policy on Slashdot Icons has always been steal whatever ones you like, but credit us when you use 'em, and its not a big deal, but its just funny to see who takes what.)

Totally offtopic sidenote 2: while we're talking about toys, check out Jubei, my MAME front end I've been poking on in my enormous amounts of free time.

So I'm at Linux Expo Australia, enjoying the conference. You can hit the link below to read assorted random relevant (and irrelevant) notes from the show floor. No, I haven't seen a kangaroo.

After more than 24 hours of airport/airplane limbo and uncountable time-zone changes, we arrived in Sydney. After 20 hours of sleep, I was almost ready to face the world outside of my hotel room.

The Australian LinuxExpo is held in Darling Harbor in Sydney, which is apparently the epicenter of all Australian tourist activity. The exchange rate is nice tho, so if I wanted to to buy boomerangs or didgeridoos or something, it'd be easy. You can't walk 20 feet without stumbling into a tourist-trap store.

The show itself is fairly typical for a Linux conference. Of course, without a Slashdot booth to hide out in, I'm spending time at either the Debian Booth (hooray! Debian is international!) or at the LinuxCare booth: this sucker is two stories. The ground floor is a little stage where Tridge and others preach their word, and upstairs is a PC graveyard with boxes ranging from iBooks, G4s and Ultra 5s to various laptops, all plugged in to the Net. This is of course where I write this.

Many of the usual suspects are here: SGI, Red Hat, Corel, LinuxCare, Pick, Debian. Absent are VA and Andover (both are represented, although in much smaller numbers than other shows and without the overhead of a booth).

The advantage of not having a booth is that I'm not obligated to spend the whole show trapped in a 20x20 square answering FAQs all day ... instead I get to see talks. Raster did his usual show on Enlightenment, and Rusty did a great job on Netfilter (including revealing that I could use perl to write my own packet filters if I was either clinically insane, or just bored).

I also sat on a panel along with several other much more interesting folks (Tridge, Raster, Terpestra, and hosted by Chris DiBona) on 'Preserving the Linux Community.' Spent a lot of time discussing who is the Linux community (answers ranging from "Anyone who boots Linux" to "Anyone who cares about their operating system and runs Linux.") Eventually the discussion turned to the future of Linux, DeCSS, the MPAA, and what the new corporate influences can do to help. Not a bad panel, although not exactly the busiest of auditoriums.

Maddog gave a good speech last night on his predictions for Linux. Lots of good stuff there, too ... he had some interesting comments about Linux's growth and third world countries. People who are waiting for "Permission" that obviously will never arrive to extend Linux to do what they want it and need it to do. Not so sure about all his talk of "Linux Camps." The average hacker don't look so hot in Swim Trunks ;)

So with the conference portion of the show wrapping up, Raster, Hormes, Rusty and other Aussies are gonna take us to an "Authentic Australian Pub" this evening. I suspect that I won't have a solid memory of the evening: if there is one thing I know for sure it's that these Australians like their lager in great quantities ... I'm not sure if my liver can keep up.

I'll be back in the States next week, after what amounts to my first real vacation since starting Slashdot 2.5 years ago. See ya then.

Khelder sent us a nifty little bit about the MacOS X Desktop. It talks quite a bit about UI Design (mirror) from a Mac-Centric but also a general perspective. It's quite interesting stuff for anyone into MacOS-X, but also it has lots of practical stuff for anyone who's ever tried to create a usable theme for one of today's modern window managers.

Mandrake writes "Enlightenment 0.16.0 came out this afternoon. Come play with what we've been toiling over for the past few months. Lots of new features from 0.15 - come check it out. Maybe now we can go and get some sleep. If you are at Atlanta Linux Showcase this week, we've even got shirts to hand out."

mikeraz told us about Microsoft's new page on Linux Myths. Designed to convince the seasoned business professional that Linux doesn't measure up to the hype. Some good points. Some not-so-good points. Care to comment? Update: 10/05 06:43 by CT : Mandrake has comments on his page.

teraflop user writes "The Enlightenment window manager now works with KDE, along with a load of other window managers. If you want to run the same window manager under Gnome and KDE, you now have several choices, including E, Blackbox and WindowMaker. "

Monday a whole bunch of people had questions for Mandrake, one of the heavies behind Enlightenment. Slashdot Moderators picked the best ones. We forwarded them, unedited, to Mandrake on Tuesday. His (excellent) answers appear below.

Peeler asks:
I run both KDE and Gnome, It would be great if the two would play nice with each other. My question is: Are there currently any plans for getting kde and gnome to work together, and if so how far along is the gnome team? Is the gnome team even talking to the kde team?

Mandrake answers:
Well, I can't say I know all the progress of all of this, but I know at least there are some plans under way to make a more universal set of window manager hints that both KDE and GNOME share. I got to meet Matthias Ettrich from the KDE project last week during Linux World and that was one of the things that we were talking about. I honestly can't say what the better solution is these days, KDE or GNOME - but I know that enlightenment will be able to support applications from both by the next release (I just got done working on implementing KDE hints for 0.16) - and my advice to the average user is use either or both or none, or whatever suits you best.

But the one GOOD thing about both is they're working on bringing more applications to the linux desktop, which is something that we need pretty sorely right now.

Trashman asks:
How soon do you expect a 1.0 release of E?

What features, arenn't in E .15 yet that you would like to see?

Mandrake answers:
1.0? Eek. I have no idea. There's a little bit of a roadmap sometimes, and there's kind of a plan right now as to what all we want in there EVENTUALLY and I suppose that some day there will be a 1.0 release, but not today. Enlightenment is still under pretty heavy development, and I tend to get the 1.0 feeling when you've got most of what you want done in there, at least to a basic extent.

Some people call something 1.0 the first time you ship something, but I know at least that raster doesn't care what people think of the version number (and I suppose that has rubbed off on me, too). So I have to go with the "when it gets done" answer, as usual. There's a lot of stuff left to go into E before a 1.0 even that is planned now (including a lightweight file manager, some more network integration, etc) - and then there's a lot of stuff I'm sure that hasn't even been thought of. And with the addition of some other folks like Christian Kreibich who is working off the codebase now, I'm sure there will be even more stuff added in before release too.

Ale asks:
Whenever I try to compile Enlightenment, I get an error saying my fridge is out of ale, even though it isn't. I tried stocking my fridge with different kinds of ales, to no avail. I even tried removing everything not beer from my fridge, and that didn't work either. Can you help me figure out what's wrong?

Mandrake answers:
Well, I'd have to say that it's likely that you forgot to connect up your refridgerator to the PC again. Quite often, I find that as I walk out of the kitchen towards the living room, the serial cable I have running into the office from the fridge comes unplugged. You might want to check to make sure it's still plugged in. If it is plugged in, I know that those cables are long and prone to fraying, so make sure your cat hasn't chewed through it. If all else fails, make sure your libFridge is up to date.

Syd asks:
You've been involved with some of the later XF86 development, and you run xinerama on your machine, (as evidenced by your screenshots) so my question is this: Can Xinerama run on two monitors at different resolutions? I know they have to be the same bit-depth, but it would be nice to be able to buy a 19" monitor and use it alongside my existing 17".

Mandrake answers:
Xinerama is still pretty new - you can run at different resolutions on different monitors (not bitdepths, however) but due to backwards compatibility reasons you'll have an unmapped area - you have to have a rectangular desktop.

Anonymous Coward asks:
Hey Mandrake! How is the perl/gtk book coming along? I'm already drooling in anticipation! Can you give us a ballpark figure on when it will be published? Or how about a topics list? Any info would be greatly appreciated!!! Keep in mind you have at least one guaranteed sale!!!

Mandrake answers:
It's kinda on hold right now. Mark Stone from O'Reilly (my main contact there) will prolly give me a call as soon as he sees this (I was supposed to talk to him during Linux World last week but was too busy to get around to it).

Anonymous Coward asks:
On my P1-233MMX-Matrox Mill II system, GTK applications like E, the Gnome suite, and stand-alone applications like FreeCiv display (at times) sluggish interface response and slow screen draw times. Complex interfaces can often be seen drawing in or updating widget contents in sequence.

It can be oddly reminiscient of my old 25Mhz Amiga running a 3rd party widget toolkit like MUI.

My questions for Mandrake are:

1) Where does the fault lie - X, GTK, E, the application, or "all of the above"

2) What efforts are being made to increase performance?

3) Do you think we'll ever see optimisations like hand-tweaked assembly in the GTK event loop, or in the widget redraw code?

Mandrake answers:
Well - to be honest with you I'll point out that in many cases you eat a lot of overhead by communicating over the X protocol. Context switches, IPC, etc, it all eventually eats into your performance bit by bit. Of course, the more graphics you throw at it the more overhead you're going to add into that. It's everyone's fault, and it's no ones fault. Fun answer, isn't it? You probably won't see hand-tweaked assembly in the GTK event loop, because most of where you're losing time won't necessarily be helped by it.

I wish there was a happy answer for that question. It's usually an applications fault if refreshes seem lagged though - there are a lot of things you can do to optimize out a lot of the "slow spots" that are visibly slow to the user... enlightenment does a lot of this - peaking through and optimizing out as many refreshes/moves/etc as possible. In a lot of areas there's some more serious work being done to increase performance - at least in the image rendering area, raster has been doing some work on imlib2 with some MMX assembly code in various places (for x86 only - there's C code for other platforms) to help speed up some processing. There's hope yet.

Anonymous Coward asks:
May I have your children?

Mandrake answers:
My girlfriend might have some beef with that. I suggest you ask her.

mindslip asks:
Microsoft, as much as we love to hate them, spends tons of money (which I'm sure Enlightenment doesn't have by comparison) on useability and the human interface.

I can rely on the same keystrokes, the same mouse clicks, a consistant Clipboard, the same file dialogs, etc. etc., no matter what Windows app I run.

Linux apps, be they for KDE or Enlightement, or any WM, seem to be as different from one another as possible. This is all in the name of "We're Unique!", which seems to translate to "We're Unusable and have a HUGE learning curve!"

What, if anything, is going to make Enlightenment/ Gnome/ KDE/ Anything else, more usable than one another? Themes are lovely, but a pretty face is only skin deep.

Can we at *least* "steal" some of MS's better ideas for use in "our" environment?

Mandrake answers:
Pretty much one of the tenets of enlightenment has always been to let the user decide all this stuff. on an application by application level there's not really a whole lot that you can do to add consistancy, that's really up to the app and/or the underlying toolkit that it uses. I know that GTK+ and QT both provide stuff for a lot of this... you'll notice that most GTK+ apps look the same, etc. But as far as stuff like enlightenment goes, we let the user define as much stuff as he wants to, right up until he gets into application land. which is a place where the window manager pretty much has no right to tromp over. (kinda like my opinion about letting applications have control over root window clicks. gmc, IMNSHO, shouldn't take mouseclicks on the root window)

As far as how you want your overall desktop (outside of applications) to behave - you can emulate it as closely as you want to (within current limitations of enlightenment) - set up all the keybindings you can to behave and respond the same, etc. But I will tell you one thing - they spend a lot of money on UI research that doesn't do me a lot of good - I have a hard time sitting down in front of a windows box and getting any work done because I CAN'T change enough of my settings to make it how I like to use my desktop. To me, that's what it's all about - giving the user choice. Even if enlightenment isn't the end-all-be-all system for everyone, I hope we at least up the bar a little bit on making people offer you more choices.

Zurk asks:
Is enlightenment going to go the 3D way of desktops ? Some companys were promoting kewl 3D accelerated desktops and with the Xfree 4 accelerator support can we expect 3D accelerated desktop support in E?

Mandrake answers:
I am of the opinion that to do a 3D desktop we'll have to throw away a lot of the current notions of computing. I've got some cool ideas about a lot of that stuff, but I'd rather implement it a much different way later (hopefully I'll get a chance to write a paper on my ideas on wearable computers) than put together something hackish today.

pos asks:
Do you think that a newer release of X will be sufficient to carry linux for a few more years or do you think a project like berlin (or some other windowing system) deserves more programming weight put behind it? Is X11 fit to carry all of the linux graphical weight or is it becoming a dinosaur?

Mandrake answers:
Well, there's a lot you can do with X the way it's set up now (there are lots of ways to invent shortcuts through the system). Unfortunately there is a bit of dead weight behind it, though. However, I have said for a while that people are cranky enough giving up windows apps (for the most part), a lot of people are going to be even crankier giving up all their X applications. Backwards compatibility would be key for a new system - even though that tends to be a lot of the weight dragging most systems down. It's a vicious cycle. I met the berlin folks a year or more ago at Linux Expo in Raliegh - and I was thinking at the time that they would have more to show sooner (but then again the enlightenment ACTUAL release cycle is slow as xmas, so who am I to talk?)... I'm hopeful of new solutions but I don't necessarily see anything in the immediate future, but I have to say for now that xfree86 3.9 is pretty cool (4.0 will be a good release, by my gut feeling).

Note: if you have anyone in particular you'd like Slashdot to interview, please send your suggestions to roblimo@slashdot.org. I read 'em all.

Mandrake, AKA Geoff Harrison, is a heavy contributor to the enlightenment project and has also left his mark on Gnome, XFree86, and a bunch of other excellent free software projects. In real life, he works for VA Research as (surprise!) a software developer. Mandrake is, without question, one of the leading lights of the Linux and free software development communities. Check his Web site, and post any question(s) you have for him below. Answers to most or all of the highest-moderated ones will be posted Friday.

hasse wrote in to tell us that Mandrake, co-developer of Enlightenment is meeting with Amiga. Amiga Central quotes him saying "So sometime next week I'm going to meet with the VP of Engineering at Amiga. That should be interesting. I wonder if I can get them interested enough in enlightenment that they would be willing to donate programmers to the project. "

drdink wrote to let us know about a SlashNET forum with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. It will be at 01:30 UTC (9:30pm EDT) today in #forum. Open discussion about the forum will be held in #forum.d. If you're new to SlashNET, irc.slashnet.org will point you at a random server, and us.slashnet.org will point you at a random US server. Hope to see people there!Update: 06/14 12:50 by H :Get the log here.