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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."
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?
:(){
I always thought Elnlightment was the most innovative WM I'd seen.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
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.
I heard they were porting Duke Nukem Forever to D17!!
something interesting i noticed, the group_id on sf is 2, (is this the first sourceforge project ever?!?!)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
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!
Oh wait... what? It's almost september? WTF is going on here...
i can't wait till it hits 1.0..
- tristan
nope, everyone is waiting for e17
forget it.
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.
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.
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)
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!
--
Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
Well, that may be so. However, the topic at hand here is enlightenment not evolution.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
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.
Anyone noticed the title of the song being played on this screenshot? (see the bottom right)
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'.
I don't read replies by ACs.
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).
Where can I find screenshots of this new release?
On the Enlightenment site, under "Screenshots".
-kgj
-kgj
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...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hey, load up Fink and you can have Enlightenment on your Powerbook. Or any of a bunch of other window managers.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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!
When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
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.
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.
I stole this Sig
Unbelievable, must have slept for a while. What's next? Doom III?
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)
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...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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*
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.
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.
,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.
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
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
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...
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.
Gentoo's Portage documentation is pretty nice.
/etc/portage/package.keywords, package.mask, and package.unmask. (They may need to be created.)
Try:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -p enlightenment
Make sure it's not going to install some hideously unstable library in that cast.
Or edit
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I had just settled for a quiet night, just me, the fags, the vodka...
I never knew!
...and always will be. :)
Gentoo users, this is now in portage.
PCB
free ipod and free gmail!
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...
:-) I use both. I have Enlightenment set as my X11 window manager for 10.3 and it works really well (via Fink).
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
He's got a 2 digit ID!
no comment
There is also Evidence, the enlightenment file manager. See the Screen Shots and download the release.
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.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.