E17 Available From CVS

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

Comments

Click a button

[mr_tenor]

Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.

DR 17 Movie

[digitalfallout]

Raster did a short demo movie of the DR 17 wm showing the current iconbar and runtime module handling, here is a mirror www.atmos.org/tmp/e17_movie-00.avi

Let's get some things straight here

[flithm]

There's a lot of stuff being said here about enlightenment, and people need to really understand was Raster is trying to do with E17.

First of all I use E16.7.1 as my WM of choice. I've been using E since I first found it several years ago.

A lot of people don't understand that, why would I use E when there's Gnome or KDE? Well, personally I can't understand why people use Gnome or KDE when there's E, but that's just personal preference.

I'm one of those people who like minimal functionality, uber-flexibility, combined with easy of use, and demands aesthetics above all. E is for me, but I can see why it's not for everyone.

People are scoffing at the poster who said E17 is beautiful and fast by suggesting that without functionality of course it's going to be fast.

Some people are laughing at Enlightenment for being around for 5 years and still not having virtual desktops, pagers, etc.

E16.7.1, the latest stable release, has everything you could ever want from a WM. It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time! The virtual desktop support is second to none. You can even have different layers of virtual screen accessed by using the scroll wheel on the desktop.

E also has the best Xinerama support I've ever seen in a WM, for those of you who are into dual monitors like me.

Now let me address some of things people have been saying about E17. Apparently the poster forgot that this is slashdot and most of the posts will come from people who have never actually used Enlightenment, or who don't know anything about it.

Like many others have said, E17 is a complete re-write, and it's not anywhere near finished. The post is simply an acknowledgment that the window manager code for E17 has finally been put back into the CVS repo. So if you're wondering why it has such limited functionality, it's because it hasn't even been available to be worked on by anyone other than Raster yet!

Some people said that this is not news because it has always been in the repo. Not true. It was in the repo a while back before major rewrites to the foundation libraries, but it got taken out because the changes were too great. Raster had to start again on the WM code.

And finally... why should we care about E17? It is going to be cool... seriously cool. Raster and his team are excellent coders. The reason why it's taking so long is because they're doing it right this time.

The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.

E17 will be worth waiting for. It will be feature-packed. It will be beautiful. And it will be fast.

Re:Let's get some things straight here

[macshome]

The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.

FWIW, the Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.3 is just that, an OpenGL rendered WM.

Re:Let's get some things straight here

[raster]

1. the xserver was severely slowed down thanks to xvidcap hammering x to capture pixels (e17 was runing inside xnest which was running inside x, and xnest basicaly nukes extensions so all the speedups you get on a real x are gone and the extra indirections really hurt). 2 it's encoding a video realtime while e17 running and xvidcap is hammering x to grab pixels, 3. no it wont be faster not animating as the window pops up instantly and reacts instantly - you just get to see the animation. i like it and its insanely smooth "on a real display" the video is just an indication. get it, install it, run it yourself to see what i mean. the video does not do it justice. sure - you can remove the animation - no code changes needed. it's part of the theme. themes can animate and transition as they like. also the "it uses opengl" comments are wrong. it *CAN* use opengl *IF* it inits using opengl to render. we have a perfectly fast software rendering engine that beats the pants off most things around. all the exmaples you see all use the software renderer. no opengl or hardware help. in fact our preferred renderer is software. its 1. more reliable (stability) than opengl, 2. higher quality than opengl or xrender, and 3. in most usage scenarios much faster and smoother than opengl or xrender - even IF opengl is hardware accelerated (due to lock contention, DRI etc).

Interview with Rasterman

[davejenkins]

For anyone wondering what Rasterman has been up to lately (aside from Enlightenment), I sat down with Rasterman last month and have posted my interview here. Rasterman has some interesting thoughtson the Asian market, embedded platforms, and how they will interact with network middleware.

Oh, and he can drink like a fish-- Enjoy!