Enlightenment Lives

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."

Comments

cool to see it get fixes

[quelrods]

It's cool to see E is still alive. I've been using it as my wm for many years and haven't found anything else that does virtual desktops just the way I enjoy them. Does anyone know if they fixed the mozilla related focus bugs?

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure E is great but do you not feel very tired and thirsty after using it?.
Some times when using E I think my desktop is out to get me.
Don't get me wrong, I really love E!

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[daviddennis]

I tried it years ago, when it was the new great thing, and was discouraged by the hideously difficult installation.

I've pretty much replaced Linux with MacOS X (and I'm not the only one - I notice another similar reply already), but I would be curious to know if it's any easier to install than the old whole day or more nightmare where it seemed like you needed every library on the planet to get the thing working.

D

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, back in the day there were like 20 packages to compile. It did suck to install.

But, it's modern day. This is what apt, emerge and the like are for. When it hits debian testing, I'm sure as hell going to give it a try. I don't use E as much as I did previously, because my machine is pretty lightweight, and I need the RAM. When I upgrade, I will no doubt use E again full time, so it's great news.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Uber Banker]

It's cool to see E is still alive.

But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

To be fair, I thing E does better than most... more attuned to my taste than KDE or GNOME. But why must we have hundreds of hours of development hours go into something which is inferior to the two market leaders? Sure there are Lunix/BSD vs Windows/Mac arguments/fests all time time, but no Linux/BSD WM looks or functions as polished as WinXP/MacOSX (note I am walking WM/GUI here, not OS in general).

Divide and conquer...

As long as the X-Windows system is divided with no clear objective (WTF are GNOME up to with those massive icons and lack of flexibility everyone hates, why do KDE have to make it so difficult to make something doable, etc) and no clear purpose it seems inable to get the critical mass behind it to make a decent desktop. Perhaps we need some skill regarding graphical design to be recognized and give this tired uber |337n355 superiority regarding the(se) technical, and none too important to the finished project (what does the user care if it was created in C, C++, Assembly), difference(s) a rest.

I want a straightforward window system which is flexible and adaptable with graphics what don't look slapdash. All Linux/BSD WMs are good for is keeping several CLIs in the same 'desktop'... and for this E is best.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Mold]

Well, I use E daily (haven't upgraded to this version though) and installing it on my FC2 box, all I had to do was install one RPM.

Installing the new CVS stuff is a pain in the ass though. But then, it's CVS. Very nice stuff though.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, troll or no, I have to agree with you. I run KDE atm, because I do like all the integrated apps and services, and the last build of E that I tried didn't handle the KDE task bar, so now I feel at odds with everything. I just looked at gnome again breifly, I think it's gotten better, but I'd still say no thank you. I think E is still the best WM, and I hope this release fixes the KDE interoperability issues.

As a user I really hate the fragmented frameworks for all the different apps. I which the widgets etc could be seperated from the app and handled by the X server or WM. So you could decide you want to use gtk and everything would draw gtk, or qt, etc etc. Of course with the level of individuality out there, I doubt we'll ever see a standard emerge. Too many people think they know how it should be done, and go off and try to impliment it the "right way".

I don't think there's anything necessarily bad about people scratching their itch, but it sure would be nice to have a unified interface to little things like copy/paste/clipboard, etc. The way things are now does suck, but it's good enough I can deal with it. But when you compare it against the Win32 and Mac worlds, the lack of through and through consistency on linux sucks. I really hope whenever E17 sees the light of day that it somehow can resolve some of these problems. That may be way to much to hope for, but anything coming out of the Enlightenment camp deserves a long hard look.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[SendBot]

I would be curious to know if it's any easier to install than the old whole day or more nightmare where it seemed like you needed every library on the planet to get the thing working.

You could always let your package manager handle the dependencies. Let's see:

emerge -p /usr/portage/x11-wm/enlightenment/enlightenment-0. 16.7.ebuild

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies \
!!! all ebuilds that could satisfy "x11-themes/ethemes" have been masked.
!!! possible candidates are:
- x11-themes/ethemes-0.16.7 (masked by: ~keyword)

!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.

So yeah, pain in the ass. I tried 0.16.6, and that worked okay. Anyone know how to tell emerge to ignore masking crapola?

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[1lus10n]

Check your make.conf file and check your keywords variable, should be set to x86. If the ethemes ebuild is set to something else (ie ~x86) then it wont build, beyond that .... Depends on why its being masked, could be blocked by a broken (or unresolvable) dependancy conflict or it might be blocked in the /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask file.

I have run enlightenment on gentoo since gentoo was pre 1.0, never had any problems. Matter of fact I just had to re-install over the weekend do to hardware failure (drive) and had no issue's getting it to install. Though I havent updated to the latest/greatest version of enlightenment yet.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[mnemonic_]

What the fuck?

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[AstroDrabb]

But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

To be fair, I thing E does better than most... more attuned to my taste than KDE or GNOME. But why must we have hundreds of hours of development hours go into something which is inferior to the two market leaders? Sure there are Lunix/BSD vs Windows/Mac arguments/fests all time time, but no Linux/BSD WM looks or functions as polished as WinXP/MacOSX (note I am walking WM/GUI here, not OS in general).

You are obviously stating your opinion, so why not make it sound that way? I think the default WinXP desktop is childish, though the Classic desktop on WinXP is nice and usable. As for Mac OS X, I have used it far too much, and don't like the GUI at all. I am dead tired of the over done theme, and can't stand every menu bar being at the top. I will take Gnome over Mac OS X any day, though that is _my opinion_.

which is inferior to the two market leaders?

Huh? What crack are you smoking? Max OS X is _not_ a market leader. There are some sources showing Linux desktop having a higher percentage then Max OS X as of December 2003. While others show Linux at around 1% or so and Mac OS X around 3%. No matter what source you take as gospel, Neither Linux nor Mac OS X are a _leader_ when it comes to the desktop. MS has that sealed. Now if you want to talk server. Well, Mac OS X is no where on the radar, while Linux is a _very_ strong second with MS in first, percentage-wise. Linux in fact has been the fastest growning server OS for the past 4 years or so, growing faster then any other OS, including MS Windows. So please don't call Mac OS X a "market leader" in any field, since Mac OS/X has always been and always will be a niche market.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[infiniti99]

As long as the X-Windows system is divided with no clear objective

The X-Window system has no objective whatsoever regarding desktop environments, let alone a clear one. It is only a display surface.

As far as desktop environments go, of course we're divided. There's Windows, Mac, KDE, GNOME, etc. Why aren't we up in arms that Apple created their own desktop instead of working with what existed? Each of these projects has a reason for being. And sure, their existence takes away from the others. For example, lots of software is Mac only, and so the rest of us miss out. This is inherent to having many desktop environments.

But hey, at least on a usual X11-based OS, you can run KDE and GNOME apps at the same time. Running a Windows app on a Mac is considered a feat and a feature, but for some reason having the GIMP under KDE means that Linux sucks. I'll just end this by saying that Linux isn't even a desktop.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[yerfatma]

e as in "Xstacy", or e as in "MDMA". Something like that.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[nofx_3]

You may want to check out this: http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/gtk-qt I've been using a cvs version from last week and it works quite well. I have all aps using my plastik theme which is quite good even if its a bit plain. I would say a huge majority of apps use either gtk or qt so most of the apps I am using have the same look altough not the same feel (gnome apps and kde apps have diff menu setups and such, and some apps belong to neither desktop) but between theme engines like gtk-qt and freedesktop.orgs other efforts like a universal icon tray standard for both DE's, the linux desktop situation is improving quite a bit. The main problem I am having is sound, but even that, with alsa and dmix is improving. I was able to get arts and sdl audio to play through dmix, so basically 90% of my apps have sound that works well and will play with other apps, mostly openal or new standards like jack are the only problem I have. Personally I'd rather have a linux box even if the DE's aren't perfect, becuase its just more fun, more customizeable, and you learn a hell of a lot more about your hardware and software, which should bring a smile to the face of any geek.

-kaplanfx

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[nofx_3]

sorry about that, here the hyperlink to that site: qtk-qt

-kaplanfx

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[rizzo5]

All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

i think windowmaker looks pretty slick. i also like gnome, but i'll agree that that has a number of rough edges. but windowmaker is pretty tight in my opinion. kde and gnome are far from being "all" of the X-WMs available.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[BrokenHalo]

Installing the new CVS stuff is a pain in the ass though.

I can't say I'm a big fan of CVs, but I just downloaded and extracted all the source packages from Sourceforge, and a simple

./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install

was all I needed to do on my Slackware box. No problem.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[St. Arbirix]

But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

What really ticks me off is that Litestep looks nicer than anything I've run in Linux and Litestep is based on an X-WM! I'm pissed off to no end that it only works in Windows. I'd give my left foot for a Linux version that installs so easily and has support for all of Litestep's modules and themes.

Note: If I get slammed for this because there really is a Linux WM that works so well then I'll likely weep with joy, karma be damned.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Big icons are like big breasts the bigger they are the more enjoyment i get.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[rppp01]

I spent years saying the same thing. Now, at work, I have linux on my laptop. Guess what? I use about 5 or 6 apps. Those are not dependent on the window manager. What do I do? I use each one. I have used KDE, Window Maker, Blackbox, XFCE and even tooled around with FVWM (bleh).

Those that want a plain jane UI have KDE. Others, well, can have it all.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

um. linux may have a greater desktop percentage, but does a single window manager have a greater percentage? i somehow doubt it. you can't talk about linux like its a single cohesive operation system - its not. its a collectoin of pieces, hence distribution.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting opinion. I don't share it. Yes, most window managers aren't the prettiest things ever, but I've found them to be far more functional than Windows' UI. With options like virtual desktops, dock apps, desktop-accesible menus, smart window placement, window shading, send to back, point to focus, snap to edge, and so on, I've found many WMs to be able to do much more than Windows can.

My personal favorites are WindowMaker, Fluxbox, and flwm. None of them look particularly pretty, but they're all more functional than Windows.

Yes, I'm calling flwm more functional than Windows.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the helpful post. actually, I tried gtk-qt on my FC box at work, and the scroll bar glitches out, it was way too annoying, so I quit using it. I haven't built it from cvs though. Instead I am using a custom ~/.gtkrc-2.0 which looks like this:

include "/usr/share/themes/Simple/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"
gtk-font -name = "Bitstream Vera Sans 7"

and I'm pretty happy with it. BTW, that tip came from unified_desktop.pdf which is a nice document to read if you run KDE. I know the desktop situation is improving in linux with xorg and other efforts. Over the years I've run nearly every WM and I know how to customize nearly everything to a high degree and can even tweak source code here and there if I absolutely feel the need to spend the time. And my desktop does look nice, but it's not all automatic and transparent.

But I guess what I'm aiming at, is if you run an app in Windows or OSX, everything has a consistent UI through and through end to end. It would be nice if the presentation to the user was some how more abstracted or handled in the X server or something. I suppose if there was a way to seperate the toolkit somewhat, so the application can use generic terms to say I need something, and each toolkit implimented that standard something, so you could unify around qt, or gtk. Hmm, I've been sitting here thinking about it for a few minutes and I don't know what to suggest really. I suppose it's the reason why it's not fixed. It's not an easy fix. Maybe there needs to be a standards body to define some kind of api or something...

Oh well, I dunno. I think I'm just going to go hit myself over the head with a brick a few times and try to forget about it...

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[nofx_3]

another site to check out is: y-windows. You'll find that the goal of this project is to build a new gui server-client model much like X but with a built in set of widgets (extendable with a canvas widget). You still have a client server model, but with a standardized toolkit, and with it being re-built from the ground up one of the goals is to have better hardware acceleration (I.E. one thing being thrown around is a desktop built entirely in Cairo or a Vector based desktop, this may be the same thing, I dunno that much about svg). The project is moving slowly at the moment but I spent some time with it in the past and it is progressing so its something interesting to look at for the distant future.

-kaplanfx

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[WWWWolf]

But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

Do they have to look that great? I use WindowMaker, which isn't the greatest-looking from the whole bunch - but I use it because I value its rich functionality and good theme-consistency. It's fairly close to MacOSX, actually, due to both borrowing from NeXT roots. Heck, it's far better than MacOSX in some aspects (virtual desktops out of box, yay!) And it sure does everything Windows does. But what it doesn't do is superfluous eyecandy that is good for nothing. (Well, there are a few n3at effects but those are optional and just to soothe the newbie nerves =)

As long as the X-Windows system is divided with no clear objective

Contrary to popular misconception, the people behind X Windowing System have a very clear, consistent and well-defined goal in respect to window management: To improve and maintain twm, the official window manager(tm). Everyone but hardcore practicality fans are supposed to go "ewww" at this point and go find an alternative that satisfies them.

All Linux/BSD WMs are good for is keeping several CLIs in the same 'desktop'...

Heathen! Are you suggesting that there's more to the world than xterm, xload and xclock - The Apps That X Was Meant To Run? What else could anyone ask for?

=)

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[displaced80]

That's it.

Market research by drug pushers in the US discovered that 'Ecstacy' just wasn't catchy enough for users in the American market. After many focus groups were formed, it was decided to pro-actively radicalize the Ecstacy brand. In order to dynamically push the envelope of the established paradigm, it was decided to extreme-ify the Ecstacy brand by 73%.

Thus, what Europe knows as Ecstacy or 'E' is called Xstacy or simply 'X'.

Sadly, it means that by and large, the US missed out on the subtext of The Shamen's 1992 hit, "Ebeneezer Goode" -- "E's are good / E's are good / He's Ebeneezer Goode"

... this is so OT, I'm almost tempted to post anon. But what the hell. I bet there's not even enough people who remember The Shamen to mod me up....

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

had no issue's

"issues".

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Mr_Dyqik]

Anybody got any Veras?

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[displaced80]

Laaahvvley!

Don't get the reference? Ebeneezer Goode lyrics. The track will be available from your P2P network of choice.

(yep, we're OT - but imagine the horror of Slashdot without tangental conversation! What? You'd prefer it that way? Live the dream, my friend. Live the dream...)

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[quelrods]

hrm cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/enlightenment && make install oh it worked what do you know. Don't waste your time with gentoo's attempt at a knock off of the *bsd ports collection. Get the original that works! Saying dependencies are annoying is admitting you either run slackware or run a system without decent package management.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Bob Uhl]

All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.

Bluecurve is very attractive, and I find Ion to be extremely pleasant to work in, far better than any OS X or Windows offers.

Re:cool to see it get fixes

[Mr_Dyqik]

Aah, the genious of rave lyrics. And now for something completely different.

Excuse me, where is the bass drum?

Cool Name...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wanted to run Enlightenment because it has such a cool name, but I never liked it much and couldn't bring myself to do so.

Glad to see it's still around

[DLR]

I always thought Elnlightment was the most innovative WM I'd seen.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[flewp]

I've only used Fluxbox as a WM, and was impressed by it's performance on a PII-400. How do you think E would fair on the same machine? It's a PII-400, 256mb of ram, Radeon 7000 64mb video card. I started using Fluxbox after KDE and Gnome just became so bloated. I'd dual boot this machine, but the time I spend on this computer is either working (which requires Photoshop, LW, Painter, and a few video editing applications) and playing games, so that's why I keep linux just on the PII machine.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Stevyn]

It may be innovative, but in my opinion it's too ugly to use. I'm sorry if this is trolling or just being a dick, but it's hard to look at. Maybe I'm used to KDE or xfce4, but do people who use it prefer it's default look over the default look of other wm's? Or is that because it's so customizable the default interface is quickly altered to appeal to tastes?

I'm not a big fan of KDE's keramik, but I find this interface too ugly to be usable. Sorry, that's my opinion.

But on the other side, it's good to see small projects like this stay alive. It's good to see how the community can press on even when they're not backed by wealthy investors. So I guess that craps on my complaint. If I don't like it, who gives a shit.

Go Enlightenment!

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Anonymous Coward]

It would work fabulously. This is exactally the kind of machine that E was designed on (it was mentioned in an article I read last week). So, it shouldn't be a problem at all. You could probably get away with taking it down to 128MB of ram if you really wanted to.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[captnitro]

I used to use E on a P100 with 64MB back in high school.. ..Insert candy raver joke here..

and it ran fine. The colors, as always, were beautiful.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[captnitro]

Enlightenment is heavily, heavily based on themeable items -- not just colors, icons, or window bars, I mean *everything*. There are quite a few crappy themes out there, so you have to find the right ones.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Anonymous Coward]

The theming can completly transform E's look. I've noticed alot of people say they're not too keen on the look - alot of people who use it are into dark/gothic themes. I actually wasn't too keen on the original default themes either. But there are literally hundreds of themes available, everything from dark/gothic to abstractly artististic to clean/bright themes.

Chances are if you have a certain preference, then there are others who also have and have made a theme for it.

I think one of E's primary motivations is to design a desktop that's not constrained in any way. Every piece is designed to be as customisable as possible - to leave the end choice about how the desktop should look to the user. Nice philosophy.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're doing Photoshop & Lightwave work on a PII-400 you should really consider charging more & getting a better machine.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[flewp]

If you're reading slashdot and posting comments, you should really consider reading a bit better.

I'd dual boot this machine, but the time I spend on this computer is either working (which requires Photoshop, LW, Painter, and a few video editing applications) and playing games, so that's why I keep linux just on the PII machine."

This machine is a P4 2.6ghz, 1gb PC3200, Radeon 9600 Pro that I built last summer. I'll probably be going to 3 gb and a much better (ie, professional) video card in the near future. I only run Win2K Pro on it, as I said, I spend all my time on this machine just using PS, LW, games, etc, so I only have linux on the PII.

The key emphasis, and the part you should read is the "why I keep linux just on the PII machine.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[BrokenHalo]

I used to use E13 with all the eye-candy it had back when I had a PII-400 with only 68 Mb of RAM. It worked fine then, and I doubt if it's changed.

I remember a lot of heated words being uttered about E's "bloat", but I just downloaded all the major components of E17, and the total came to about 11 Mb, which seems pretty paltry by comparison with Gnome (not flaming, I'm a big fan of Gnome) or KDE. I'm looking forward to giving it another spin...

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Anonymous Coward]

Innovative? I mean sure it looks nice, but it's not really that different to everything else out there. Try something like WindowLab to see one attempt to innovate in this area.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Anonymous Coward]

was impressed by it's performance

"its".

How do you think E would fair

"fare".

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[Anonymous Coward]

people who use it prefer it's default look

"its".

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[shish]

You could probably get away with taking it down to 128MB of ram if you really wanted to.

I have E16, some EFL progs, and some GTK progs (no QT/KDE) running quite happily on 64 :)

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[chthon]

There is a very nice Aqua theme available for E.

Re:Glad to see it's still around

[WhiteDragon]

my favorite E theme has been Ganymeede for several years. Stuff looks cool, very functional, and not too dark or too light.

My first window manager

[CDR1313]

Enlightenment sure brings back memories. I'll have to try it out sometime if I ever decide to give up my powerbook.

Re:My first window manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, same here... Enlightenment drew a great many people to Linux.

Re:My first window manager

[daeley]

Hey, load up Fink and you can have Enlightenment on your Powerbook. Or any of a bunch of other window managers.

It looks cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

...I prefer to just stick to one thing that works, not waste my time going to the next coolest looking display manager. It needs to be rather revolutionary to get my attention. So why should I try it?

Re:It looks cool but

[Anonymous Coward]

It ALMOST does Amiga Screens right ("Virtual Desktops on PCP" or something like that), let down only by some fundamental limitations of the X Window System (on the Amiga OS 3.0+, every GUI app had a notion of what named "public screen" it was on, Enlightenment fakes it by remembering for the application, which often breaks).

Try it, you might like it (or hate it).

"Rasterman", a very long time ago, was an Amiga hacker.

Re:It looks cool but

[iNiTiUM]

I've been using E for a few years now. Its easily the coolest window manager around if you've got some RAM to spare. Its easy to use, extremely customizable, and can be themed to hell and back. The eye candy is a bonus, but the handling of virtual/multiple desktops is amazing and does wonders for productivity (think about the first time you used tabbed browsing).

As for reasons to use it?
Well lets see....

The themes change not only the look, but the functionality and behaviour. (See the Aqua themes)

Window Grouping

Virtual/Multiple Desktops (Yes, there is a difference)

More options than you can shake a /. troll at

Easy to use

I could go on, but I really hate telling people why they should use a product. Since you had the motivation to ask, find some motivation to try it out. Most people that have the patience to tune E to their liking will never go back to anything else. If they do, its usually to a minimalist WM like ratpoison or fluxbox (both ends of the scale I suppose). If you don't think its worth your time to enhance your productivity, then stick with what you know. Otherwise, give it a shot and be prepared to get lost in the immense selection of themes!

Re:It looks cool but

[quantaman]

...I prefer to just stick to one thing that works, not waste my time going to the next coolest looking display manager. It needs to be rather revolutionary to get my attention. So why should I try it?

So don't, I'm guessing they won't really miss you anyways and if you don't want to go through the effort (somewhat nontrivial) of trying it out then don't. Then again what do you mean by "works"?

There are a lot of people using windows, most are not going to switch to linux anytime soon because for them windows "works", of course they still have all the trouble with spyware, viruses, no multiple desktops, etc, but they say it "works". Same with IE, they figure it "works" and don't even consider activeX wonkyness or tabbed browsing (don't know what SP2 has done for this). So at what point does your window manager "work"? When it compiles? When it has no bugs? When it has nothing you can point to from your dialy usage and say "that's a bug"? Maybe when annoying UI issues are gone? I figure the only way a program is ever truly done is if it does everything you've ever wanted it to do as simply and efficiently as possible. So if you want to put in the effort to see what you might be missing from your window manager that "works" go ahead and try it out. I can tell you that I'm certainly not going to try it out today (heck probably won't even RTFA) but sometime later when I have some time to spare, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe never, who knows, I might just give it a whirl.

Re:It looks cool but

[StoatBringer]

That was my first thought when I saw the screenshots - Amiga Power Windows! I know the Amiga isn't quite dead (sort of a shambling zombie at the moment), but the ability to pull entire screens (or different resolutions) up and down at will was one of the things I loved most about it. It would be great to see that properly implemented in a modern UI.

Re:It looks cool but

[Eneff]

There's someone else out there using TWM too?

Cool!
___

(Oh, and E was revolutionary when it came out.)

Re:It looks cool but

[dbIII]

Its easily the coolest window manager around if you've got some RAM to spare

And if you haven't, say if you have a 75Mhz pentium with 24MB RAM, you run the "clean" theme or the one that looks like an IRIX desktop. That's what I did when I had a machine that was too slow to run a local copy of Netscape, even under twm - I just ran enlightenment locally and Netscape from another box. I've even run enlightenment as the window manager for MS Windows machines with X servers - running from a remote linux box of course.

Re:It looks cool but

[Liquid Len]

Virtual/Multiple Desktops (Yes, there is a difference)

Ok, I know I'm ignorant... Would you enlighten me on what this difference may be ?

Re:It looks cool but

[Ripplet]

enlighten me on what this difference may be

(Assuming you're not joking...)

A 'virtual' desktop has a different size than the monitor you're using: usually bigger, and often an exact multiple e.g. twice the width and twice the height). There are various tricks to move around to the bits you can't currently see, such as simply moving the cursor up to the edge of the screen.
'Multiple' desktops means you can have one set of applications open on one desktop, and another set of applications open on another desktop, and you can quickly switch between the two sets of applications. These desktops may, of course, also be 'virtual'.

Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I find screenshots of this new release?

This is the release that everyones been waiting for right?

Re:Screenshots?

[Myuu]

nope, everyone is waiting for e17

Re:Screenshots?

[joeljkp]

Well, I guess I missed the joke here. Parent is right, e17 is the next-generation release that everyone's been salivating over for a few years.

IIRC, they're redoing all the base libraries from scratch and implementing a more complete and cohesive system, which probably explains all the rabid E fans out there.

Re:Screenshots?

[Myuu]

ha, I guess the mods took my sig of 'forget it' as a part of the post.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, E fans are rabid 'cause e17 is like the fourth of fifth such major rewrite. It's hard to keep track, honestly. IIRC everything up to r13 was the same codebase, and 14, 16 are different. Okay, maybe 3 or 4.

Anyway. We love Raster, and everyone else that's worked on E. He's a genious. No doubt at all about that. He's also a perfectionist. The problem is that all of those things combined plus the fact that he likes to go off and hack with no apparent plan is frustrating. He's gotten better about that as of late, probably because he's got some help organizing, etc.

I'm sure they could've had a 1.0 (and a very good one at that), if things were a bit more organized from the start. But, I think, in a way that Raster likes it in a state of perpetual development. I think he said once that E should constantly be at the bleeding edge, with stuff that other projects never even dream of, constantly evolving, with no clear distinction...

Sounds to me like an art project, which makes sense, 'cause Raster is also a fantasic artist, and as such, he's got the mind of an artist.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

they look ugly because your browser scale them to
window size. zoom in or view them in external
program.

I remeber...

[Mindjiver]

I remeber back in the old days when everyone used either E or Windowmaker or Afterstep.

Thos were the good old days with OctoberX. :D

Re:I remeber...

[Anonymous Coward]

There were no 'good old days' with OctobrX.

Re:I remeber...

[mediumgreen]

I remeber back in the old days when everyone used either E or Windowmaker or Afterstep.

Gawd, I feel old. The old days to me means when vtwm came out.

*sigh*

Re:I remeber...

[sl4shd0rk]

FVWM95 baby... mmmmmmm

Re:I remeber...

[chthon]

When I started using Linux in 1998 I used olvwm.

Mirror...Kinda

[matz62]

DR16.7.1 has been released!. This is the biggest release since DR16 first debuted! In this release dependencies have changed from Imlib/FreeType to Imlib2/FreeType2. The old default themes (which made the distribution almost 18M in size!) have been replaced with "Winter" by rephorm. The distribution has been split into 3 diffrent packages: programs (source), docs (Edox), and themes. A long long list of bugs have been fixed (including some very old nagging ones that weren't easy for kwo to squash). And probly of most interest to the end user: "Theme Transparency". Get the files source and RPMs in the usual place.

If your wondering what happened to DR16.7.0, it was halted last minute by several bugs that were only reproducable by a small number of us but were major bugs none the less. You can see the changes since the initial release here.

Ports for Solaris are avalible now and the DarwinPorts port is ready. Gentoo Portage will be updated shortly.

Re:Mirror...Kinda

[Anonymous Coward]

With all of these great advances, it sounds like Linux will be ready for everyday users sometime in the next 50 years. Kudos!

Re:Mirror...Kinda

[Anonymous Coward]

What, was that some kind of jab at the glacial pace of Enlightenment development? Ha ha! You're a clever AC aren't you?

Next you'll be saying that Windowmaker needs a ton of improvements before you'll switch from DOS.

Re:Mirror...Kinda

[Rysc]

The old default themes (which made the distribution almost 18M in size!) have been replaced with "Winter" by rephorm.

Great, great... but can I still use BlueSteel?

Re:Mirror...Kinda

[Anonymous Coward]

Greatest comeback EVER. Wow, I am smote.

Re:Mirror...Kinda

[klevin]

As best as I can tell, DR16.7.1 doesn't break support for other DR16.x theme releases. If you've got BlueSteel installed, and you configure Enlightenment to use the same themes directory as before, BlueSteel should still be usable. If the latter condition's not true, grab the BlueSteel theme from that section of the E file list on SF and there you go.

hmm...

[liloconf]

I heard they were porting Duke Nukem Forever to D17!!

Re:hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard they were porting Duke Nukem Forever to D17!!

They should join forces, maybe together they manage to make a release.
And why not - they are working on very similar applications!

Enlightenment is IRRELEVANT

[Anonymous Coward]

They had their chance to create something usable, in time. Now, it's too late. They are too late.

Enlightenment 0.17 feels more like an experiment more than anything else. Gnome and KDE and even XFce are usable today, E17 is not. People won't be switching that easily to something like E17, especially now that Gnome and KDE are more intergtrated to the system rather than simple window managers with some nifty effects on top.

sourceforge group

[Coneasfast]

something interesting i noticed, the group_id on sf is 2, (is this the first sourceforge project ever?!?!)

Re:sourceforge group

[rowanxmas]

yes. most people know this.

Re:sourceforge group

[kundor]

Must be; group_id 1 is alexandria itself. (and 3 is mesa3d.)

Re:sourceforge group

[Anonymous Coward]

"most people know this."

That's a pretty outrageous claim...

Re:sourceforge group

[goofyheadedpunk]

Perhaps this? I can't find the id number, but that seems like a nice guess.

Re:sourceforge group

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome to slashdot

Re:sourceforge group

[FuzzzyLogik]

If I recall correctly Mandrake (of http://www.mandrake.net fame) worked with rasterman (of http://www.rasterman.com fame) at VALinux (the software area) long ago.. they've all parted ways from VALinux now. But since SF is run by VALinux these guys were some of the first to have access to it and all that. hence the group_id of 2 :-P I believe Rasterman worked for VA... but my brain is a little fuzzy

Re:sourceforge group

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but that is Sourceforge itself. E was the first real SF project, but they only really started using SF recently (i.e. a couple of years ago). I remember the anouncement, it was something like "We are SF project #2, so we may as well use it".

Re:sourceforge group

[Precision]

Yes, back when we hacked up SF, Raster and Mandrake were just down the hall, so E became one of the first projects. IIRC mainly because at the time they were hosted on openprojects which was broken/down.

Re:sourceforge group

[chrisd]

Yeah, during the creation of SF, the team reserved 2 for Raster and Mandrake who were working at VA (in the disco room, don't ask) at the time.

They didn't take posession for some time, as they resisted moving off their own hardware, but they eventually gave in.

Chris DiBona

Re:sourceforge group

[eille-la]

dont feed the trolls please (including this post as a part of the food)

Re:sourceforge group

[Andy Dodd]

Raster WAS working for RHAD Labs (RedHat's advanced development group) for a while, but left.

Not sure if he went to VA later or you're just thinking of Mandrake only. (I don't remember Mandrake's history. FYI Mandrake the E author had NO association with Mandrake the distro.)

Re:sourceforge group

[FuzzzyLogik]

correct. Raster used to work for RH and i am pretty sure he worked for VALinux and then quit to move back to australia.

Mandrake (http://www.mandrake.net) however was not associated with Mandrake-Linux (http://www.mandrakelinux.com).

Mandrake went on to found another company, which he then sold and is in the process of working on yet another. BTW, Mandrake's first company was bought by VALinux, it was called Enlightened something I believe... Someone care to correct me? I may have my facts slightly mixed up about raster working for VA still.

Re:sourceforge group

[Anonymous Coward]

well carsten is now working for VA Japan together with Horms. call me a stalker, but I've followed raster's journeys ever since I used E between DR0.6 and DR0.16. I stopped using E many years ago and prefer other WMs nowadays but won't tell which one just to prevent religous flamewars. let's just say as a programmer I need a customizable environment without much need for fancy gui stuff.

Wow

[iMaple]

I used enlightment for a couple of years before switching to kde since a year . I have to say that E was a really intuitive and lightweight WM ( I had a really slow computer then .. switched to kde after geting a better machine) . Anyone out there who use E as their primary WM on resonably new machines ??

Re:Wow

[shadoi]

I run it on my Athlon64 3200+ and my P4 laptop. I also use the EFL and all the other E goodies.

Re:Wow

[reverius]

I use iceWM as my only "desktop environment" (hahaha) on very new machines (my desktop is an Athlon XP 3000+). There's no reason to add bloat simply because your computer can handle it.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using E16 on a new machine. It has the benefits of being faster than gnome/kde (more lightweight), with the bonus of customising it any way you please.

KDE/Gnome have a tendency to throw things in your way which is great for a new user who doesn't know where anything is, but for someone who does, anything you do in KDE/Gnome can be done in E, without the clutter.

Re:Wow

[Malek the Damned]

I run Enlightenment on my p4-2.2 laptop, my athlon 2400+ at home, and my dual athlon 2400+ at work. I lurve it.

That said, I have the KDE kicker bar running down the side, and all my "most used" apps in the actual enlightenment menu. Means I have fast, uncluttered menus, but still have access to everything on the system thru kicker. And I have a taskbar. We likes taskbars.

E15 was the first window manager I used, and although I've tried a lot of others, I just prefer E to this day, and is still perfectly integrated with Gnome/KDE apps. Plus, the Fossils Of The Machines theme kicks ass =)

But for some reason, I hate epplets... *shrug*.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? So? I use the console on a dual Athlon 64 3200+ with 4 gigs of memory, for just that very reason! Nyahnyah!

If I need to do something "fancy", maybe I'll pop up into usermode to putz around in X11. With no windowmanager, mind you. Just me and my trusty x-term! :D

Re:Wow

[1lus10n]

Not an epplet fan myself and I have been using E for about four years.

I personally think E has addictivity built in, I have tried everything else and each project has SOME of the things I like about E, but only E has them all.

The only bug I have found in E that consistantly irks me is the focus issue with gaim & galeon. But thats minor since a simple "click on item" fixes it.

Re:Wow

[Rysc]

I personally think E has addictivity built in, I have tried everything else and each project has SOME of the things I like about E, but only E has them all.

I think that about sums it up for me, too. E just can't be beat.

When I came to Linux from LiteStep/Windows E was the ONLY WM I could theme to act like the Litestep 0.24.5 default theme. AfterStep is close, since LS was modeled after it, but some things were just too different.

All hail E! Now gimme my goddam E17 already...

Re:Wow

[Malek the Damned]

The only problem I ever found was when launching Xine from a Konqueror window (ie, double-clicking on a video file) caused Konqueror to be elevated to "highest" stacking setting. Annoying, but not exactly earth-shattering. And fixed 2 or 3 releases ago.

I just wish Debian Unstable would damn-well update, they still have 16.5 (I think; it's something old anyway).

I kinda like KDE's desktop manager (kdesktop, i'm fairly sure), and it's a definate second choice, but everything about E is just... I dunno. Right. Besides, 3 desktops with 12 virtual desks each r0x0rs my s0x0rs.

As a side note, does anyone remember the 16.5-zoopee patch? The one that gave better control over the iconbox, enabled a few other settings, and so on? Anyways, I emailed the author a while ago, but he had no plans to update it for .6 or .7... I'm not enough of a C/C++ coder to do this myself (had a few attempts and ended up fucking things royally); could anyone interested in giving me a hand fixing this up drop me a line?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

E has been my favorite window manager since I first tried it years ago. Maybe it's just me, but I hate having a desktop covered with icons and all the other junk in other environments. I like being able to have a well-sorted menu system that doesn't take up desktop real estate (even while running at 1600x1200+, it's nice for it to be out of the way). It's a nice too to be able to just switch to an empty desktop and be able to leave everything as is, knowing the typical passerby probably will probably not figure out too quickly how to use your system while you're away (at least if you modify the menu button/key sequence from default).

Re:Wow

[dbIII]

Anyone out there who use E as their primary WM on resonably new machines

Using it now on a Duron 1.2GHz and at home on a 3.2GHz Amd64. The other WM on the Duron for 8 bit color (legacy software needs it folks) is twm, simply because it would be a pain to set up scripts to have the config files in two places. Slightly modified "Ganymede" theme in both places. Used to run "Obsidian" back before the guy who wrote the theme put together Slashdot.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

On my home desktop i ran E on my Duron 800 with 256 MB RAM for quite a while, changing theme every 3 months or so. I used themes and modified them slightly according to my preference, which is easy and very customizable. E's truelly a geek swiss knife IMO.

The reason i switched from E to GNOME is because i got tired of some bugs (which are now fixed i see! great, thanks!) and because my main HDD continuously had no space which breaks the E config files into emptiness. Which, well, is the result of another problem obviously but i didn't had the time to fix that problem hence i switched to GNOME. I also got a bit tired of the customization every once in a while. I know, you don't have to customize but when i ran E i got this itch every once in a while. With GNOME, i liked the default theme, so that wasn't a problem.

Suffice to say, i'm really looking forward to E17 and appreciate the bugfixes. Now, composite support would be awesome, too.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Deb Sid still has 16.5? Weird. I just checked out Sarge and it has 16.6. I'm not gonna whine it doesn't have 16.7.1 yet cause that just got released, so i argue Sarge is up2date. Makes me wondering why Sid isn't (if you're right, that is).

Re:Wow

[klevin]

I've been using Enlightenment as my WM for about 5 years now (after I got sick of AfterStep just not working often enough).

It got used on a PIII with 256MB RAM at work and an AMD K6-3 with 128 MB of RAM at home when I first started using it. These days, home and work have merged and E's running on an AthlonXP 1800 w/ 512MB of RAM. Definately faster response from E. The limiting factor these days isn't E, but not enough memory for some of the apps I run.

Re:Wow

[klevin]

Maybe it's just me, but I hate having a desktop covered with icons and all the other junk in other environments.

Hear hear! The whole taskbar and icons on the desktop issue is one of the reasons I don't run Gnome or KDE. Both projects have some great apps, but their desktop environments drive me crazy.

E gives me all the eye-candy I want w/o forcing the above on me. Though, I must say, there for a while it was a pain finding new themes that didn't go for the whole "must have task-bar" schtick. That was until I found the "Fossils of the Machine" theme. I was going to post a link to the author's website, but it seems to have gone away. Bummer.

Oh goody.

[BJH]

I hope Rasterman has remembered to include plenty of that CPU-crushing eyecandy that was the major (indeed only) feature of earlier releases.
I always found Enlightenment to be the most enjoyable of WMs, as it felt so good when you stopped using it.

Enlightenment - the best advertisement for Ratpoison yet!

Re:Oh goody.

[BJH]

Shit, if I'd known I was going to be modded down for speaking the straight truth, I would have posted with my +1 bonus to give you modders something to get your teeth into.

By the way, from the FAQ:
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down.

Re:Oh goody.

[BJH]

Keep it coming, I've got karma to burn.

Enlightenment - the WM you run when your PC's too fast!

Re:Oh goody.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I don't think it's so much a matter of the mods' collective opinion as the fact that your post is very clearly flamebait.

Re:Oh goody.

[BJH]

Hey, I'm enjoying myself here, OK?

Re:Oh goody.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too true to be funny. But for the guys that build scrapyard systems (me) Enlightenment runs like crap.

Re:Oh goody.

[thrift24]

Enlightenment may have plenty of eyecandy, but it was never cpu intensive compared to gnome/kde and it looks plenty better. I had the exact opposite problem after leaving enlightenment to try all the other wms/new kde/new gnome releases. They just wouldn't get out of my way long enough to let me get my work done(a la kde and gnome), or they'd make my desktop look worse than win 3.11(a la ratpoison and windowmaker). Don't have anywhere to store any screenshots or i'd post some as i just emerged the new enlightenment DR16. The new theme transparency looks quite nice also, hopefully it will intigrate nicely into the new xorg though, because it's kind of out of place without true transparency between non enlightenment window(the transparency isn't just a background screengrab with several enlightenment windows).

Re:Oh goody.

[starling]

CPU-crushing eyecandy

Uh oh, time to upgrade that Celeron 300Mz you're running.

Re:Oh goody.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used E for a couple of years, and *loved* it, especially the BrushedMetal theme in DR16. Then I got lured to the darkside, and started using KDE and Gnome. When I went back to E recently, I thought "how the hell did I ever use this". The BrushedMetal theme is just over-the-top with pixmaps, and the screen transitions that I thought were so cool are actually tedious and annoying. Task switching was also more difficult than I recalled - especially since I have got into the habit of running apps fullscreen these days.

One thing I have to say about E, though. It isn't really as bad a CPU/memory hog as people make out once the bells and whistles are disabled, and it is quite stable. I remember being logged into a single E session for 6 months without any performance degradation on a P133 with 48 Meg of RAM.

Re:Oh goody.

[meringuoid]

Hey, this looks fun, let's have a go...

Enlightenment - because you really need a pretext to buy that Opteron!

I kid, I kid... I use KDE, and on the first startup I moved the useless-crap slider all the way to the right :-) I mean, I've got an Athlon XP 2000 and half a gig of RAM and most of the time I'm only running a music player and LyX, so I might as well have some eye candy...

Re:Oh goody.

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

I'm sorry, but us speed freaks know not what this "too fast" thing you speak of is. ;)

Re:Oh goody.

[daviee]

That was true when I was still running AfterStep (~4 yrs ago). Have you really tried the Gnome2/KDE lately? Not to bash any of those projects, as I run Gnome2 myself; but Enlightenment really isn't that slow unless you're runnning a 486. Yes, one is a wm and the others are desktop managers, but I'm just talking about X startup, normal app lauches and window movements here.

For me, I'm still waiting for E17.

Re:Oh goody.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but us speed freaks know not what this "too fast" thing you speak of is.

That is an interesting pharmacological difference between speed users and "E" users -- the effect on the nervous system should be roughly the same?

;)

I know, I know ;)

Re:Oh goody.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed the ratpoison rpm, and was reading their FAQ. On 2nd thought I think it is just a tiny bit too minimal for my tastes. I need virtual desktops and they're talking about just a little bit a glue code, and script this and that to get the functionality that doesn't come default. I don't think I'm going to mess with it. I think FVWM is lean enough and that's the default over here. But as far as bloat and slowness are concerned. Enlightenment is a lean mean screamer compared to the latest gnome and kde desktops...

April fools!

[kamelkev]

Oh wait... what? It's almost september? WTF is going on here...

Re:April fools!

[mowler2]

I feel the same...

Re:April fools!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time. Now if you can tell me what time is, you're home free. My guess is that time is just a concept.

i love E

[OmniVector]

i can't wait till it hits 1.0..

Re:i love E

[stevey]

I'm waiting for it to hit v2.71828183..

Re:i love E

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that was e. E is e*e (7.3890561073081)

Gnoem used to run E?

[matz62]

Didn't Gnome used to run on top of E?

Re:Gnoem used to run E?

[BrokenHalo]

Didn't Gnome used to run on top of E?

Not quite; some distros used E as a WM under Gnome (as opposed to the other way around). Offhand, I don't recall why they replaced it with Sawfish.

Personally, I'm a bit disappointed with the Gnome crowd for having ditched a WM that did its job in favour of Metacity, which doesn't. (Metacity is incapable of remembering window placement or minimised/maximised state, which as far as I am concerned, is a WM's job.)

Re:Gnoem used to run E?

[Anonymous Coward]

Little problem, though: Sawfish is mostly written in a programming language created by Sawfish's original author.

It was unmaintainable, once that guy gave it up.

Re:Gnoem used to run E?

[LizardKing]

Metacity is incapable of remembering window placement or minimised/maximised state, which as far as I am concerned, is a WM's job.

No, that's a session managers job, and has been since the X Window System included the xsm program.

E redefined the desktop?

[Awptimus Prime]

I think going as far as to say "redefine the desktop" is a bit over the top.

While it had a few bits of eye candy, it had no extended functionality over any of the other options at the time.

Let us forgo the zealotry and remember E as it was: The script kiddy's first Linux desktop.

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it did have extended functionality - it had an infinite stack of draggable virtual desktops vaguely akin to amiga screens (though clunkier). Windowmaker also had a practically infinite stack via the "clip" at the time, but the desktops weren't draggable.

I could be wrong, but I think the enlightenment pager was also the first to actually show miniature contents of windows in the display, prior to that, virtual desktop pagers just showed rectangles representing the windows.

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[Lord Kano]

While it had a few bits of eye candy, it had no extended functionality over any of the other options at the time.

It didn't make the 486 that I first ran linux on cry like some other WMs at the time.

LK

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, E had, and even still has the most powerful window management ability of any WM that I've ever used. It did it's job. Did it well. Even if it went off on the eyecandy tangent to an extreme, you've got to admit that it is a good window manager.

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[matusa]

Your statements are quite rude. For some reason, following gnome's irritation with imlib, bashing raster came into style. But that is another tale.

E had fully themed widgets, both for window manager utilities and the decorations themselves. Shortly thereafter I saw this creeping into other window managers and toolkits, and then windows and macs both unofficially and officially began carrying similar flexible interface enhancements. As far as this unparalleled flexibility, E _was_ the first, and the pattern I just described is no coincidence--the influence was definitely there to a not insignificant extent.

raster's a nice and very enthusiastic guy, dedicated and ambitious. Take a look at E17 if you have a moment.

(note zealotry is not the aim here--E is not even my primary; simply I hate this damned bashing)

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[On Lawn]

While it had a few bits of eye candy

And Sees has "a few bits of chocolate". Nothing has ever come to the stunning visual excess that E had in its hayday (before Redhat made them all put on shirts and ties).

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[Awptimus Prime]

Hmm, I recall having a Mac OS6 desktop whose widgets were just as customizable as anything in E's interface.

I will take a look at the new release, as I do with all window managers. I probably will only pick apart the things I don't like, as I do with anything internet forum related. :)

Re:E redefined the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a fucking break. The script kiddy's first desktop? Care to back that up with any facts, or are you just another slashdot moron?

E carved a path that everyone else was drooling to follow (even Microsloth, belatedly).

Re:Gnome used to run E?

[JakeThompson1]

Yes, GNOME once ran with Enlightement, then that was changed to Sawfish, and now we have the current Metacity.

Though in reality, since all these are just window managers, you could replace them with anything you want.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I used to run Enlightenment like, 7 years ago when it was considered "cool" to do so.

At the time, I found the widgets fancy but unintuitive.

Seriously, what has Enlightenment been doing these past 7 years? The screenshots don't look any better than my desktop did way back. Plus, you don't get the nice KDE or Gnome-related integration.

'E' is a window manager that was ahead of the pack, and fell to the wayside by not being able to keep up with the times.

Re:Why?

[Mold]

E's window buttons are changed by the theme. So that's not E itself (although maybe it's default theme).

What do you mean by Gnome integration? It was Gnome's default WM for a while, and you could swap it back in without too much trouble now. E automatically imports your KDE and Gnome menus, and it doesn't keep your from running any apps from them.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, thanks for that informed analysis, you worthless, stupid idiot.

Re:Why?

[spauldo]

Back during the imlib mess raster made the decision not to support the GNOME hints (from what I remember - this was years ago). Sawmill became the default window manager, gdk-pixbuf was born, and that was the end of the Enlightenment-GNOME relationship.

I can't say if it's been added back since. Sure, GNOME apps will run on anything, but for the best operation the window manager needs to support GNOME hints.

I only paid mild attention as I couldn't stand DR14+ enlightenment anyway. I had switched to fvwm and then switched to sawmill (which eventually because sawfish over a name dispute).

I'm sure if you look in the GNOME mailing lists for 1999 and 2000 you'll see what I'm talkin' about.

What I miss is the old versions of E, before the overlaying desktops (or whatever they're called). Back in the day I had a lot of people interested in linux just because of E - _nothing_ looked cooler at the time, and not too much does nowdays. I'm running fvwm now but would gladly switch to something like that if it wasn't older than dirt.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, you don't get the nice KDE or Gnome-related integration.

What kind of integration are you talking about? E does have GNOME / KDE menu integration and recently (IIRC 16.5 release) it got updated to support GNOME 2 / KDE 3.

It's also easy to say this from your ivory tower but consider E is a non-profit project with far less developers than KDE or GNOME while still prefering to be different and innovative the perspective is slightly different than you pretend (to steal the) show (of) it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been working on E17. The release this article is about is just a stop-gap measure; E17 is where it's at.

E17 will have some nice features, like OpenGL acceleration, and a file manager with support for Linux/Posix filesystem attributes and ACLs (iirc). Having said that, I think very few people are involved, and it's taking them FOREVER.

With X itself gaining OpenGL acceleration now, the attributes are pretty much the only reason I'm interested in seeing E17. Actually, I wish they would just quit Enlightenment, and work on adding the best features to GNOME/KDE.

Or at least that the KDE/GNOME developers would realise the importance ACLs etc, and do it themselves :)

Version numbering

[P-Nuts]

It seems Enlightenment has only gone halfway on dropping the leading 0 from the version numbers, as the news pages don't include it, but the tarballs do. It seems unlikely given how long E has been around that it'll ever reach 1.0, so perhaps eventually it will do an emacs, and drop the leading numeral (a 1 in emacs' case)

EFL and the road to E17

[DNAspark99]

Anyone interested in what rasterman and crew have been up to should really check out and compile the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries)

Some really neat stuff is on the way, of particular interest is the edje/evas/evoak stuff. Eventually this work will lead to an improved themeing system, for E and anything else that ties in to the EFL.
Rasterman has even given a glimpse of the power these libs will bring to the programmer with his own version of a DVD player, using the EFL, in just 17 lines of code!

so no, contrary to popular belief...E is NOT dead!

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[Carnildo]

Rasterman has even given a glimpse of the power these libs will bring to the programmer with his own version of a DVD player, using the EFL, in just 17 lines of code!

That's nothing. I'm sure a Perl hacker could do it in one line.

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. I'm sure a Perl hacker could do it in one line.

use CPAN::CustomDVDPlayer;

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[terraformer]

You mean:
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$ t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=( $m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])$t^=(72, @z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16 -2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if ((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h =5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$ h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$ d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[1lus10n]

I'm sure they could butitwouldntreallybeonelinenowwouldit ?

The reasons I hate "freeform" languages .... let me count the ways.

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that this doesn't in any way give you a "DVD player".

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[Erik Hollensbe]

Perl hackers are the new guys...

Of course, you might be thinking of this, as that's where all this stuff got popular.

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[Anonymous Coward]

It does, however, unscramble the CSS on DVDs.

BTW, did the MPAA ever give up on protecting this as a "secret?"

It's only widely available, so much so that you can find dozens of forms of it online...

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[(startx)]

evas is still "on the way"?!?! Rasterman showed us his embedded work and evas2 and told us it (and E17) were "just around the corner" two years ago at a conference at UIUC. It seemed cool then, but now it's old news.

Re:EFL and the road to E17

[RdsArts]

I think you're missing a ELF header.

Back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Enlightenment takes me back a few. One of my first explorations in Linux was RH7.2 or something like that...and I was messing around with the GNOME setup and finally had enough courage to try Enlightenment.

It was interesting, but I couldn't get my head around that virtual desktop thing. Moving the cursor to the edge of the screen warped me over to the other desktop...and I liked putting apps on the corners of the screen, so that messed me up badly.

I also had a really low-powered machine so any eyecandy made it run at mach turtle.

Eventually, I discovered KDE and have been running on that since. I see the "oooh shiny" in GNOME once in a while and want to try it out but I end up not doing so. Back in the day, E was my "oooh shiny" desktop with sounds and metallic themes. Though I'm not inclined to use it, I'm glad they're still out there.

Re:Back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

and finally had enough courage to try Enlightenment.

Were there big, scary monsters guarding the "Use Enlightenment as your window manager" tickbox?

Mod Parent Redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

The author himself indicated that this was the case. Thank you, that is all.

Re:Be curious to find out if the code's any cleane

[rickbrodie]

Well, that may be so. However, the topic at hand here is enlightenment not evolution.

Go Enlightenment!

[Burgundy Advocate]

The Future of Window Managers...

...in 1996.

Re:Go Enlightenment!

[Anonymous Coward]

you damn kids with your 300k slasdot uid's.
back in my day we used twm and liked it!
uphill both ways!

Re:Go Enlightenment!

[Burgundy Advocate]

Heh... back when I was in College (run when you hear somebody starting a story that way) I used to know a chick who used twm exclusively. Swore by vi and for some God-forsaken reason loved ksh.

She used to come in and talk Linux to me as I sat there in my boxers and tshirt right after getting up... occasionally sitting on my leg so she could see my computer better. Very, um, stimulating conversations.

She was definitely hot though. And by hot I mean strange and frightening. I mean, I can see all the other behavior... but twm??!? Sorry baby, I don't go for sadomasocism.

E overdose!

[ESqVIP]

Anyone noticed the title of the song being played on this screenshot? (see the bottom right)

Re:E overdose!

[suedehed]

Coincidence or Chance.... You decide!

Re:E overdose!

[koekepeer]

wouldn't be surprised if azundris did that on purpose. she's a funny character - check out her website

Re:E overdose!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ecstasy. You should try it together with running Enlightenment to experience a unique Enlightenment.

Re:What's the latest stable release again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, gnome is more and more going the windows way assuming it knows better then the user.
I finally swich back to Enlightenment on the last big release of gnome (wasn't it 2.6?)
You can set Enlightenment to fit your preferences.

fvwm

[danZenie]

last time i heard E was a drug. i honestly think fvwm is a much better wm. but, last time i heard opinions were like assholes.

not dead, but comatose

[nbert]

it's funny to read this now - I just visited enlightenment.org some hours ago to check if they got any closer to 0.17 stable since the last time I checked (~6 month ago). Now / tells me that they finally made it to 16.7.1. I guess I'll have to lower my expectations. Don't get me wrong - I really like Enlightenment. I used it for several months before I finally switched to XFCE. 0.16 showed me the potential this project has, but it lacks some features which I really want to use. I started searching for alternatives when I realized that E wouldn't go anywhere for a long time. By the way: What was the most obvious April Fools story this year? I'd vote for 'Enlightenment 1.0 is out'.

Re:not dead, but comatose

[Loco3KGT]

Thanks for adding insult to injury, jackhole.

I FELL FOR THAT ONE

(I am being totally serious too)

Re:not dead, but comatose

[nbert]

Thanks for adding insult to injury, jackhole.

I don't really know why you would be offended by an insensitive clod like me, if you are comfortable with the current state of enlightenment.

I still think it's great, but I doubt that they are going to release 0.17 this year and I also doubt that they'll (at the current rate of development) be any better than some newer WMs/minDesktops in regards to innovation, features and usability. I found something which works better for me but I never would criticize someone who is loyal to E.

Re:not dead, but comatose

[Loco3KGT]

was just a joke. I didn't get offended. I did feel like a tard when I read your comment and thought "heh, I fell for that one. >:-| "

Woo, now I can make use of this AMD64!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was planning on saving it for Doom3, but hell, nothing can stress the system like E.

Nice logo, idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

The logo looks like the MSIE blue "e" mated with Sonic the Hedgehog.

What about E17?

[slashcop]

What will we see first? E17 or project looking glass?

I'm going with project looking glass.

Yes, I meant Enlightenment.

[cduffy]

Sorry, no slam against Ximian meant -- it's Rasterman's code I've historically had problems with.

Re:Yes, I meant Enlightenment.

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me confused for a moment. I actually like Evolution's code.

Re:Be curious to find out if the code's any cleane

[BJH]

He's actually talking about Enlightenment. Alan Cox was heard to say that Rasterman is good at drawing pretty pictures, but as a programmer he makes a good plumber (or something to that effect - it's in one of the back issues of his Diary from 4 or 5 years ago).

all down hill since E13

[sPaKr]

The default theme for E13 KFA'ed but everything since that has been down hill

Screenshots!

[handy_vandal]

Where can I find screenshots of this new release?

On the Enlightenment site, under "Screenshots".

-kgj

Re:Screenshots!

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are screenshots of older releases. None of them have the new default theme.

Re:Screenshots!

[Anonymous Coward]

On the Enlightenment site, under "Screenshots".

-kgj

I think those are DR16 screenshots.

Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

Sheesh, just great, a third set of graphical toolkits to load in memory for nothing... Like we didn't have enough waste of memory with Qt/kdelibs and GTK/Gnomelibs having to be both loaded in memory most of the time (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

Really, there are some times where the OpenSource approach to things isn't the right one. Sure choice of graphical toolkits is great, but do we look like stupids forcing users to have more memory to load several huge sets of similar libraries *just because* or what? I wish F/OSS folks decided to rally behind one and I'd happily follow, even if it wasn't my primary choice, for the sake of reducing the bloat...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Feh. This is the day of the gigabyte. Most new computer have 256MB+ Which is plenty for what most people do. Hell, it's plenty for what I do most of the time. Many computers ship with 512, and a gigabyte of the highest performance DDR isn't out of reach for even a casual user anymore.

Add to this the fact that most people don't typically have a myriad of apps open at any given time; maybe a web browser and an email client, a few terminals with whatever project they've got going on, etc etc. Shouldn't be a problem.

I agree, though. There are just too many libs to chose from, as a developer. It would be nice if there were one or two fully developed libraries.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Add to this the fact that most people don't typically have a myriad of apps open at any given time;

You just need one, say GIMP in KDE, and there you have megabytes of additional, functionally identical code loaded in memory for nothing.

And you know what? even with 512M, when I edit really big images with GIMP, I need all the memory I can get. Memory isn't there for applications and libraries to waste as they please, it's supposed to be used for the data you create/manipulate.

Many years ago, it used to be that memory taken by applications and the OS was minimal compared to your data, simply because it was vital. Now it's the other way round, because developers have gotten comfy with Moore's law. The problem is, code grows faster than Moore's law...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[vandan]

Cheap troll, but I'm bored.

Don't like EFL / Enlightenment? Don't use it. That is the power of open source. Your bitching about inefficient memory usage when you probably haven't written a single line of code in your life should not and does not affect the ability of others to write and use code that you don't approve of. That is the power of ope source.

If you took the time to see what the E team had been up to, you'd see that their approach is the way of the future - they are pushing the boundaries for the good of everyone else. Imlib-1, which Enlightenment-0.16.x was based on was also the basis for Gnome-1.x image rendering. Similarly, Imlib-2 and EVAS will be the basis of more powerful desktop systems down the road.

Anyway, when you leave school and go on social security, you will be able to afford another 64MB stick and all your memory problems will be a thing of the past.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Don't like EFL / Enlightenment? Don't use it.

Don't be silly. If some program uses the EFL, even if I don't use Enlightenment, I'll have to use the EFL libs to use said program.

For example, I don't give a rat's ass about Gnome. I think Gnome, as an environment, is as ugly as it gets. But I need to use GIMP and Gnomeeting. There's no Qt/kde equivalent: what do I do? do without them? of course not, and you know it full well.

Your bitching about inefficient memory usage when you probably haven't written a single line of code in your life

Heh, funny people who make assumptions without knowing. FYI, I do real-time programming and I port the Linux kernel on embedded processors. You've probably already seen my name out there on the net, but of course this is /. and I'm not going to tell you who I am.

you will be able to afford another 64MB stick and all your memory problems will be a thing of the past.

Tell me, is computing all a matter of how much it costs to you? or "just get xxx more of yyy and you're set"? how about engineering elegance? how about not wasting when you don't need to?

When *you* leave school and become a professional, which I hope you do, hopefully you will learn to appreciate that. I know it's a concept of the past, but it is one that I think is still important.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[topher1kenobe]

I don't use any QT apps. I don't have QT installed. I run E, and I have gnome installed so I can use Galeon. That's really the only gnome app I use. I use the GIMP, and gaim, but they aren't really gnome apps.

So yes, some people do restrict themselves to one or the other. There's nothing written with QT that I need.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[drinkypoo]

Tell me, is computing all a matter of how much it costs to you? or "just get xxx more of yyy and you're set"? how about engineering elegance? how about not wasting when you don't need to?

Right, and I suppose you're entering this from a Sun SLC with a 200MB SCSI disk, because it does everything that someone needs to do, because you can run emacs and TeX at the same time? Or maybe a PDP/11 with legacy Unix? Come on, we're all being wasteful in the name of convenience.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Phleg]

(who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

I restrict my applications to those in the GNOME project (or, at the very least, those using GTK2). I find that I can work far better when my applications share the same look, feel, and general behavior. Far more so, that is, than when I attempt to take advantage of the slight-to-nonexistent benefits of some KDE applications over GNOME ones.

My one exemption, however, is Kile, to which there appears to be no GNOME equivalent.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Turmio]

do we look like stupids forcing users to have more memory to load several huge sets of similar libraries *just because* or what?
Don't like it? Don't use it. Nobody's forcing you or anyone use it. It's simple as that. But no matter what, don't bitch it if you're not willing to help. Thanks.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?

Gentoo users on P133s, who *really* don't want to have to compile up the (Qt|Gnome) libs.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[nihilogos]

Like we didn't have enough waste of memory with Qt/kdelibs and GTK/Gnomelibs having to be both loaded in memory most of the time (who restricts his choice to either Qt programs or GTK programs, but not both?)

Join the 21st century. At $130 for 512MB of DDR2 who gives a crap about wasting memory any more?

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy, its called Mac OS X. One graphical interface, all apps conform and are very consistent. No more memory waste.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[DaCool42]

Until you want to run an X11 app (which could be using any number of toolkits) or you want to run a classic app (which requires a whole second layer of OS).

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[abigor]

Bravo. I love it when these wankers who sit at home writing command-line mp3 players in Perl pull the old "you've never written code, so shut up!" line. But you're wasting your time talking about elegance and so forth - either people have an idea of this intuitively, or they don't. It's not a concept of the past; instead, it's just not a concept that everyone is capable of sharing.

By the way, your original post was dead-on.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the problem is the GNOME project. They got started because of a really bad case of Not Invented Here, and they've just kept going in that direction. Any time they need a library, they roll their own. KDE at least often uses a thin wrapper around a standard library. (Which is why the dependencies for kdelibs4 are so insane) If the GNOME project would just FOAD already, the Linux desktop effort would be in much better shape.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Dean Kusler]

Join the 21st century. At $130 for 512MB of DDR2 who gives a crap about wasting memory any more?

And hey, there's plenty of petroleum out there, so who gives a crap about driving an SUV instead of a Prius or Civic Hybrid? Just because you can waste doesn't mean you should waste, and no matter how inexpensive or ubiquitous memory (or gas) seems to be, it is in limited supply and it does cost money.

I see your opinion as being patently American, which depresses me to no end about my countrymen.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[BlowChunx]

I was about to recommend TexMaker, but that too is built with Qt...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Erik Hollensbe]

Seriously, if you don't like it, vote with your mindshare and your wallet.

Want unix without the X hassle, the 4 different environments you need to run all the programs that you use, the different desktops, etc, etc, etc?

BUY A MAC.

Mac OS X is the only affordable commercial unix workstation. And as a bonus, it's based on FreeBSD (quite heavily) - which means almost any unix program will work on it with relative ease (mostly a compile) - and if you need X protocol support, you have that too, without the hassle.

Use linux or FreeBSD on your server where you need the real horsies. Get an OS that's actually addressing your desktop needs for your workstation - and manages to support OSS as well; perhaps not in the way that some people here would like it, but it works for me.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Azghoul]

Sheesh, just great, a third political party. Like we don't have enough waste of energy with the Republicrats and Demolicans both running and taking up airtime with their fund raising and attack ads (who restricts his choice to either one party or the other, but not both?)

Really, there are some times where... Ah hell, you get the point.

Let's see, just like 3rd parties, the developers who are working on E are working on it because they don't WANT to work on the existing stuff. There is certainly NOTHING forcing you to get anywhere near their goodness. You don't have to install anything of theirs. You can EASILY AVOID THE BLOAT.

My analogy at the top points to this: The efforts of the E guys are NOT wasted because they likely would NOT be working on Gnome/KDE if they weren't working on E, in the same way that those of us who vote for 3rd parties do so because we don't like the two "standards". It's not a zero sum game!

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[nihilogos]

And hey, there's plenty of petroleum out there, so who gives a crap about driving an SUV instead of a Prius or Civic Hybrid?

There's not plenty of petroleum out there, it cannot be reused (unlike ram), and using it has serious consequences for the health of the environment and the people living in it.

Coincedently I do drive a Civic, and hope to buy the hybrid as my next car.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[hawkeyeMI]

Yeah except once you buy memory it doesn't get used up continuously.

DISCLAIMER: I loathe SUVs and those that drive them.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[mvpll]

I see your opinion as being patently American, which depresses me to no end about my countrymen.

Sorry, you can't blame your countrymen for this one. Small-minded/selfish people everyone suffer from a lack of insight.

"Hey, there has always been 'gas/petrol' at the 'petrol/gas' station, so there always will be, and if there isn't, its the governments fault."

or

"I have 'gas/petrol' in my 'gas/petrol' tank, not my problem if you don't have any in yours, hmm, what are you going to do with that pointy stick?"

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[brank]

The main strength of the EFL isn't the widget set. The EFL does a lot of cool things that Qt and GTK programs can't. For example, everything is based around Evas canvas(es), an EFL desktop can use all the cool eye-candy effects that the rest of X is still waiting on.

And it's all written in Raster's hand-optimized code, so it's quite a bit faster than current XRender. And it runs on handhelds, too, so you can take all that with you on your iPAQ.

For example: DVD player in 18 lines of C, RSS feeds embedded in the desktop.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[vandan]

FYI, I do real-time programming and I port the Linux kernel on embedded processors. You've probably already seen my name out there on the net, but of course this is /. and I'm not going to tell you who I am.

Sure you are. And I'm the Emperor of NASA. In my spare time I work on 3 programs at once, with each hand using a different keyboard, and my nose typing on the third keyboard that is being held above the ground with my levitation skills.

For example, I don't give a rat's ass about Gnome. I think Gnome, as an environment, is as ugly as it gets. But I need to use GIMP and Gnomeeting. There's no Qt/kde equivalent: what do I do? do without them? of course not, and you know it full well.

GTK is good enough for everyone else. If you don't like it, stop hacking the Linux kernel and port the Gimp to your own widget toolkit that fits inside 640kb. You are just going to have to deal with applications using memory, and you know it full well.

Tell me, is computing all a matter of how much it costs to you? or "just get xxx more of yyy and you're set"? how about engineering elegance? how about not wasting when you don't need to?

Fine. Go sit in the corner and flog yourself over your own widget toolkit that fits inside 640kb and let everybody get on with their computing. How about getting with the times dude. 256MB in the minimum on new PCs. Anyone geeky enough to be running Linux should have at least twice that - minimum.

You seem to have a problem with what the rest of us call 'progress'. Memory requirements increase. Deal with it. I'm not sanctioning the need for PCs running any more than 256MB, which is dirt-cheap these days, and ( as I've already pointed out ) is the minimum you can get a PC with these days. I'm just saying that the problem you're describing doesn't exist with hardware that is even 3 years old. And *someone* has to be working on software for today's and tomorrow's computers.

Your attempt to come across as mature with your "concept of the past" and "how about engineering elegance" bullshit - in light of the few MBs we're talking about here - just shows how out of touch with reality you really are. Did you know that the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries have been ported to devices such as the Sharp Zaurus? Memory efficiency is certainly at the top of their list of requirements to get the libraries and applications running with respectable performance. Perhaps you should research a little more before you go karma-whoring for gullible moderators that have a soft spot for hacker-wannabes.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Phleg]

Texmaker was renamed to Kile =)

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Nimey]

Someone who needs that $130 to pay for groceries or the rent?

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory is cheap (kindof). Cache isn't.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[killjoe]

"which means almost any unix program will work on it with relative ease (mostly a compile) - and if you need X protocol support, you have that too, without the hassle."

Bah. True but only half true. Sure you can attempt to compile anything you want but lacks a real official package system. If you have any dependencies then you have to download each one and compile it too.

Sure there is fink and darwinports but both of them are very small compared to the freebsd ports or apt,

I like my mac but don't pretend that it's somehow easy to get your favorite OSS program working on it. It's possible but it's such a pain in the ass it's not worth doing.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[shadoi]

Yes... the atrocious memory wastage, oh wait. WRONG. The complete core EFL is 1.3 MB (stripped).

I know it's a concept that's hard to grasp, but actually looking at something and TRYING IT OUT before you critique it is usually a good idea.

For those interested:
http://enlightenment.org/pages/efl.html/
http://enlightenment.org/pages/cvsnotes.html/

Try out some of the cool apps people have started working on like:

• entrance - EFL based Login Manager (gdm replacement)
  
• engage - OS X-like dock with smooth scaling.
  
• entice - EFL based image viewer.
  
• evidence - File manager with TONS of features.
  

Go to the main enlightenment.org page and CVS for lots more...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[shadoi]

Oops, correct links:
http://enlightenment.org/pages/efl.html
http://enlightenment.org/pages/cvsnotes.html

mea culpa.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Erik Hollensbe]

I guess I haven't had a problem, dunno. The majority of all the problems I have had were with applications that relied on STL support for the C++ side of gcc, although migrating from Apple's gcc to fink's gcc changed that problem considerably.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

what are you going to do with that pointy stick?

Poke you with it.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[IamTheRealMike]

Want unix without the X hassle, the 4 different environments you need to run all the programs that you use, the different desktops, etc, etc, etc?

Last time I checked MacOS X had at least 3 different environments loaded at once: BSD, Carbon and Cocoa + whatever custom libraries and toolkits individual apps use (and it's been shown that apps like iTunes do stuff like reinvent stock widgets internally!).

So recommending somebody who is complaining about memory usage to buy a Mac is simply mindless advocacy which just makes you look uninformed. After all, this is the OS where the stock media player is about 60MB.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[nanoakron]

Who the fuck thinks this is +5 Insightful?

It's just the insight you'd expect from combining an arrogant linux zealot who doesn't care about product coalescence to reduce redundancy with a bloated american 'honey, let's take the SUV to the ATM tonight' approach to the world.

Beautiful to see in all its unadulterated corpulence.

-Nano.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[flynn_nrg]

I'll just ignore your ad hominem attacks. From the rest of your comment:

GTK is good enough for everyone else.

No, it isn't. GTK+ 1.2 is enough for almost everyone, it's light and fast. GTK+ 2.x is incredibly slow. Don't even try to use a GTK+ 2.x app over a remote X session. Qt doesn't exhibit this problem, despite being programmed in the "slower" C++ language.

How about getting with the times dude. 256MB in the minimum on new PCs. Anyone geeky enough to be running Linux should have at least twice that - minimum.

My current desktop is a dual PIII with 384MiB of RAM that I bought in November 2000. I have no reason to fork $600 for new hardware (mobo/CPU/mem) when the one I have does the job. I've been using free operating systems for all my server and desktop needs since 1995, so I'm hardly a newbie. You're also forgetting that there are plenty of places that use old hardware, not everybody lives in the USA. Free software has the nice side effect of making high quality software available for everyone at no cost but if it continues getting bloated you end up having to spend cash on hardware.

GTK+ 1.x is great, GTK+ 2.x still has a long way to go, IMHO Qt 3.3 is the best toolkit these days in terms of speed and memory usage. And this is comes from somebody who hates C++ but who has decided to use Qt on new projects instead of GTK+ 2.4.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

News Flash!

X is an app. As is gnome, kde and E

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[ocelotbob]

I'm sorry, but I can get a much faster, nicer looking workstation that can do more than just run photoshop with my Linux box. I'd rather deal with the occasional klunkiness that is Linux than the ugly-ass gulag that is OS X.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

"256MB in the minimum on new PCs. Anyone geeky enough to be running Linux should have at least twice that"

Congratulations. That's just the attitude that's keeping Linux off the corporate desktop in a big way. "omg buy more memory! all new PCs can run it so I'll totally avoid the millions upon millions of machines that AREN'T new!".

You're saying anyone running Linux should at least have 512M. Yeah, I wonder why it has hardly any desktop penetration. (BTW, I do use Linux and like it).

Heavens above. There are MASSES of boxes out there with 32, 64 and (rarer) 128M RAM in. Millions and millions in businesses around the world. And yet they can't run Linux, because if you try to run KDE/GNOME, OOo and Mozilla at the same time on them, they're crushingly slow.

Wasn't Linux supposed to get us off the upgrade treadmill? And now, if you want a proper fully-fledged Linux desktop with decent apps, you need more memory than even WinXP demands?

And you can't see the problem with this?

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

I loath people who loath SUVs.

It's fucking retarded to hate a inanimate object or make generalitions about people based on the type of car they drive. Many of the people that drive SUV's need a big car. They don't make big cars like station wagons no more. They make big SUVS.

But then again I KNOW that most people who do drive SUV's are morons. I drive a medium sedan.

I actually never paid more then 1500 dollars for any car, my favorite was a 4x4 that I paid 300 dollars for at a junkyard. Absolutely wonderfull, I could hit curbs going 40 in that thing and it didn't even faze it. I love small cars, but not because of the gas.

But who is the bigger moron, they guy that drives SUVs because he has a small penis, or the guy that hates SUV's because he has a small mind and is easily manipulated by phony enviromentalist agenda?

To me, they are both fucking morons.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Join the 21st century. At $130 for 512MB of DDR2 who gives a crap about wasting memory any more?"

Ironically, in another thread you'd probably be talking about Windows' "bloat".

Anyway, can't you see that this kind of attitude is TERRIBLE for Linux's desktop adoption? There are millions upon millions of boxes in businesses out there with 32, 64 and 128M RAM, and they simply can't run a fully-fledged Linux desktop (GNOME/KDE + Moz + OOo) without slowing to a dire crawl. So we've lost a HUGE opportunity to take market share from Microsoft.

Similarly, home users don't want to be on the upgrade treadmill. If they have to go out and buy more memory each time a new round of distros appears, how are we any better than Microsoft?

The total lack of attention to bloat and resource usage is hurting Linux in a big way, and your comment pretty much sums it up. We've gone from a fast, sleek and compact OS to this bloat riddled mess -- with people saying "Join the 21st Century" and "buy 512M RAM" because it runs like shit on my only-three-year-old hardware.

And you wonder why Linux is suffering on the desktop.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[say]

You seem to have a problem with what the rest of us call 'progress'. Memory requirements increase. Deal with it. I'm not sanctioning the need for PCs running any more than 256MB, which is dirt-cheap these days, and ( as I've already pointed out ) is the minimum you can get a PC with these days.

This is true, obviously, but doesn't add to your conclusion. He argues that code should not be _unnecessarily_ bloat, not that you shouldn't make new features for new computers. He argues for elegance and efficiency, you argue for non-elegance and non-efficiency because that doesn't stop new computers.

Well, when these new computers are three years old, and Enlightenment 20 comes, the owners of those computers might have been able to run it if it was more efficient.

On the other hand, efficiency is a huge sales trick for open source software: Norwegian schools are now joining the Skolelinux project, not because it provides cheaper software (Windows school licenses are dirt-cheap anyway), but because it works on their legacy hardware.

Innovation should not compromise with the idea of saving resources. Far too many times have humanity made that mistake. Computer cycles are also resources, at least as long as 95% (yes, it's true!) of the world's population hasn't even got a computer.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[hawkeyeMI]

How about loathing SUVs not because of the environmental issues but because I don't desire to be killed by them? I drive a compact car, something which in a city is often helpful for parking, squeezing between cars on narrow streets, etc. Some people unfortunately seem to feel that they need to drive SUVs by themselves to get to work and back in the city.

I'll grant you that SUVs are useful in some situations and for some people. Guess what -- most of the time the people I see driving them will likely never encounter those situations.

I don't know if you're familiar with game theory, but there's something called the Prisoner's Dillemma, wherein two suspected partners in crime are apprehended and separated. Each is told that ratting out the other will lighten any sentence they might get, but if both rat each other out they're screwed. The best choice is for both to keep their mouths shut, because the prosecutors need their testimony to get anywhere, but as human nature would have it, in practice, they almost always both rat each other out, figuring that the other will have done the same.

This is how it seems to work with SUVs. The most common excuse I hear for driving them is, "I feel safer." Yes, they're safer relative to people like me in regular old cars. However, SUVs have been shown to be more likely to roll over in accidents, especially where vehicles of similar size are concerned. In other words, an accident between two SUVs is more dangerous than between two cars. The safest route would be for everyone to drive cars. However, some people 'sell' out for a little marginal safety for themselves and get SUVs, thus endangering everyone else. Eventually you have 50% or more of the cars on the road as SUVs, very dangerous for car drivers, and dangerous even for SUV drivers as now they have more 'peers' on the road, peers which in an accident are mutually more dangerous than if they drove cars.

SUVs are a huge problem, no pun intended. Let's just hope oil prices go up and hit their drivers where it hurts.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Dean Kusler]

I can't agree with you more on this, at least. I ride a motorcycle to work and school every single day down a relatively busy interstate. I actually feel much safer on my motorcycle than I do when driving the same road in a car, because I have so much room and I can change direction/speed much more quickly than the cars and trucks out there.

As far as the "utility" of SUVs, my view is that they are just an attempt to masculinize the minivan. I would hazard a guess that over 90% of SUV owners would be served just as well, if not better, by a minivan or a wagon.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[BlowChunx]

That's oddd...they just released another update on 8/15/2004 - under the name TexMaker...

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

What steps do you believe are necessary for the production of DRAM?

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[vandan]

Congratulations. That's just the attitude that's keeping Linux off the corporate desktop in a big way.

It didn't keep it off our desktops. In fact I would argue the opposite. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP having been out for years, and Longhorn just around the corner, no-one is going to start a Linux rollout with a desktop full of gtk 1.x apps. Memory-efficient as gtk 1.x might be, it looks like barf compared to Windows. If you want to sell your Linux solution to people who are also aware of the Microsoft alternative ( and I think we're talking about most people here ), you have to be able to show them something that looks like it was written this century. You also have to be able to assure them that it's under active development and will be support down the track. If you can point me to ONE corporate Linux migration using gtk 1.x, I will eat my words. It's just not happening.

Heavens above. There are MASSES of boxes out there with 32, 64 and (rarer) 128M RAM in. Millions and millions in businesses around the world. And yet they can't run Linux, because if you try to run KDE/GNOME, OOo and Mozilla at the same time on them, they're crushingly slow.

I haven't seen any, and if there were any left, I'd be betting things are starting to break down on them. The hard disks for example - you can't tell me that an IDE disk from what ... 5 years ago ... is still running reliably. None of ours here lasted that long, and we had a wide variety of disks from a wide variety of retailers.

If people must use 32MB computers ( and I'll assume that they have a 200Mhz processor or less in them ) then they can run gnome 1.x and gtk 1.x applications. There are plenty of them. The original poster was complaining about running apps like the Gimp, which since version 2 requires gtk 2.x ( shock, horror ). He misses the point that he's not required to use version 2, and also that anyone running the Gimp really should be thinking about upgrading their computer if they've only got 32 MB. But if they refuse, version 1.x of the Gimp is *plenty* good enough for them.

I still don't see the problem here. If enough people want apps built around lightweight widget toolkits of yesteryear then they can damned-well make them. The majority of us will not think twice about installing gtk 2.x and apps written for it, and won't be particularly concerned when we hear our apps won't run at a respectable pace on a 32MB machine. You can only just barely get Windows NT 4.0 running on a 32MB machine. People running 32MB machines are no doubt running Windows 9x or earlier, and if they move to Linux they should install be pleasantly surprised with Gnome 1.x. They will, however, be absolutely horrified with OpenOffice, so I don't see the relevance of complaining about gtk 2.x when they can't even get an office suite running.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[Erik Hollensbe]

Ok, lets get real and not stretch the truth then.

I was only talking about X. So that leaves out BSD as it has no GUI, at all.

If you don't use legacy (OS 9 or earlier) applications, Carbon is out too. Of course, none of the systems that I was comparing against even need to consider emulating a completely different OS. I consider that a bonus for those who need that kind of support - and for those that don't, something that never is installed in the first place unless it's done manually - something you'd know if you installed the system yourself.

That leaves one.

As for custom widgets, last I checked this happens with GNOME and Qt, and the Win32 API as well. One only needs to look at things like GtkGLArea, the Qt database additions (because Qt is *much* more than just a GUI toolkit - which has good and bad repercussions), threaded and non-threaded versions of Qt (which if you want full app coverage have to be installed - separately), and that's not even getting to the "glue" widget tookits such as wxWindows, Glade, etc. And of course, one of the top complaints in the past for IT administrators was that versions of Office install a new set of widgets that overwrite portions of the Win32 widget API, causing havoc for other applications. I won't even bother touching on the various versions of Qt and GTK that need to be installed on each machine for even marginal app coverage.

And if we're going to compare other toolkits - not only do you not understand from a developer's viewpoint why toolkits are used even if they're non-standard on the system, you're obviously grasping at straws.

You should also note, that I made no attempt to even address memory usage of the Mac - as anyone who uses it knows it's a memory hog. I'm running on 768M and it runs great - it wasn't as happy under 256M, but certainly not unusable. You might also note that with rare exception do these widgets deviate - actually, only the new iTunes/Quicktime do on my system, and those are a shared library under Panther, as both applications come with it. They still use the Cocoa API, AFAIK. If they don't, their behaviors still work very similar. One can easily witness this through trivial use of AppleScript to control the applications - something that will never happen with the current state of X.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[nihilogos]

Product coalescence? Diversity is a *feature* of the open source method. Two different desktop environments for linux have emerged because two groups have different ideas about what they want in a desktop environment. You'd think people would be happy they have a choice.

And from the end users point of view, both are themeable to the point where they look exactly the same. Only a zealot would rant about having redundant libraries loaded into memory. The core kde libraries (including qt) on my system come in at a whopping 6.8M. That's less than *one percent* of my memory.

Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...

[IamTheRealMike]

I was only talking about X. So that leaves out BSD as it has no GUI, at all.

So? It's still loaded, and still taking up resources (both machine and human resources). I don't see how the X-ness of it or not is relevant.

If you don't use legacy (OS 9 or earlier) applications, Carbon is out too.

No, most interesting Mac apps use Carbon. That includes iTunes, QuickTime and the Finder.

. One only needs to look at things like GtkGLArea, the Qt database additions

GtkGLArea isn't a "customized widget" as there is no equivalent in GTK at all. I never said having new widgets was bad, I said creating exact duplicates of already existing widgets that are specific to your app is bad.

Glade isn't a widget toolkit.

There are only two versions of GTK that need to be installed to run pretty much every GTK app ever written, so I'm not sure what your point is here. Certainly GTK 1.2 is not being used by new apps anymore, unlike Carbon which is being used by new apps - typically the large, industrial strength apps use it over Cocoa.

You've confused a lot of different things in your last paragraph : X is not a scripting system much as Quartz is not. Systems like AppleScript do indeed exist - the existance of KDEs DCOP scripting system clearly proves you wrong on that count. iTunes and QuickTime do not use Cocoa. Quite a few apps use custom widgets in a way that the user doesn't notice, however they are still eating up resources to exist - the calendar program does this for instance. So does Safari.

I'm afraid most of your points aren't grounded in technical reality ....

Damnit mods...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this Interesting/Informative/Insightful? The parent said nothing about *why* it was innovative, *what* they do differently -- it's like modding this comment +1 informative for saying "I tied my shoes this morning". Great! This sucks when I try to read slashdot at +4 and still get garbage like this that tells me absolutely *nothing*!

Re:Damnit mods...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't try for first post *and* make a detailed post. As it was, he put so much detail in there, he missed FP.

The 90's called and they want their WM back!

[n2rjt]

Seriously, I tried E when it was young, and wasn't impressed. It didn't help that my Linux box was a 486DX2 @ 66MHz. I used olvwm or fvwm95 back then, before switching to qvwm. The impression I got when seeing Enlightenment running on friends' machines was that it was full of glitz but otherwise no better than the minimal WMs I was running.

A standalone window manager is a thing of the past. Now, it has to be integrated with the desktop environment of choice.

Re:The 90's called and they want their WM back!

[Anonymous Coward]

The 90's called, they want their saying back!

Re:The 90's called and they want their WM back!

[Stephen Williams]

A standalone window manager is a thing of the past. Now, it has to be integrated with the desktop environment of choice.

Unless there is no desktop environment of choice.

Enlightenment and its ilk are aimed at people who still subscribe to the "window manager, a few graphical apps, and a heck of a lot of xterms" way of doing things. I am one such person. Gnome and KDE are probably both wonderful environments, but I like my iconless, xterm-encrusted environment, and I don't want to change.

New releases of Enlightenment thus make me happy :-)

-Stephen

Give us E17 damnit!

[Lisandro]

I've tried the CVS for Enlightenment v0.17, and it looks so sexy i can't wait to give it a shot. The ammount of work the E team is putting onto E17 is incredible.

Who knows, i might even drop XFCE for it if it runs well enough.

Re:Give us E17 damnit!

[sethstorm]

The only problem is that they've dropped it from CVS in 2003 last time I checked. If it didnt have memory leaks when it did work, it worked quite well for what it was.

Re:Give us E17 damnit!

[Lisandro]

Yup, i had the same issues. Still, it looked stunning.

w00t!

[xspatz]

Enlightenment is by far the best wm out there! It's functional and beautiful...which is a combination no one else has. I love E!!!

something

[camcorder]

to test

An E release...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelievable, must have slept for a while. What's next? Doom III?

Well... gnome ran on a lot of things.

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME was used on a lot of things back then. Some of us used Windowmaker+GNOME; others, Enlightenment+GNOME; some IceWM+GNOME, etc.

Screenshots?

[polyp2000]

Anyone got any decent screenshots of this release?
The ones on the website look ugly.

Nick (wanting to see something special!)

The Problem...

[polyp2000]

The problem with enlightenment is...

That most of the common desktop applications are written for gnome or kde. Thus ruining the look and feel. I tried "e" a few of years ago and it looked good by current standards, but by todays standard I'm afraid the promise it holds has become dated. Maybe if the toolset were more integrated and it didnt have such a "grainy" look "e" might be a contender. IMHO its looking old fashioned.

One of the nice things "back in the day" were the animations and the window transparency implemented in "e" now these features are in KDE (and presumably Gnome) enlightenment doesnt really have much to offer. Its not as lightweight as some of the more popular lightweight WM's and performance hungry for the more integrated heavyweights (Gnome / KDE )

I like the fact that Enlightenment is there , but I think its moment has passed now, something more drastic needs to happen because it seems to me that is is stuck halfway between the need for a lightweight WM and a heavyweight one.

Nick ...

E will need KiKaZ themes! Calling all skinners!

[Provocateur]

The last theme I installed on E16.4 was 23 oz of glass, it's like having a Mac face on a Linux box. Have ripples running on a 4x1 desktop on a lo-spec Thinkpad, with enough resources left to loop my favorite trailers to the tune of techno.

Pixelmoose if you're listening, don't forget to a)port your theme to E16.7.1 b) make a 23oz of glass xmms skin...

Re:Be curious to find out if the code's any cleane

[allenw]

... and Raster would probably agree. :)

Getting the code to run on Sun's C compilier back in the DR13 days was painful but possible and totally worth it due to the speed improvements. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the speed junkies gave up on E at/near the time of DR14 due to the extensive use of gcc-isms in the hacked up configure script and the code... and that doesn't even take into account some of the... err.. interesting methods that Carsten chose to implement some of his ideas.

Never could get into it

[Mr. Cancelled]

This isn't a troll, or at least it's not meant as one, but try as I might, I could never get into using Enlightenment. And from the fact that Gnome and KDE get the majority of the press/developers/software, I'm guessing I'm not alone in this impression.

Don't get me wrong: Enlightenment is certainly a powerful and capable windowing system, and there have been some fairly original looks/themes released for it, but, to me at least (he says, carefully circumventing the Troll under the bridge) it's not a GUI that a new user coming from the Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world can immediately begin using. Or configuring.

(This is where all the Slashdot/Linux "elite" begin to quote my thread for their 'RTFM', and 'How could it be any simpler than xxxx?' responses)

When I first began investigating Linux all those years ago, Enlightenment themes and screenshots were all the rage. KDE and Gnome were promising, but Enlightenment was how all the coolest geeks seemed to produce such cool eye candy-based desktops. But to a Linux newbie like me, coming from an Amiga/Dos/Windows background at the time, it was totally alien. It was just too much to have to begin learning Linux, and a totally different GUI like Enlightenment, both at the same time. So Enlightenment went goodbye after way too many wasted hours trying to become productive and look good doing it.

So flash ahead several years (last year, to be exact), and a much more Linux-savy version of Me decided to give Enlightenment shot again. I hadn't kept up with it, and had meanwhile become an avid KDE fan, but I wanted to try something different, and figured that Enlightenment had to have matured by this time, to a point wherein I could grasp it easier. I mean... KDE had came so far in this time.

So I boot it up after installing the latest version, and ,after booting, am faced with the identical look and feel of the last time I used it. Nothing (on the surface, at least) had changed! No icons... Just a couple of odd, pager-like boxes.

Now... I'm not expecting enlightenment to change their way and become KDE or Gnome or anything. But they've gotta realize that virtually any converts to their window manager will be coming from an environment such as KDE, Gnome, Windows, etc. It's a totally different methodology from that of Enlightenment. You'd think that one of the first things that you'd see on a default desktop would be a "how to get started" type of document.

Yeah, yeah... I know. RTFM. Yes, I also know that I can configure Enlightenment to look and interact like whatever I want it to, but I'd kind of expect "something" to push the new user in the right direction.

But other things were not impressive also. Fonts, in paricular, looked poor when compared to the more popular window managers around.

So flash foward to todays announcement here on Slashdot, and so I decide to take a look at Enlightenments page to see if anything's changed yet. I see this. Come on... For crying out loud, someone get Enlightenment a PR director. If the programmers hope to grow the userbase of their window manager, they really should make it a bit more accessible. If an "intro level" of usability isn't a possibility, then how about a simple "Introduction to Enlightenment" document, or walk through? Something to offer the new user a glimpse of the power of Enlightenment. And without requiring them to hunt it down, or surf out to a website.

At least make the default font's look better. This is a good example of both the default look of Enlightenment, and it's default fonts. Conversely, this is the default look of KDE. I'm not saying that KDE's superior (to me it is, but who cares), but the default look, which all of us have seen many times before, and consi

Re:Never could get into it

[topher1kenobe]

I've used E for a long long time. I don't use gnome or kde because they LOOK heavy. The bars, the widgets, everything feel fat.

As far as I'm concerned, E is perfect the way it is. I couldn't care less if there's never another release. I couldn't care less if no-one else ever uses it.

It's fast, stable, powerful, flexible, and pretty. No, it's not for people who don't like to tweak. I like to tweak. Gnome and KDE are for those who just want to get work done, and not mess around on their computer. I like to mess around with it, make it stand up and talk (I have a COOL computer ;) ).

So really, if you don't like it, don't use it. Don't tell anyone else to use it. Tell people other things are better. I really don't mind in the slightest.

Re:Never could get into it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you had such a problem, I came from Atari/Amiga/DOS/Windows over to linux when as you said Enlightenment was all the rage. I ran lightstep on Windows before though, so maybe this is why I didn't have as much trouble? Or because I've used next, mac, and several other systems?

I failed to get E running my first time, and didn't understand all the build process, but I eventually got there. There is a help screen, for me that was more than adequate documentation. So I don't know what you expect, apparently more. Maybe someone out there will cater to that, but given you can download RPMs that are precomiled, and given that it's documented, if you know a little about running linux, I don't see why it's so difficult?

Re:Never could get into it

[bicho]

take a look at entrance.

Its gorgeous, and more themable than kdm or gdm or any other, and of course, depending on the theme, it pust the processor through its paces...
But its just gorgeous!

Re:Never could get into it

[Mornelithe]

According to the text of the article, they switched the default theme to winter, so it looks more like this by default. Those screenshots on the E website are (if you look close) from E 16.0, and this is 16.7.

Also, I don't know what you heard, but E16 is just a window manager, like Fluxbox or KWin or Metacity. It isn't an never was trying to be a whole desktop environment. In fact, it used to be the default window manager for Gnome before Sawfish replaced it.

In other words, if you want panels and desktop icons and stuff, then you need to run Gnome or KDE with Enlightenment as the window manager, or you need to use iDesk or something like that to provide that extra functionality. E by itself is closer to the minimalist window managers.

E17 will be more like Gnome, KDE or XFCE, but that's been years in the making and may yet be years before it's released. But E16 was never trying to be like that. What you're doing is sort of like complaining that Fluxbox doesn't do everything that KDE does. E isn't designed to do fancy stuff out of the box and be GUI configurable in all aspects. That's what KDE and Gnome are for.

Re:Never could get into it

[Anonymous Coward]

For crying out loud, someone get Enlightenment a PR director. If the programmers hope to grow the userbase of their window manager, they really should make it a bit more accessible. If an "intro level" of usability isn't a possibility, then how about a simple "Introduction to Enlightenment" document, or walk through? Something to offer the new user a glimpse of the power of Enlightenment. And without requiring them to hunt it down, or surf out to a website.

There's an awesome intro-level introduction. You download the docs from where you downloaded e. Install the docs, and when you fire up e, go to the main menu (middle-click), and click "Help." Anyone who bothers to download the docs can figure it out, with or without outside help.

Re:Never could get into it

[CAIMLAS]

To be more specific, E17 has been years in the remaking.

They've been quite far into awesome development progress when Mandrake and Rasterman get the inspiration to scrap the code base and do a "rewrite". I was using E CVS snapshots 3 years ago that were more advanced, more featureful, and more pretty than what's currently available.

I suspect the reason why E17 isn't catching up to where it used to be is because a lot of the developers have left. EFM was getting really, really nice, and they scrapped the code base. I've got a friend that was working on it. He left shortly afterwards. Rasterman and Mandrake are apparently impossible to work with, between this and their moving around the world, etc.

Excentric is the word, people.

Re:Never could get into it

[doshell]

Don't get me wrong: Enlightenment is certainly a powerful and capable windowing system, and there have been some fairly original looks/themes released for it, but, to me at least (he says, carefully circumventing the Troll under the bridge) it's not a GUI that a new user coming from the Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world can immediately begin using. Or configuring.
[snip]

This boils down to a very simple thing: one of the great problems of most free/open source software is the lack of *good defaults*. The only way we can make Joe Sixpacks adopt Linux as their desktop is to make sure it will Just Work(TM) for the first time they switch their computer on, without having to tweak any settings at all (while, of course, allowing power users to do so if they want to).

Perhaps Enlightenment is not a very flagrant example of this (I don't really think it is meant to compete with Gnome/KDE, it's just quite an innovative WM for those who have the time, willingness and know-how to try it), but nevertheless I feel I see this over and over again every time I try out some new piece of FOSS.

Re:Never could get into it

[ajs]

I've used E for a long long time. I don't use gnome or kde because they LOOK heavy. The bars, the widgets, everything feel fat.

And since, as we all know, Gnome and KDE are not window managers, and I believe that E is at least Gnome-compatible, there's no reason to be speaking as if E and Gnome (or KDE for that matter) are equatable.

What's more, Gnome and KDE are both fully themable, and at least in the case of Gnome, that means that you can select pixmaps/SVG, layout and fonts that result in a very E-like look (there are, in fact, several old Gnome themes that were designed to fit in with E more smoothly than the default).

Gnome is a set of libraries that provides for everything from widgets (such as the truly amazing Gnome Canvas which is distantly related to the TK Canvas) to session management to inter-applicaton communication to accessibility features to internationalization and much, much more. Enlightenment is a fine Window manager, and it has some of the other features of a desktop system as well, but let's not forget that most of what a desktop does, it does for applications via libraries, not by controling the display and management of application windows.

What's really cool is

[smartin]

That now hardware is fast enough to run it.

How about make it work ...?

[Atomic Frog]

Enlightenment was/is a really cool window manager. Unfortunately, that is all it. A window manager. A lot of eye candy, a lot of processing power and it doesn't _do_ a heck of a lot when compared with even OS X's Aqua, MS' WinXP, IBM's WPS....

Pretty eye candy is cool, but how about making it do something useful?

Re:How about make it work ...?

[0racle]

Usefull like displaying windows? Like you said, its just a window manager, so thats all it does. Exactly what do you expect that it should do for you to call it usefull?

Wanna hear something dumb?

[Ronnie76er]

I just re-installed linux last night, and enlightenment is my WM of choice...go over to the website....dum dee dum....

It was released today? WTF?

Weird coincidence...ok proceed to mod this down...

Unfriendly developers

[punkrawk19]

I am surprised that they are still continuing. The last time I had a problem with Enlightenment I sent a patch to the developers. I recall being treated like I was wrong and that they don't wrong bad code. So I will have this forever in my mind and think of all the bugs they have made and are unwilling to correct because of their pride.

Re:Unfriendly developers

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall being treated like I was wrong and that they don't wrong bad code.

No, they right bad code.

I'd like to see it use the latest X stuff

[Nailer]

I'd reckon it'd be really nifty nifty if Enlightenment started using Damage and Compositing in the next Xorg releases to handle its transparency. This would also make E hardware accelerated for most folk.

Re:I'd like to see it use the latest X stuff

[jovetoo]

and most likely break compatibility with solaris HPUX, etc...

Re:I'd like to see it use the latest X stuff

[AstroDrabb]

So there is no hardware excelleration for Solaris, HPUX, etc? If not, then I don't think it would matter that a desktop WM supports hardware excelleration. Basically, it means that those OSes are only good for a server, which is basically how it is now. Solaris and HPUX are _not_ very good on modern (read commodity x86 hardware) for a desktop.

Re:I'd like to see it use the latest X stuff

[Nailer]

There's Solaris guys working on Xorg, and HP folk too (dunno if they're HPUX engineers tho).

Furthermore, xorg manages the X standard. The current release is X11R6.7, which occured two months ago. Anyone else is free to implement this standard. They're also more likely to do so as xorg now produces reference implementations. Its likely Sun will implement the current X standard in their X server.

Its likely damage and composite will be included in a post X11R6.7 standard.

So I'm sure both guys running Enlightenment on Solaris will indeed by happy.

New themes ... again and again

[PCM2]

The old default themes (which made the distribution almost 18M in size!) have been replaced with "Winter" by rephorm.

One of the things that always bugged me about E was that when you installed a new version, everything would look different. I would mostly pick one theme from the defaults that came with it, but when I'd go to update to the latest version, that choice would be gone. Yes, there's no denying that some really slick graphic design went into some of those interfaces... but when the initial "ooh, ahh" of E was over with, I wanted to get some work done. Consistently inconsistent UI isn't really conducive to that.

from their faq...

[Chuck Bucket]

• Do people still use DR16?
  Yes! Hundreds of people use DR16 daily, possibly thousands. As more and more users move to Linux and other UNIX platforms they are becoming aware of Enlightenment and making it their window manager of choice. As KDE and GNOME pick up more and more steam it becomes harder to find a powerful, yet elegant window manager for the power user who wants simplicity, flexibility and functionality. Enlightenment is often emulated, but never duplicated. Many of the users who have left E for Fluxbox or Sawfish have eventually come back to the frey."

100s? Even they should give themselves more credit. I'll try this release, but think I'll be stuck with Openbox at least till I can try e17, but I appreciate that they're still rolling; choice is good.

CBV

Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Another XFce user :)

XFce is awesome! Gotta love the CVS.

Can't wait for the 4.2 stable release.

Tranparency in KDE?

[loqi]

Am I just ill-informed, or does KDE not have any transparency worth mentioning? Having a console whose background is a filtered version of the desktop background, updated by position, is nothing to write /home about.

Re:Tranparency in KDE?

[koekepeer]

oh like in eterm? :P

pseudo transparency is not exactly a nice solution, but it's all that's possible with the current version of X. keith packard is working on integrating true alpha blending in the x server, but it's rather resource intensive i understood.

if you look at what the E team is doing with their new EFL framework, you'll be impressed. they use a canvas (evas) that does true transparency. on the current X server (and much faster than via the render extension), but also on the framebuffer, etc. raster is working with embedded systems atm, looking much further than just an X11 windowmanager.... plenty of nice things to come from the E-team, it seems :)

Re:Tranparency in KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

pseudo transparency is not exactly a nice solution, but it's all that's possible with the current version of X. keith packard is working on integrating true alpha blending in the x server, but it's rather resource intensive i understood.

I'm running the xorg 6.8.0 RC2 and the alpha blendings are completely hardware accellerated through my geforce. BTW, this xorg-version is about to be released these days. (release date is actually today!)

Read the manual.

[Andy Dodd]

Gentoo's Portage documentation is pretty nice.

Try:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -p enlightenment

Make sure it's not going to install some hideously unstable library in that cast.

Or edit /etc/portage/package.keywords, package.mask, and package.unmask. (They may need to be created.)

For example, package.keywords might have:
x11-themes/ethemes ~x86
to unmask unstable versions of ethemes on x86 systems
and
x11-wm/enlightenment ~x86
to unmask "unstable" versions of E.

Re:Read the manual.

[hawkeyeMI]

I emerged it just now with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

Not one problem (on my system anyway) and I'm typing this in it right now.

E and configurability

[Andy Dodd]

FYI, E was THE original themable WM.

The whole idea of pixmap-themed WM decorations (and later, pixmap-themed GTK widgets) started with E.

IIRC, the initial development on themable GTK was done by Rasterman.

I ditched E because they went from "configurable WM" to "bloated desktop environment in one package". At least GNOME is modular. (They may have changed these goals...)

Sawfish probably has E beaten in raw configurability now, thanks to the fact that it is both themable AND scriptable.

But I'll probably check E out again, for 2-3 years it was my favorite WM. (Before KDE and GNOME existed.)

cheaky E crew...

[apachetoolbox]

I had just settled for a quiet night, just me, the fags, the vodka...

I never knew!

Re:cheaky E crew...

[CAIMLAS]

I can't be sure, as I don't know wher ethat came from, but I seem to recall that one of the E folks was a brit.

IIRC, they call cigarettes 'fags' over there. As in, "I'm going to go suck a fag, you want to come?"

Hopefully this can be confirmed/denied by an authentic brit. :)

Re:cheaky E crew...

[BenjyD]

Yes, fag means cigarette. Although some people use it as a derogatory term for gay people too (like the US), so I'm not sure anyone would actually say "I'm going to go suck a fag, you want to come?" as some people might take it the wrong way...

Mandrake's Speeling

[poopie]

No, they right bad code.

This is way funnier than you even know. Anyone who read Mandrake's code or docs was always assaulted by spelling errors.

Even he acknowledged them and said essentially, "who cares?!" ... Aah. Enlightenment on my SPARC 20, those were the days.

E17 is the future of Linux WMs...

[Tumbleweed]

...and always will be. :)

Addicted to E

[hawkeyeMI]

Sorry for the cliche subject. Anyway, I used E 0.16.x for three years. I had tried a bunch of desktops and settled on E for its usability. Then I was lured away by KDE, which I've been using for just over a year.

This story has inspired me to try using E as my primary again for a while. We'll see, I'll probably go back to KDE, but for now damn does it feel good to be home. :)

now in portage

[Chuck Bucket]

Gentoo users, this is now in portage.

PCB

Standard Gentoo "Don't use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS" post.

[Joseph Vigneau]

Don't use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86", use Mr. Dodd's other suggestion, /etc/portage/package.keywords instead. If you do use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS, and do something like "emerge -D", it will attempt to "upgrade" all of the dependencies of that package...

Best of both worlds

[Dhrakar]

:-) I use both. I have Enlightenment set as my X11 window manager for 10.3 and it works really well (via Fink).

E is going to be a desktop environment

[Trepidity]

0.17, despite the paltry version number increase over 0.16, is not two years in the making so far because they're updating the eye candy on the window manager. It's an entire set of libraries covering basically anything you need to write and run apps, from which a complete desktop environment will also be built.

just to clarify, that's not the one released today

[Trepidity]

This is still just an incremental, long-overdue maintenance release to 0.16. At some point in the past they chucked 0.16 and started from scratch, writing a bunch of libraries in a modular fashion to "do things right", but the project grew quite ambitious and has taken rather longer than probably anyone would've assumed, so eventually someone went back and did some maintenance releases on 0.16, which is what is being released here. I have no idea when 0.17 will come out, although a few of the libraries are finally starting to coalesce, after they were chucked and rewritten from scratch two or three times each.

They might be slow, but they sure as hell do a thorough job.

6 years with E

[tyrr]

Enlightenment has been my desktop of choice for 6 years!
When it comes to eye candy + speed + features + stability there is simply no match. Tight yet pretty and extremely functional E running ShinyMetal theme with Pager and Iconbox has been good to me for all these years.
In fact the reason why there were not that many updates is that it needs none. Everything you need is already there.
Good work guys!

You don't get E

[SmallFurryCreature]

E was never meant to be a replacement for windows. There are two crowds of linux users. Those that want everyone from windows to convert and those that don't give a damn what other people use.

Enlightenment belongs in the latter catogery. KDE and Gnome have a mission and so does Enlightenment but they are not the same mission. Read their site.

It being hard to use is not a problem to the people who use it. That is may be a problem to you is not their problem. This is the hardest to get about opensource. That the programmer doesn't need to give a damn about marketshare or customer satisfaction.

So your last line is right. They don't care and they don't have to. That is freedom. If you want them to care, pay them.

This guy really does go back

[zapp]

He's got a 2 digit ID!

Re:This guy really does go back

[Stween]

And he's only made 91 posts in his time here :)

Re:This guy really does go back

[NoMercy]

I know somone with a K5 ID under 20, but really you only get ID's that low when websites are so new no one knows about them, never know if it'll take off but hey sometimes it happens, my slashdot ID's looking rather low these days though 4 digits would have been nice.

That or as many other places, not giving people access to UID's since it just creates uid pissing contents :)

Re:This guy really does go back

[Glytch]

[...]my slashdot ID's looking rather low these days though 4 digits would have been nice.

Oh, it is. I may not have informative or funny posts, but I'll damn well pass for an old-timer, dagnabbit.

Re:This guy really does go back

[kimba]

People with low UIDs are not necessarily old timers, because the whole login system with UIDs on Slashdot was released well after Slashdot became popular. Those that have short UIDs just were looking at the site on the right minute of the day to get them.

If I recall correctly, I registered my account only very shortly after the login system began, and I have a (comparitively) massive UID.

Re:This guy really does go back

[Anonymous Coward]

I started reading Slashdot before it had UIDs as well and remember when they were introduced, but my own UID is 5 digits. I only got a UID when I realized that you needed one to get stories from all sections to show up on the front page.

pedantic

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, lots of software is Mac only, and so the rest of us miss out.

You use that word but I don't think it means what you think it means...


lots

n : a large number or amount; "made lots of new friends"; "she amassed a mountain of newspapers" [syn: tons, dozens, heaps, mountain, piles, scores, stacks, loads, rafts, slews, wads, oodles, gobs, scads, lashings]

Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Their config script is screwed up!!

[analog_line]

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.


I have plenty of ale in my fridge and the script couldn't find it. Somone let the E guys know. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem!!

Evidence - the enlightenment file manager

[kris]

There is also Evidence, the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots and download the release.

more importantly

[Anonymous Coward]

Tools are cool, some are better than others; but what really matters
is what you do with them.
A desktop is just a tool to use to get at the heart of
the matter, the work you have to do or the fun you want to have.

Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/ ...

[sethstorm]

Well, there is the alternative

Expensive when new, yes. But it supports open source and open standards without the elitist image.And there are other places if you cant stand the expense.

E & XOrg

[POds]

It seems that a some of the eyecandy that has gone into the E libraries has also ended up in the new XOrg release, such as transparency and thumbnails? Just wondering, do you think E will take advantage of the XOrg updates in the future such as the XComposite extension, that allows off screen rendering (i think that was the extension i was thinking off). I know e claims to be fast, but using the stuff in the new X has to be a good thing right?

e17

[itzdandy]

honestly, i'm going to wait until e17 is released. EVERY library and idea i have seen for this DE are quite promissing, and if rasterman and his cohorts can put it together right, it will give linux what it needs to be a top-of-the-line desktop OS.

Re:Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/

[Erik Hollensbe]

heh.

"without the elitist image"

What, are suddenly computers some form of high fashion? I just want to use emacs, firefox and perl and not have to mess with X or anything else regarding the system to get there.

If what others percieve of you determine your choice over a superior technology - perhaps you shouldn't be the one to define "elitist".

I can buy 3 brand new powerbooks for the price of one of those IBM workstations. And they STILL run X.

mac

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah buy a mac, and suffer from the automatic screen brightness tuning feature, which is on all the time even after you turn it off. i hate mac-laptops so much because of it, i hate them i hate them!

Re:Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/

[sethstorm]

What, are suddenly computers some form of high fashion? I just want to use emacs, firefox and perl and not have to mess with X or anything else regarding the system to get there.

The zealotry, and the "more money = guaranteed higher quality" is where I get my reasoning(yes, there is the "you get what you paid for", but expense != guaranteed quality). Well as far as the fashion is concerned, that's a distant 4th after performance, quality, and service.

If you happen to be the kind that isnt in the zealotry mindset but concentrates on the insides, you probably wouldnt care what was at the other end of the screen.

I can buy 3 brand new powerbooks for the price of one of those IBM workstations. And they STILL run X.
Mind that AIX is in the same vein as OS/X as not being free (as in beer) as Linux/[Free|Open|Net|Dragonfly]BSD, but it does have X, GNOME, GCC, and has Firefox- with the option for Linux compatibility.
I knew somebody was going to bring it up, so I did put up the other links for the not-so-new-but-still good hardware.

I'll just sum it up in this phrase - Apple if you have no care to break out the screwdriver, pSeries/RS/6000 if money/weight arent a trouble for you when new.

Re:Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/

[Erik Hollensbe]

Actually, if you want to consider me a zealot, I use FreeBSD, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X for all sorts of different purposes by my own choice.... daily. Consider that.

Perhaps we have a different mindset, which I'm willing to accept - the hardware is only important on my server - where I want stable, well-performing stuff that I can rely on. That includes the software to back it up - while OS X has never given me a reason to think that it's unstable, I'll stick with FreeBSD as my first choice and Linux as a second.

While my short (6 month) term hasn't given me enough time to evaluate apple's hardware from a longevity perspective, I haven't had to open this box yet - it's not a question of needing to anymore. This, I like.

And on my workstation, software is infinitely more important - since I know how to administer my development environment, I know that tech like NFS with the server being reliable hardware is infinitely more important than a workstation with teh same qualities. Also, comparing AIX to BSD requires a rather fuzzy lens, but comparing AIX to Mac OS X is nothing more than saying: "They both have commercial UNIX". There is almost nothing similar about them.

My reason for switching

[slux]

e was actually what got me using GNU/Linux first. I started using Litestep, an explorer replacement for Windows at the time. Going through a few themes, hunting for new ones I noticed a few of the best were ports from enlightenment (BlueHeart, Shinymetal...) and e looked like it had all the features that Litestep was missing because of the limitations Windows placed.

I didn't end up using e for a very long time however. The lack of releases, themes and it actually lacking some features I had come to like in Litestep were my main reasons for switching to GNOME.

I'd like to see e17 be something that takes the themeability and effects of a window manager to a new level again, but what I've been wishing for all these years is a Litestep clone. Guess I should try to delve into the world of windowmanager programming some time.

You're being a bit harsh on OS/X, don't you think?

[msobkow]

Apple has had the foresight to switch over to a POSIX stack, bringing along their GUI and multimedia expertise to *nix platforms.

They need to clean up their security approach before they look like another "gaming over reliability" vendor, but Apple has a very realistic chance to make significant inroads on the corporate desktop.

You can buy MS Office for it, clean, native support from the vendor. No workarounds, no bullshit, and business needs that support if it comes with a believable promise to maintain the security and reliability of the software product. That matters more to business than anyone likes to admit: You must have Excel-compatible macros to deal with other businesses, right from the initial projections used to gain investors.

You can cross compile a bazillion POSIX/ANSI C/C++ applications on OS/X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and literally hundreds of other systems. Apple happens to be the only one that has a GUI as nice (if not nicer) than Microsoft's efforts.

If Apple makes sure they take care of security, I see no reason why a business manager wouldn't prefer an Apple solution to generic Linux. It gets most of the benefits plus full vendor support and a moderate/growing product support catalog.

I used to think Apple was dead myself, but I think they're making the right moves for the future. The same goes for Novell (again, security: eDirectory) and their purchase of SuSE (again, standards: POSIX/ANSI/...)

Linux has potential for a lot of desktop markets, but as long as Apple doesn't get greedy on their pricing I think they have a very viable shot at stepping in to the desktop as a balance between OSS and commercial products.

Personally if I had to choose a desktop solution for the enterprise, I'm pretty sure it would be a coin toss between Apple OS/X and either SuSE or Mandrake with Gnome. (More standards -- Gnome is effectively the new CDE.) Qt/KDE have advantages, too, but my focus is server side with the desktop as a client side requirement. I'm not so much concerned with porting desktop applications as I am with making sure I have access to desktop tools for the users.

P.S. No, I don't have a Mac

[msobkow]

I wouldn't mind having one for cross-platform builds, but I really have no particular use for one myself. I just find most users are more comfortable with the idea of a Mac on their desk than a Linux box.

Plus they can go bug the forums and vendor for support instead of the staff.

Lovely..

[Dodecha]

Lovely, absolutely lovely, maybe i'll switch back to enlightenment now.. been using kde for a little while..

Cool....

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe now they've switched to imlib2 and freetype2 the releases will come faster... unfortunately I don't use it anymore... When I first used linux it was cool to use it, with all the ripples and stuff, but now I just use boring metacity... I do miss the virtual desktops and pagers... but really I just want a minimal enlightenment with a few of the features I want, not a whole other framework... I want to complement gnome, not replace it...
enlitenment - lite version of enlightenment anyone?

E screenshot has been removed

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it says something (good) about KDE that they put enough thought into their representation on the web that /. comments don't cause their screenshots to be re-evaluated.

Or maybe they just have better things to do with their time...

nontrivial is an understatement

[Anonymous Coward]

While 'E' is certainly a very 'pretty' and useful wm, to call it's installation nontrivial is being overly generous. My last attempt at installing E resulted in dependency hell. After the 3rd or 4th level of dependencies I gave up as I had much better things to do with my time.

Re:nontrivial is an understatement

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you installing from CVS? If you are using any of the popular Linux distros, or FreeBSD, or NetBSD(I don't know about OpenBSD personally) it should be real straightforward to install. Just type the appropriate command to your systems package management software, and that should it.

Re:Oh no! (Parent is a troll shill)

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

The parent compares platform-specific binary sizes to broader claims of memory consumption. This is nonsensical.

Re:Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/

[sethstorm]

Actually, if you want to consider me a zealot, I use FreeBSD, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X for all sorts of different purposes by my own choice.... daily. Consider that.
I didnt call you as a zealot, rather that there are people who are more blind to anything but their platform of choice (I deal with Sun and Intel machines as well as the RS/6000's, and I've) seem to muddy the pool.

but comparing AIX to Mac OS X is nothing more than saying: "They both have commercial UNIX".
That's what I was saying, with the point being that they're open. Just that they might be for different people.

Re:You're being a bit harsh on OS/X, don't you thi

[AstroDrabb]

but Apple has a very realistic chance to make significant inroads on the corporate desktop.

I disagree. Apple has no corporate mind share. I have been a developer for 3 fortune 500 companies and never heard Apple mentioned for any reason. Windows, Linux and Solaris I hear about, but never Mac OS. There is no compelling reason for a corporation to switch from mostly MS WIndows based desktops to Mac OS based desktops. The costs per unit for the systems would go up and you lose the large application support. Also, if Mac's made any big gain on corporate desktops, you could be certain that the MS Office suite would suffer under the Mac OS platform. MS would slow development to a crawl for the Mac OS version.

If Apple makes sure they take care of security, I see no reason why a business manager wouldn't prefer an Apple solution to generic Linux. It gets most of the benefits plus full vendor support and a moderate/growing product support catalog.

I don't see that happening. At the end of the day, the per unit cost of a comparable Mac is more then your comparable x86. Linux can leverage the x86 commodity market while a Mac cannot. There is also the lock in. One of the big reasons in the corporate world to look for alternative is the single vendor lock-in from MS. Going to Apple wouldn't change anything. It would make it worse because now your OS _and_ your hardware is from one source. Apple is not big enough to handle the corporate hardware requirements. They couldn't handle the consumer iPod demand, how would they manage to be the _only_ Mac hardware vendor? They also do not offer much in the server space. Do they have any 4-way boxes? I know we have plenty of 4-way x86 servers where I work, anything bigger is usually Sparc. Most companies want to get their desktops and servers from one vendor to get cost savings. We use HP/Compaq for all desktops and almost all servers, and helps us get good deals. Again, Apple just doesn't have a big enough hardware stack for most US corps.

The biggest two things holding back Apple in the corporate world is the single vendor lock-in with hardware/software and cost. Where I work we have 130,000+ employees. Now the majority of them do not get computers, but 1,000's do. We just got good development boxes from HP with 3.0 GHz P4 (HT), 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drives. They were maybe $1,200 each or so. A comparable system speedwise from Apple would be at least $2,0000. So that is a good $800 more per employee/per desktop. $800 * 300 developers = $240,000 more for the Apple solution.

For a corporate desktop user that doesn't need MS Windows, again I don't see Apple turning heads. You can get a good, usable x86 desktop for $500. You cannot touch anything new from Apple in that range. The best you could do would be to get an _older_ G4 that just doesn't keep up with modern x86 desktops. On the software side, the only place mac has n advantage over Linux is with MS Office.

While MS Office has a strangle hold on the corporate office suite, Mac and Linux don't have much of a chance for the typical office desktop (I am not talking servers). There is no cost advantage to switch from MS Windows/MS Office/x86 to Mac OS X/MS Office/PPC. Now for specialty type desktops like for helpdesk or desktops to just run custom corporate software, Linux could have a market, but I don't see any for Mac because of costs. You could stick a bunch of $700 x86 Linux desktops in front of your help desk running a GUI or web-based help deskapp app and save costs. Your not going to touch anything in that price range from Apple.

Re:Oh no! (Parent is a troll shill)

[shadoi]

Riiight. A 200KB library will not take up less memory when used than a 10MB library.

Anyway, it's obvious that in any case it depends on the usage, but if you link to a large library, the memory footprint will be large by default. If you link to a small library, the memory footprint will be smaller, at least to begin with.

Re:Standard Gentoo "Don't use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS" pos

[Andy Dodd]

Note my comment about using emerge -p to make sure it doesn't try to do anything funky.

I've never had ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" cause my system to upgrade dependencies to unstable versions, but it WILL install "unstable" dependencies if they are not installed.

Which is why I always use -p to check that nothing funky will happen.

Re:Oh no! (Parent is a troll shill)

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

You don't even have the slightest idea of what you're talking about.