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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."
Enlightment has been work in progress for many many years and did include a complete rewrite. Which is OK because Rasterman considers himself an artist not a programmer. As for real world every day use, I'll stick to sawfish.
Does anyone have any screenshots of it that don't look like one of those hacker greetz pages you used to get on pirated Amiga games?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
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Welcome to The Enlightenment Project.
We are dedicated to providing advanced graphical libraries, tools, and environments. Currently, the project is made up of three different components: Enlightenment DR16, The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and Enlightenment DR17. While we are best known for the Enlightenment Window Manager itself there is a long history of providing advanced libraries and tools to support the window manager and other applications, such as Imlib, FNLib, and Imlib2, which extend far beyond the window manager itself in scope. Today, in development toward the DR17 Desktop Shell we have created an entirely new set of libraries and tools that provide more power and flexibility than any other group of graphical libraries available, which we refer to collectively as The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.
Enlightenment DR16
The Enlightenment DR16 window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.6 was release on Nov 2nd, 2003, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more.
Imlib has lived a long life, still in heavy usage today, as one of the most popular image manipulation and rendering libs available. Its development was taken over by the GNOME project and used as GNOMEs rendering engine until it was replaced with GdkPixbuf in GNOME 2.0. It's popularity surpasses just development in C thanks to bindings for several scripting languages including PERL, Python, and Ruby.
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
In developing DR17 it was made clear that we needed an entirely new set of libraries and tools. Raster had a bold vision of what was possible and where he wanted the next release to go, starting with Imlib2 and EVAS, and eventually growing into new libraries largely based on or around EVAS. It became clear that the usefulness of these libraries and tools went far beyond the DR17 release itself, just as Imlib did in DR16. Thus the collective library back-end of DR17 was given the independent title: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, or EFL for short.
The EFL contains solutions for almost any graphical interface task, far beyond just rendering images. EVAS provides a highly optimized canvas library. Ecore provides a simple and modular abstraction interface and advanced event management including timers. Etox provides a complex text layout library complete with theme-able text stylization capabilities (previously Estyle). EDB provides a compact database format for intuitive and easy configuration management, including the storing of binaries. EET provides an integrated and flexible container that ends the traditions of providing themes in tarballs. Edje provides a revolutionary library and tool set for completely abstracting application interfaces from their code, including a complex and flexible method of designing interfaces. EWL provides a complete widget library built on all the other components of the EFL. And more!
Enlightenment DR17
Development Release 17 of the Enlightenment window manager represents an evolution into the next generation of desktop environments: the desktop shell. DR17 will provide integration between files and your environment in a seamless manner while encompassing a graphically rich and flexible architecture. It will not compete with GNOME or KDE, but be a completely new way of visualizing your desktop, based around the EFL which was built from the ground up for this task.
Still in
Stupid question, for which I expect a stupid answer ... having downloaded e16 a while back, and tried it a bit ... how the fuck do I learn to use it?
It has been around longer than 5 years, and if you had ever used it you'd know it has plenty common features (virtual desktops, for one)
I *believe* e17 was a total rewrite, which is why those features are missing...simply because the rewrite hasn't been completed yet.
There was a time, long ago, when Enlightenment was my WM of choice, and WindowMaker played backup, when I needed things to either be a bit more lightweight, or I was working over the network, or whatever.
Nowadays, I want a lot less visually from a WM--I want it to be as unobtrusive and thin as possible. I put up with Gnome/KDE (depends on what machine I'm working on) because of the nicer and nicer applications being built around them, but I dislike all of that extra overhead--"this app depends on *WHAT*?" This is, of course, my personal taste, and nothing more.
Enlightenment, how I used to long for you. I yearned for another release. I ached to spend long nights interfacing with you... but that was long ago. I've grown up, you've chnaged. We've moved apart. Can it ever really work again between us? Can't we just let the past stay the past, beautiful in what it is, but nothing more?
Call me.
-- That tickles!
Enlightenment has been a work in progress since 97 or so I'd guess (been a fan ever since the fvwm-xpm days). Seemed like whenever it would start getting good Rasterman would decide to do a complete rewrite. Not that I'm complaining. I think it's cool that he has all these different ideas that he wants to try out. I guess it's more of a hobby/art project than a realworld solution.
Erm, I hope you're just saying that because you haven't heard anything in the last several years about the several rewrites and the refocusing of the enlightenment project on producing a set of extensive, massively featured libraries for application development with state of the art graphical capabilities and the ability to build complex applications using their components.
The window manager mentioned here is the very start of the "2 lines of code" (a long runnign in-joke) that builds a window manager out of these libraries. If you want a fully featured window manager, e16 is quite mature already.
Fluxbox really isn't a desktop. It's just a window manager. A pretty featureful window manager (which starts to blur the distinction), but a window manager none the less.
Fluxbox has a menu, minimal taskbar like support, tabbed windows, and a place for windowmaker dockapps.
Xfce is a complete and highly modular desktop environment. Unlike Gnome, components are loosely coupled, so you can easily run part of the environment without much overhead.
Xfce includes: A window manager, a taskbar program, a panel with plugins (launchers, menus, workplace switchers), a file manager, a desktop menu with a backdrop system, a session manager, a plugin capable settings manager, and a small application development environment.
There are some other micellaneous toys - calendar, a gtk theme engine, a nice resolution switcher, an iconbox. And the third party apps are growing - a couple of terminal programs, a fine media player, a growing number of panel plugins.
Making fluxbox and it's kin usable winds up requireing I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.
Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
E17 has been around for a very long time, but about a year ago they started a total rewrite, so technically, only 1 or 2 years.
And you must understand, what rasterman, etc are trying to do is a hell of a lot more advanced then anything tried before. They for instance are developing their own composite system instead of using Xorg's, and they do a lot of work optimisation wise.
They have also been developing it to be completely dynamic. In retrospect for instance, the windows start bar, the best you can do is theme it, but it will always be the same. Rasterman and the rest of the enlightenment team are making it so that the way things work on the bar are completely dynamic for instance. An example would be when you put your mouse away from the applications button, it moves to the right (bad example, but you get the point).
So, I hate to say it, but I dont think you realise the real benefits. The default theme cannot show off the full power of enlightenment 17, and you can only see it after using it for a while. And btw, I'm sure they'll add virtual desktops, its still an early alpha. virtual desktops dont take many lines of code...
As a programmer, I actually very eagerly await e17, because the foundation libraries and concepts seem pretty amazing, and believe me, all the other window libraries like GTK and QT are mostly static.. In fact, the library seems so cool that I might be changing the application I'm programming to EFL from gtk
... uses Enlightenment.
E17 forever.
actually, the reason its taken so long is because they have completely made EFL uber dynamic.. Believe me, after trying out entrance (the Enlightenment GDM/KDM/XDM equiv), I just seriously sat there staring at it for 20mins.. They can easily beat gnome/kde.
I personally think KDE and gnome (or GTk/QT) are in need of a rewrite, and many programmers have agreed with me.. GTK# might save GTK, but the C code for it can be hell. I think its extremely promising considering E17 is still barely finished yet.
Take my advice and give at least engage and entrance a try from CVS.. You'll see its very newsworthy
There was an E17 in CVS, this is an all new E17.
Allow me to explain. They had started development a long while ago on E17 which they had put in CVS (this is what you are thinking of). Since then raster has decided to start over. They have been concentrating on the EFL(Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) since then. Today's "release" exciting beause this is our first look at the real E17
my other penis is a vagina
E16 has been quite-usable for a few years now. "Restarting" involves merely restarting the Enlightenment process, which takes a grand total of three seconds on any machine bought in the new millenium, during which time windows lose their positions and borders but are all back when E has finished reloading.
There is a common misconception (or more of a preconception as I doubt most people who hold this opinion have actually tried Enlightenment) that anything pretty must sacrifice speed. E16 (and from what I've seen so far, E17) are very fast to load and don't even register in 'top'. The main reason for this is that Enlightenment is just a window manager, not a desktop environment which has an entire framework of libraries that must be loaded to run the simplest programs. Enlightenment with all its bells and whistles will run faster on an old machine than KDE 2.x series or Gnome 1.x.
It seems that bashing Enlightenment of loading slow has become a Slashdotism as important as saying that Gentoo releases are made sooner than they can be compiled or Natalie Portman's hot grits.
This is just priceless. Really...
pot... kettle... black.
Thanks for pummeling my poor web server with a direct link to my screenshots page, even though it doesn't have any actual E17 screenshots yet. :)
(At least you didn't link to the video, and no-one's gonna find it since it's all slashdotted and everything now!)
Am I a hipster-doofus?
If I were still a Linux desktop user, I'd be using E16 without a doubt. Enlightenment always seemed to just offer more than other X11 window managers; even if it was a bit finicky. After E16 development was turned over to new folks and picked up steam again (making it compliant with the freedesktop window hints and such), it was once again the most advanced window manager available.
But I remember building and running E17 from CVS something like two years ago; and I'm pretty sure it was further along then than it is now. I know Raster decided to rewrite everything from the ground up, but c'mon. This is in no way news. Should they ever actually FINISH - then let us know.
#DeleteChrome
Remember this is a complete rewrite. E16 can do all this, but IMO is getting too old, and slow. The Enlightenment team have been mainly working on all the building blocks at this stage, and not too much on the actual window manager. ;-)
With componets like evas which now has a media player built into it is going to be the best window manager out there.
If they have built it the way they were saying, it can be a fairly lean window manager if you build your theme correctly, without the builtin dvd player.
Give it a try and you'll understand. I used to use Fluxbox a lot, but being only a WM it's rather limited in what it can and can't do. I then moved to KDE, whose interface i loved but was dog-ass slow. From there i moved to GNOME, which was still dog-ass slow, and while it's interface is not as polished as KDEs, it looks (for me) a whole lot better.
:) and sleeker interface overall. Desktop icons are being developed for those who asked for it aswell. It's also one of the more Free Desktop-compliants DE available. It does what it's supposed to do, with zero bloat. In fact, i think the GNOME crew should take a few hints from XFCE.
Now i'm settled with XFCE 4, and i have to say is the first time i've ever been really comfortable with an *NIX desktop enviroment. Think of it as being somewhere between a WM and a DE: it borrows the best from both worlds. XFCE looks much like GNOME, being GTK based, but it just *flies*. In fact, i'm pretty sure that if your system runs Fluxbox well it will also run XFCE well.
The latest XFCE release is major in the sense they've started to polish the weak spots in the design - there's now a nice session manager, better configuration options, more eye candy
Here ya go guys.. I feel sorry for this guy's server
Oh, but it's "fast"... I'm getting so tired of that. I remember when Sawfish came out and everyone loved it because it was so "fast"... then it added support for all of the desktop features everyone wanted and it was deemed too slow. There was a new "fast" window manager called Metacity. Gnome adopted Metacity as its primary window manager because they didn't want something that was that heavy-weight, but Metacity needed some additional features to be fully Gnomish.
Today's Metacity is as heavy-weight as Sawfish.
E has always been "fast", but fast in a different way. There are true optimizations that aren't just a result of feature incompleteness (mostly the rendering model which allows for greater hardware acceleration). Still, it's frustrating to see this process of the new toy being compared to a mature tool with a modern feature set. I love Gnome (and I'm sure I'd love KDE too) because it provides a deep and rich integration between applications. It doesn't really matter if the Window manager is Sawfish, Metacity, E or whatever comes out tomorrow, I'll still demand strong support for internationalization; multiple desktops; interaction with the session and desktop managers, panel and applications; configuration through the same configuration system as the rest of my apps; etc.
If your window manager can do all of this, THEN I'll look at how fast it is. Same for a mailer or terminal or web browser, etc, etc.
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
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.
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!
davejenkins.com |
windows managers can be used as desktops but desktops (like KDE) somtimes use different windows managers.
Your very close. Obviously Fluxbox and KDE are desktops in the way most people think of them, drawing windows and providing a workspace, but what KDE is that Fluxbox is not is a Desktop environment.
A window manager in their most basic form just draws windows on the screen, thats it. Thats not very usable since simply doing that does not give a method to actually run applications, so a menu is added. So thats all it does.
Now look at everything KDE does and is. kwin draws windows, kdelibs provides IO slaves to handle background IO, kdenetwork provides access to protocols for every KDE app, and provides the kparts that come together for mail (kmail), news (knode), IM (kopete) and whatnot, all of which then also show up (along with others) in KDE's PIM, kontact. The khtml kpart is available to all apps, along with the file browser component, and so with those and the other kdenetwork kparts, konqueror becomes usable as a browser, file manager, ftp client, or whatnot depending on how its used. There are integrated apps for managing sound, X settings, your kernel config and virtual desktops, and that's just the beginning.
So often with a simple window manager you may have a bunch of apps that do many or all of these functions, but they are separate apps and if they all talk to each other, well your quite lucky. A full desktop environment has all the parts needed for a completely usable system to handle all those parts, and often more then you need, in a very integrated manner that all work together by design.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Rasterman's way of writing software differs quite a bit from others' in some cases. His direction and goals often encompass both cool and correct code.
Imlib2 for example has both efficient caching for remote image display as well as all-round support for image formats of various kinds and a lot of cool tricks up its sleave.
His decisions to create libraries of code that are used by other modules so that like can be kept with like and linked together as necessary is wise, even if it slows down release schedules.
I've been using DR16 for "ever" now and love it.
PS, DR17 has been in CVS for "ever" as well.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
In other words, he doesn't follow the traditional OSS development at all.
If all open source stuff was developed this way, Windows/MacOS would have died a long time ago.
I also admire the guy for not releasing a final release at all 'til all the major bugs are polished out. Calling it 0.17 is gutsy as well. Most people would call something like this a whole version number bump.
Pity that more people aren't working on this project and in this fashion.
Look at Mozilla. Remember the old Milestone builds? Talk about unnecessary bloat/misguidance. While firefox is a lean machine compared to its older cousin, it's still got MILLIONS of lines of gratuitious code in it for unnecessary 'features'. As much as XUL sounds like a good idea, imagine how much faster the browser would be if it either used native widgets or XUL was stripped clean of unnecessary features which are now permanent.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You're new here, aren't you?
Isn't that some crappy boy band from a few years back?
Enlightenment also has a file manager application called Evidence. Strong on metadata support, and with cool themes, evidence is specifically written to handle large or deeply nested directories. Have a look at the Pretty pictures.
I realise that E17 is still a WIP, but...
Did anyone else see those screenshots and think "OMG! It's Kai Krause! Run for the hills!"?
As one artist once commented to me, you can envisage Spock with some alien's computer saying: "I'm sorry, Captain. I cannot work out how to use this. The interface appears to have been designed by Kai Krause."
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Linux is not the linux of old. You got a lot of people who grew up with windows only for whom the whole idea of configuration files is alien. Now that isn't much of a problem. Some distros have come a long way into making a linux install extremely easy. But any new desktop user soon wants to chance the look and goes searching on the internet for pretty desktops. E has some very very pretty ones. Then they try it and hit the learning curve. It ain't a wall. It is a ceiling. Breaking through it is hard if you come from a windows gui for everything background. The reward is full control but the price is RTFM.
Add to it that most E users don't want or need things like a start button. Its far more extreme use of virtual desktops. Themes wich look cool in screenshot but perhaps grey on black text in real life is hard to read.
This then soon scares people off who are scared and humiliated that they could not use it. This is the "sucks" era. If you can't use something it must suck, it is never your fault.
So now you got two camps. Those that managed to break through the learning curve and those who didn't (of course you also got a camp who could care less either way but they are boring) and the perfect setup for a holy war.
On the one hand you got those who miss their GUI theme configurations and start button on the bottom left corner. On the other hand you got people who enjoy a window manager that just draws the bloody windows as they want it without turning into the bloat that is KDE or the "you can't do this because it would be confusing" that is Gnome.
Welcome to Linux where people got choice. The price for freedom might be eternal vigilance but the price for choice is eternal holy wars. Choice is all very well but unless you choose what I choose you are the sucks.
The difference about E17 is not just the desktop layout, it is how things are drawn. ALL windows managers use the similar model at the moment wether it is MS windows or Apple or any of the linux ones. If Rasterman realizes his vision then E17 could be one of the most important steps forward in desktops (as he has already used it on his Zaurus. Yeah that is right. E17 on a pda. Try that MS.) Remember that most enlightenment haters are probably using it already. The libraries developed for E have found widespread use. Just check for something like imlib2 on your average linux desktop.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.