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Enlightenment DR17 On the Linux Desktop

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the zen-and-the-art-of-x dept.

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.

7 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Ok.. by Karamchand · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Ubuntu + E17 by trevordactyl · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Ubuntu + E17 by MynockGuano · · Score: 5, Informative
      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)
  3. Stable, beautiful.... by dhasenan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Gentoo has had it for months by glimt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:LiveCD by oringo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  6. Re:Vapourware by picklepuss · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...