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.

Comments

Ok..

[Karamchand]

- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review

Ubuntu + E17

[trevordactyl]

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

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[RiotXIX]

Also, www.get-e.org is the best site i've come across for installing e17 (would have been lost without it).

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[i_should_be_working]

This thread is a bit more straightforward as it's focused only on installing e17.

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[MynockGuano]

I agree; I stumbled upon that site yesterday--just AFTER I had finished installing Enlightenment CVS for the first time in about 6 months to see where they're at.

And where are they? It's there, it's usable, and I'm loving it. Obviously, it is also still in-development, but aside from the total lack of configurability by GUI or textfile--nearly everything must be configured via obscure, undocumented enlightenment_remote commands (thank goodness for the included zsh completion script!)--once you've managed to configure it, it's completely usable. I was extremely impressed, and will be back to using Enlightenment from here on out.

For those of you who prefer it, another thing I found right after installing was this great page, which has binaries and source rpms of CVS snapshots, and includes apt and yum repositories! Very nice! I wrote a script to install the whole she-bang from CVS a long time ago, but this would be an even easier way to keep tabs on the development progress, if you use a distro that supports rpm.

----

Personal recommendations:

I like the engage launcher/tray better than the default ibar. You can enable it as a module with these commands:

$ enlightenment_remote -module-unload ibar (not essential, but having both is rather redundant)
$ enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
$ enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage

I also edited the data/themes/module/images/bg_[hv].png files in the engage source before compiling to be completely transparent (instead of 65% opaque) to remove the (in my opinion) ugly background rectangle on my engage bar. I think get-e.org had another solution for this which involved editing the module.ecj file, instead, which probably would have been easier had I known to do it before I did the install. >8)

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[the_greywolf]

Personal recommendations:

I like the engage launcher/tray better than the default ibar. You can enable it as a module with these commands:

$ enlightenment_remote -module-unload ibar (not essential, but having both is rather redundant)
$ enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
$ enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage

I also edited the data/themes/module/images/bg_[hv].png files in the engage source before compiling to be completely transparent (instead of 65% opaque) to remove the (in my opinion) ugly background rectangle on my engage bar. I think get-e.org had another solution for this which involved editing the module.ecj file, instead, which probably would have been easier had I known to do it before I did the install. >8)

i take a bit of a different tact. i keep both the ibar and engage around. i settled on this for my normal configuration:

enlightenment_remote -module-unload temperature
enlightenment_remote -module-unload cpufreq
enlightenment_remote -module-unload battery
enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage
enlightenment_remote -module-load monitor
enlightenment_remote -module-enable monitor

enlightenment_remote -desks-set 4 2

enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 0 0 "Communications"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 1 0 "Browsing"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 2 0 "t3h 3mail"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 3 0 "Downloads"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 0 1 "Programming"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 1 1 "Testing"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 2 1 "Hacking"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 3 1 "Images"

and i have a unique background image on each desktop, including Firefoxy and iCandy from ToyboxArts.

Fedora & E17

[SlashdotOgre]

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.

Stable, beautiful....

[dhasenan]

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.

Re:Stable, beautiful....

[flithm]

Well put. Unless you've been using it non stop for a year or so, you probably can't comment on its stability... unless it's to say that it is unstable.

Having said that, I've been using E17 on and off for about a year, and although I still wouldn't qualify myself able to comment on its stability, I will say this:

It feels solid. You know how you can just feel the difference? Like when you first tried OS/2 and compared it to Win 3.1... you didn't exactly know why, but you knew it was rock solid.

That's the way E17 feels.

I haven't had it crash on me, but I certainly wouldn't suggest people rush out to start using it as their main WM. It's just not ready yet. There are tons of features that still need to be implemented before it's usuable full time.

I look forward to it though, for those who like the E style, it's going to be awesome!

Re:Stable, beautiful....

[the_greywolf]

there is a menu editor. entangle.

also, you can edit the menu itself in ~/.e/e/applications/ wherein you can find engage's sticky icons, your icon bar, startup apps, apps to run on restart, as well as your favorites menu.

Re:LiveCD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd followed the Elive link in the article summary, you would have found a Debian-based LiveCD with Enlightenment.

Got it on FreeBSD

[FromWithin]

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).

Gentoo has had it for months

[glimt]

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.

Re:Gentoo has had it for months

[the_greywolf]

i really wanted to give it a try.

i now run this on a fairly regular basis:

schedtool -B -e emerge eet evfs edb evas ecore embryo imlib2 edje e epeg epsilon esmart entrance emotion eclair ewl engrave e_utils e_modules etox erss entice engage elicit eterm evidence e17genmenu

i've been happily using e17 for a couple months, keeping up with all the major CVS changes. (of course, i'm subscribed to the CVS list so i can keep track of it all.)

Re:LiveCD

[oringo]

Yes indeed. It's called elive. Get it at http://livecd.debianitas.net/index.html
There's a torrent for it also: http://torrents.osdir.com/index.php?view=Elive%20B eta%200.1

Re:Vapourware

[picklepuss]

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...

Looks/works great on Ubuntu

[bad_outlook]

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.

Re:Vapourware

[picklepuss]

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.

The best way to run E17

[poofyhairguy82]

The best way to run E17 is inside of Gnome. I call it Enlightened Gnome. Then Gnome Apps look nice, you get to have nice Gnome things like it panel and its volume manager without dealing with the worst problem in Gnome (its default Window Manager-Metacity).

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!

Re:Enlightenment version numbering....

[tuggy]

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.

Best window manager ever.

[twitter]

With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...

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.

Re:Cairo

[dbIII]

I wonder if they'll start taking advantage of Cairo and Glitz ... accelerate GUI drawing via OpenGL

They've been using Evas for a few years - which supports OpenGL and hardware acceleration. Cairo wasn't around, and they are a few years and a lot of features ahead of it.