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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.
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 can't wait till it hits 1.0..
- tristan
nope, everyone is waiting for e17
forget it.
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.
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.
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)
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).
Keep it coming, I've got karma to burn.
Enlightenment - the WM you run when your PC's too fast!
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!~
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
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.
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 had just settled for a quiet night, just me, the fags, the vodka...
I never knew!
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).
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.