Slashdot Mirror
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.
Is there a live cd distribution that contains Enlightenment? I can't be bothered with installing a distro just to try it out.
Looking at the screenshots, Enlightenment seems to be bringing amazing eye candy to the standard X server. As they haven't yet leveraged the additional transparency & acceleration features present in some developmental X servers, its exciting to think how far they can speed up and enhance these visual effects even further. Despite being in development for so long, I think this presents an interesting design/style challenge to the more conservative KDE & Gnome desktops.
Business Voyeur
Naah, it'll be 2007 before it's actually released.
True, though.
Can somebody explain to me the reasoning behind WHY they use such a strange numbering methodology for Enlightenment?
I have installed DR17 from CVS on my gentoo distribution, so I was really interested in looking at vector linux's website after reading this. However, it appears to me that since I can't get through, then they must have been slashdotted.
Anything to speed up desktop drawing. I installed Ubuntu v5.04 on my Inspiron8000/512MB/GeForce2GO, and gnome-terminal was sucking up 80% CPU, just by dragging the cursor across it! After searching all kinds of maillists, I learned to drop antialiasing, which still puts gnome-terminal at 5-15% CPU when cursor dragging. To say nothing of the rest of the drawing updates: I can see the pixels redrawing as I drag windows around, nevermind the slimetrail of "windowprints" where I dragged it from, until I drop it.
Linux usually gets much more efficient use of the same HW than Windows. But I never saw GUI lethargy like this with Windows installed on that Inspiron.
--
make install -not war
Who modded you as insightful?! You clearly don't know wtf you're talking about!
If you and the modders bothered to take a look at TGTSoft's FAQ, you'd notice that they explicitly state that StyleXP is not a skinning engine.
What is Style XP?
Style XP is not a skinning engine. It uses Microsoft's built-in visual style engine, but enhances it by providing many useful tools. Style XP can import, select, rotate, and manage Themes, Visual Styles, Wallpaper, Logons, BootScreens, Icons, and Explorer Bar. Future versions may support sounds, cursors, screensavers, and packages of all the above.
Pfft, what a shameless plug for a sub-standard product! Jeez louise...
I've been running E17 from that repository for a while now (On FC3) and I really like it. I still use E16 as my primary window manager because E17 is missing a few things I use (like remembering where windows go and a few other things) but it is really nice.
It's also fun running E17 inside a nested X server under E16. I had to pick up my Mac-loving graphic-artist friend after I showed him what a fully eye-candy E17 (animated background, animated menus, animated titlebars, etc) looks like without shutting down my X session.
... And so it comes to this.
I used e17 for a few weeks last month as my primary WM. It is indeeded beautiful and all of the fancy effects worked smoothly even on my toaster 800mhz transmeta laptop, but I eventually switched back to something more stable.
:P
It's really not ready for prime-time yet, although it is certainly close. Maybe they've fixed these bugs in the last few weeks, but I noticed-
* sometimes windows refuse to close after their owning process has been killed. These things just linger on the screen, filled with random garbage.
* multiple monitors profoundly confuse the desktop-switching gadget and pager
* evidence CVS was broken, so there's no e17 native file manager and I resorted to using nautilus
And of course it needs an e17 native version of eterm... that will be excellent when it shows up
The themes available so far don't really make use of the way-cool stuff edje can do... e17 is going to be really amazing once more themes and applications are built with its core libraries.
What be even *more* useful to more end-users would be to submit all those packages to Fedora Extras (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras)
it's availabe in x11-wm/enlightenment-devel
I wonder if they'll start taking advantage of Cairo and Glitz. Doing so would let graphics cards accelerate GUI drawing via OpenGL, a la Quartz on OS X. Hardware accelerated GUIs are a hallmark of modern operating systems (OS X, Windows Vista), it'd be nice if Linux could join the party too.
It seems like everyone is stuck on the similarities between osx and enlightenment. Yes, enlightenment has had a dock panel for years. Engage's interface does resemble osx's docker for the pure fact that it is both eye candy and functonal. One thing I have not seen you guys mention is that even though they look the same the libs and everything else behind engage are meant for it to be fast, pretty and functional all at the same time.
Most of you that have never looked at enlightenment probably think it is just another windows manager. However, as others have stated under this topic, enlightenment is built on top of libs that are meant to increase speed, stability and useablitly. Yes, e17 is lacking useablitly right now because it is still under heavy development and there are still changes being made to the libs themselves and the window manager will be the last thing being updated.
use gnu screen. that way your jobs are attached to the screen, not the window manager.
:) )
(Note that we have deferred the problem again to another layer, but gnu screen is "as stable as any terminal multiplexor I have used, maybe more".
http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/