EFL Preview Release: Asparagus

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!

Comments

Enlightenment has really dated itself

[Tim_F]

Is it even relevant today?

Hold off with those mod points for a second there bucko. Hear me out.

It's been how long since E.16 was released? Over 5 years. Sure it was impressive when I was running Mandrake 6 on my parent's P75 with 40MB of Ram and a 4 GB hard drives in the basement, but today it just looks andient. The brushed metal look that it originated has not aged well at all. The cleaner (and sexier) curves of KDE are what get me off these days. Let me know once E.17 is released (and looks a little like OSX) and maybe I'll care. But right now this is way too little way too late.

E has become about as irrelevant as Gnome and XFCE in the Unix DE wars.

Re:Enlightenment has really dated itself

[tolan-b]

Let me get this straight, the default theme of a five year old project doesn't look nice to you any more so the completely re-written codebase which is now a very strong set of X libraries and will be a complete desktop environment, is irrelevant?

Idiot..

Re:Enlightenment has really dated itself

[kalidasa]

The folks at Apple still seem to like the brushed metal theme. Meanwhile, the 5 year old E 0.16 has moved on, too, to the Winter theme.

Re:Enlightenment has really dated itself

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I running KDE at the moment. Brushed metal looks good here. WTF?

screenshots

[AMystery]

I looked but could not find any screenshots of the preview release. The old versions are nice for their age, but I would like to see what has changed in 5 years. If any of you have screenshots, please post them, or if I just missed a link, post that too. Help the graphically challenged!

That said, what WMs do the rest of you use? I personally try to avoid Gnome or KDE because they are copies of windows, and I find that interface clunky. I like windowmaker, but I have strange taste in OSs, I also like gentoo:)

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

I could only find this one. hth!

Re:screenshots

[tolan-b]

This is about a preview release of the core libraries going into e17, not the e17 desktop environment (it's moving up from just being a window manager).

Re:screenshots

[Bastian]

Agreed on GNOME and KDE. I find it rather annoying that so many Linux, *BSD, etc. users will whine up and down about how much Windows sucks, but are also hopping on the bandwagon of trying to make the unix as much like Windows as possible.

I long to see a group of thoughtful geeks with some good knowledge of human-computer interaction sit down and say, "How do we want our OS to behave, really?" because right now with Gnome and KDE the plan seems to be to just get as many features out the door as quickly as possible without any realy overall planning and to heck with anyone who is noticing that they are both becoming serious contenders for the throne of "crappiest UI, ever."

And the geeks who are fed up with this go in completely the other direction and work hard at turning X into a text terminal that can also display graphics.

Meanwhile, I also sit around living with WindowMaker because it's the cleanest GUI I can find (with it's own set of problems, of course.)

Re:screenshots

[kalidasa]

The release is not of Enlightenment the Window Manager. It is a release of EFL, the libraries that they wrote to underpin Enlightenment. Here are some screenshots of E components that will depend upon the EFL: Evidence, Entrance. and Emotion.

Some other details:

Edje provides a revolutionary method of absstacting every aspect of your interface from the application itself. By passing signals between the interface and the application all communication is done in an interface neutral way. No longer are "themes" simple changes of pixmaps over a fixed area. Using Embryo we can provide scripting ability to the interface componant itself to harness even more power and flexability. [sic]

So, no, this is not just a brushed metal window manager theme (of course, E 0.16 was always more than that, too). I've been watching E, and making the same jokes on April 1st, but I must say that I'm looking forward to trying what they're coming up with once they've got a semi-stable release; and since the EFL seems to be close to a freeze, I think we can hope to see E 0.17 soon.

This harms Linux more than SCO, MS do

[hopethishelps]

Well, choice is great ... or is it?

What about the apps than finally figured out how to use fonts that don't suck under Gnome? What about the apps that finally figured out how to use fonts that don't suck under KDE? (that's two, largely non-overlapping, sets of apps BTW.) What will their text look like under Enlightenment?

Will it look as good as all text looks under Windows?

Today, AFAIK, there is no Linux environment under which all apps generate text which looks as good as Windows text, all the time. I know it's a lot more fun to play about with "new ideas" in environments, than to fix environments or apps that somebody else has developed. But until Linux gets rid of the complete garbage that often masquerades as text output (and anything short of Windows quality should be regarded as garbage), promoting alternative environments is just a distraction and a nuisance that makes it harder to get the real problems solved.

Re:This harms Linux more than SCO, MS do

[Cokelee]

The font smoothing in Linux with certain options (same options that the firefox binarie come with ... . can't think of it) and nice fonts installed surpasses this Windows that you speak of. Put a font at size 34 in Windows and it simply will not be attractive. Put it on a gray background and the rough edges look worse. In a tweaked system this is a non-issue.

Perhaps because I use GTK2 apps with gnome's font smoothing and I select all the fonts in portage I'm missing out on these horrid experiences. If that's the case the problem lies with those who package Linux for average users; not in projects themselves. Either way, your point is mostly moot.

Re:This harms Linux more than SCO, MS do

[tolan-b]

I'm sorry but you're at least a year out of date.

I'm using Fedora Core 2 for my desktop, with Gnome as my desktop environment, and *everything* is atni-aliased properly by default except for one app, xmms, which just looks like a Windows app. Only XP supports anti-aliasing of text, and it's off by default. Some OEMs turn it on before shipping, but most don't.

http://slight.overtops.org/tmp/Screenshot.png

Re:This harms Linux more than SCO, MS do

[teebo]

A wonderful UI resource that caters to a select group of pioneers, currently under active development by friendly helpful professionals, is said to harm Linux.

No.

My thanks to the E team. You've come a long way and I'm ecstatic.

Re:This harms Linux more than SCO, MS do

[urmensch]

Will it look as good as all text looks under Windows?

I hope it continues to look better. The default text on my XP system looks horrible, especially when compared to my GTK/Freetype desktop.

wow

[toolio]

Enlightenment 0.17 ?!?

What's next, Duke Nukem Forever?

e17 apps...

[jacksonscottsly]

once you've had your way with the libraries, check out the enlightenment apps that use, them. all absolutely beautiful: - evidence -- file browser - entice -- image viewer - iconbar -- a button-toolbar - engage -- osx-like (in the default theme) toolbar - equate -- calculator app - erss -- a desktop rss viewer (gentoo users, most of these apps are ~x86 ebuilds) there are a lot of others, too. All with a remarkably logical and beautiful interface. Evidence has fully replaced all other file browsers on my computer, and is damn close to everything i want (although rendering directories with large numbers of files seems to take a while). Also, i noticed that the new real helix player seems utilize some parts of the EFL -- probably the best move real programmers have ever made, in my opinion. Anywho, enlightenment really makes everyday computing a joyful experience; thanks e team!!!

What can it do...

[NoMercy]

http://enlightenment.org/pages/systems.html

Just take a look at some of those thumbnails and remember to pick your jaw up off the table once your done, my favorite has to be the embeded xine's alpha-transparancied ontop of other xine's :)

Huh?

[spitzak]

Text output does not vary depending on the window manager.

Re:Huh?

[IamTheRealMike]

The main issue is that Qt apps sometimes select fonts, uh, inappropriately. It appears to vary depending on .... well, I'm not sure what, I don't use many Qt apps. But one thing I rememeber from trying KDE 3.2 lately was that not everything used AA fonts: in particular I could not make Konqueror use them for the life of me.

Flip side is I never had any problems with this in Gnome ... or FluxBox, or anything else really. It seems to be a KDE problem. In everything else the fonts were fine for me.

Re:Huh?

[spitzak]

What I meant was that if you ran those Qt apps under Gnome, you would see exactly the same thing. They would look no worse and no better, they would choose the exact same fonts.

Fixing ugly fonts

[0x0d0a]

My guess is that your DPI is wrong. It took me a while to figure out what was going on on my own system.

Check the output of xdpyinfo|grep inch, and see if you have anything other than 75x75 dots per inch (or 100x100). In at least FC2 with fontconfig, the system determines font sizes based on resolution (this is new), and X occasionally decides on some weird resolutions for your monitor, which makes everything quite unappealing.

If it's some oddball size, like 85 dpi, add the line "Xft.dpi: 100" or "Xft.dpi: 75" to your ~/.Xresources file, and xrdb ~/.Xresources, and reopen the application in question. If this fixes your problem, have your system run xrdb ~/.Xresources each time you log into X, before anything else runs (I use .xsession to run it, but my understanding is that in this era of GNOME and KDE, distros don't seem to use .xsession any more).

Re:Fixing ugly fonts

[0x0d0a]

Note: this is only worth doing if you're having trouble with Xft-using apps, and not otherwise. This means, say, the GNOME v2.x gaim (and pretty much any app with antialiased text). It doesn't affect, anything in, say, xemacs or xterm.

My personal favorite.

[phoenix.bam!]

www.xfce.org Xfce4 is light, fast and easy to personalize.

Re:My personal favorite.

[Lisandro]

Second that. XFCE4 is amazing. I'm looking forward to e17, but XFCE is the first time i've ever felt really comfortable with a linux DE.

(Slightly OT) A WM Change of Pace

[ttuegel]

Well, I'm one of those people who likes to change things up often (new themes every other week, new window manager for X every month, etc.), and this article made me want to try Enlightenment out. So I did. A warning message caught my eye when I ran the configure script. I found it, and it turned out to be of little consequence, but I also found something else in the output:

checking for mass_quantities_of_bass_ale in -lFridge... no
checking for mass_quantities_of_any_ale in -lFridge... no
Warning: No ales were found in your refrigerator.
We highly suggest that you rectify this situation immediately.

I have a premade slogan for them

[nelsonal]

I cuss, you cuss, we all cuss for asparagus!

The EFL is like Longhorn's Avalon....

[Anonymous Coward]

Years before Avalon will ever reach consumers.

I don't see as much of a 3d focus in the EFL, but the screenshots are highly impressive regardless. The Enlightenment project does once again appear to be ahead of its time... ...and it avoids that Gnome/KDE "desktop environment" crap.

All apps starting with an E

[Lispy]

Elicit
Entice
Evidence
Entrance
eRSS

Great. Not that it would have been enough to have KDE with this annoying capital K on every program.

The rest looks promising and refreshingly different, though.

Wow

[chizu]

Amazing, I wonder how long until we see a stable release?

Enlightenment is my second favorite WM/DE, fluxbox being first. I may be going back to Enlightenment if more stuff starts using these awesome libraries.