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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."
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.
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.
Enlightenment has a button you click which restarts the wm. All the user sees is a little spinning clock for a second or two.
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?
Here ya go guys.. I feel sorry for this guy's server
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 |
First pretend you are 13 years old and just discovered that Windows 98 isn't the only operating system in the world.
Second, get really into this movie called The Matrix. Watch it at least 20 times -- It will help you customize your Enlightment environment.
Third, develop a crush on an anime character. You'll need this for your desktop background.
Finally, just fire up your fake-transparent terminal and get on IRC. The "chicks" there will be glad to help you become an elite Enlightenment dood!