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Enlightenment DR17 On the Linux Desktop
StephenJoiner writes "There's a new review on Mad Penguin of the latest VectorLinux release, which includes the in-development Enlightenment DR17 desktop. As far as I know, this is the first time DR17 has appeared on a production desktop... even as a "technology preview". All I have to say is Enlightenment on VectorLinux is absolutely off the scale." Enlightenment was in Slashdot news earlier for both the involvement with Elive and their use of Epeg bits to deal with thumbnailing.
- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review
There was recently a how-to posted on getting Ubuntu and E16-E17 paired up on ubuntu forums if anyone is interested and hasn't seen it:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=54476
For anyone interested in testing out Enlightenment 17 in Fedora, you can find a repository here: http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/news_e17.html I've used it with FC2 & 3, haven't tried FC4 yet, but so far it's been fairly stable. I do still prefer E16, but it's worth a shot.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I've been using E17 for the past few days. It's beautiful, and it's as stable as any desktop environment I've used--perhaps more so. Not all the features have been implemented; it still needs a menu editor to be really useful (or just tell me which config file to modify, and put one there by default), and I'd like to see an e17 terminal.
Still, it's lightweight, beautiful, features real transparency, and is unusually stable for being in heavy development.
If you'd followed the Elive link in the article summary, you would have found a Debian-based LiveCD with Enlightenment.
I use it daily on my laptop here on FreeBSD 5.4. It really is superb. I previously used xfce4, but have switched over to this now. Startup time is about 3 seconds, speed is excellent with loads of graphic effects. Themes available are really nice. The only criticism I have is the use of binary files for some config stuff (menus and icons).
I highly recommend it. Can't wait for the full release (not least because I haven't bothered to compile the extra utils).
I'm not a Gentoo apologist or advocate, but it has had DR17 available as an ebuild (like the rest of the distribution) for months.
Yes indeed. It's called elive. Get it at http://livecd.debianitas.net/index.htmlB eta%200.1
There's a torrent for it also: http://torrents.osdir.com/index.php?view=Elive%20
I need. What about that?
Sorry, but styles can't affect functionality [or] simplicity. If I want the eyecandy (KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment...), I can choose it. If I just want a screen to open a bunch of terminals in it (Ratpoison anyone?) I can have it too. It's called "option", and it's a blessing.
Actually if you look on Rasterman.com, he does a few comparisons of different stock window managers using a script that he wrote, and E-17 kills.
http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News Scroll down to the post "E17 is being Optimized"
I'm particularly fond of the way the pager behaves. I like being able to drag and drop iconified windows between desktops. Although this works in Gnome, it will place the window in the new desktop at the same coordinates it was in the old one. With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...
I run e17 (16.999.whatever) on Ubuntu from a HOWTO available in the forums. There is a .deb repository you can tie into, so now even the 'Ubuntu update' auto thingy even finds updates to those, so it's part of my system now. It's very slick, feels like the speed of Fluxbox but the look of, well...nothing really; it's in a class by itself.
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
Look, I'm not trying to get into a pissing match over which WM is better or anything. The parent subject indicated that E17 was vapourware, and you and I both know that's not true. He also wanted to know what was significant about it besides the eye-candy. Obviously high performance on a small footprint is significant - particularly if you take into account that it actually looks half decent.
Enlightenment has been out longer than Mac OS X and has had an interface similar to the dock. So Apple may have copied Enlightenment, not the other way around.
I'm not trying to trumpet OS X...yeah the fuck right, you freakin' karma whore.
A couple of things:
First, Gnome Terminal is dog slow and fat-ass. I never use it because it's such a resource drain. I use Eterm 0.9.3 actually and with the exception of it not liking some UTF-8, it works great. It takes up about 1/6 of the resources GT does.
Second, are you using the nv (Open Source) driver or the nVidia (Proprietary) driver? I've noticed the nv driver is incredibly slow compared to the nVidia driver, especially dragging windows around. I don't see pixels update, but refresh goes to about 1fps when I'm dragging Eterm windows around. With the nVidia driver, it's smooth and slick, but it randomly locks up the machine if you have RenderAccel turned on.
... And so it comes to this.
The last release of Enlightenment (an XWindows windows manager) was 0.16, and it used to be the default window manager for GNOME. It was released in 2000 (last stable) and an update was released December of last year (2004).
DR17 indicates it is a development release (i.e. not advisable to use in a production machine) of the next version (0.17, or "17" for short). There are some very novel things in it, and all-in-all, it is a very powerful engine. See the ./ article for interesting, albeit self-described, forward thinking of the project.
If you want the full effect you have to go into Gconf and tell nautilus to not draw the desktop, but otherwise it works pretty good. I have found that overall its faster than Metacity, and is more stable with xcompmgr. I just wish I could find another way to task switch in E17 that is not alt-tab, and I hope that one day E17 will conform to Freedesktop standards so I can use Kompose with it!
Open Source Sushi
the latest stable version of enlightenment is 0.16, DR means Development Release (yes, a stable development release).
The next version will be 0.17, so its called DR17.
I got yer virtual desktops right here.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Windows powertools allows some fun stuff, like Linux-style mouse focusing, multiple desktops, MacOS-like Expose switching...
However, programs aren't expecting windows to have capabilities like that, so it's a bit glitchy, sometimes, haha
That said, Every Linux WM/DE that I've used has implemented these capabilities better.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Sure, gnome is a lot like windows... but if the contest was between which DE (gnome or KDE) looked more like which commercial WM, it's pretty obvious that gnome resembles OSX more than KDE resembles OSX and that KDE resembles windows more than gnome resembles Windows... This is why it's easy to compare the two as people do...Perhaps the ways in which gnome is more like osx and kde is more like windows are few, but they are also quite obvious, methinks: - gnome...er metacity or whatever has a bar at the top; windows has never done so standard, neither has KDE (to my knowledge)... but OSX has and gnome has. - gnome presents fewer options that "clutter" the screen, like OSX. Look at the doc in osx, it's pretty simple. Look at the menus in gnome, pretty simple. KDE presents every option on the face of the earth in some distributions... windows can be awfully cluttery, too.... ESPECIALLY on a new install loaded with dell/hp/gateway/whatever-company bullshit applications. Macs simply don't come loaded with all that crap visible, and Gnome keeps it to a minimum. There are other similarities, too, but these are the most obvious and therefore the most important... once you get much further than this, you start nit-picking into things people don't even notice.
[ you and I are ugly ]
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now.
The E pager is very nice and I hope everything is just as good. It's been a long time since I've used fvwm, just as it had been a long time since I used E. I like E's real division between virtual desktops and screens, so you can have multiple pagers in E each with it's own desktop with multiple screens. I also like being able to drag and drop between the different pagers.
E also gets minimized viewers right too. It draws a thumbnail or an icon and grows to accommodate what you have open or scrolls, your choice. You can also turn off the borders, so nothing but the icon or thumbnail gets in front of your background image.
Theme transparency already rocks. Add that to animated backgrounds and you have something unmatched in the commercial world.
Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.
Like this benchmark?
It looks a little funny to me to, but it's a benchmark with both window managers on it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
the devs are working on it, they aren't a secret cabal of enlightened devs, they publish a list of features they will implement on get-e.org and other places
There's a BitTorrent for VectorLinux at http://www.mininova.org/tor/80583