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.
Enlightening.
Maybe this will win the desktop war?
- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review
Howabout you link to the madpenguin article?
test
Here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Does it run Lin..
I was wondering what happened to Enlightenment!
Is there a live cd distribution that contains Enlightenment? I can't be bothered with installing a distro just to try it out.
what the fuck is DR17?
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
Clearly the editors know their readers so well! Due to the overly popular method of not reading the article, editors have apparently stopped including links to them all together so that readers aren't bothered by those nasty changes in text colors.
Well done.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
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.
We don't need 10 flavors of Gnome, KDE, Enlightment etc. We need a very customizable engine like StyleXP for windows with a billion interface skins to download.
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
Its off the hook! Not off the scale.
Jeez, don't you know anything about the hip-hop subculture?
Nearly had a heart attack when I saw this, for a sec I thaught e17 had been released... finally, I have been using e16 since I first started linux (slackware 7.0) I have tried gnome, kde, windowmaker, etc. since then but always go back to enlightenment, it si just the best, I cannot wait for e17 to be finalized! but this is a good start, it leads me to beleave that it is time to try out e17 again (last time it was VERY early development stage)
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.
When I was first exposed to Open Source (perhpas FREE) software I thought that the business model was flawed. Yet, here i am today using TONS of OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE.
Enlightenment is realy cool... but its been BETA forever.
Looking at Mac OS X I think I see where the future lies. We need Open Source but we also need the resources of private industry to move things forward. Mac OS X is UNIX done right. Enlightenment, with all of its cool features, is still in my opinion unusable. Although I have not tried it lately - perhaps it has made leaps and bounds in improvements.
But this begs the question: what role should OSS play in today's world? What is the proper balance between free and pay? In the end, don't you get what you pay for?
Maybe this version will actually have some decent support for wireless and WPA...
"Nature bats last..."
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.
Can somebody explain to me the reasoning behind WHY they use such a strange numbering methodology for Enlightenment?
E is cool and everything, but it has been in Beta for what ... 8 years now?
It may be nice tech demo, but let us face it, it is a dead end street.
I mean I got it to run on my old HP-UX workstation back in the day. But what has it done of _use_ latetly.
Sorry I am asking for results as opposed to merely worshiping at the alter of "Oh, shiny."
Of course, I'll get modded as Troll or Flamebait for not toeing the line.
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.
i believe the question is if it runs OSx86 these days.
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.
Yes it is
Which way?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I didn't even notice the story didn't link to the article.....
eHave eYou? (iApple and KDE?)
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?
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...
Noble in what way? The MS Monopoly is still with us. So basically the only noble effect is that companies get free software, and a few moochers get free software. The majority of the world continues on like nothing's happenned.
But is it... "Outta Site!"?
Is it "Off the Hook!!!"?
Is it "To the Max!!!"?
Is it "Total Extreme!!!"?
Is it "Rad!"?
Is it "Bitchin'!!!"?
Is it "Narly!!!"?
I need to sit down, I feel overwhelmed by a case of stupid.
Real men don't use desktops, they use twm and throw down with some .twmrc
.07 of my memory and exactly 0.0 of my cpu.
Seriously though, while those screenshots do look nice, I haven't yet looked at a flashy desktop and wished it on my system. I prefer every ounce of my cpu going to my applications. top -p 4148 just showed twm using
Well it is also for some a highly functional way of organizing the desktop and has been in personal use for years. I still use enlightenment on my MAME box as it is just such a damn sexy thing to have the television with guests over.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
What does this window manager do that Mac OS X's doesn't? It seems that it has copied the dock straight from that, and window transparency is already well supported on the Mac as well. I ask not because I'm trying to trumpet OS X; I'm trying to understand whether there's real innovation here, or whether this is being touted only because it's more advanced than Gnome/KDE.
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 does off the scale mean? Good or bad?
...the greatest desktop known to man and machine. It is what convinced me to dump Windows altogether. It is THE killer app. That is all.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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 last time I tried enlightenment, I was not impressed. Eye candy is great, but I also want something that lets me work efficiently and consistently (Please, somebody modernize OS/2's WPS and make a WM that uses those concepts!). If enlightenment can deliver consistency and a usage model that gives us power (simple things are simple, hard things possible, etc), that would be great. If not, I'll just settle to next best thing to WPS I can find on linux, which is currently windowmaker with Rox-Filer.
ARE YOU TRYING TO COVER UP THE SERVICE THIS GUY HAS PROVIDED FOR THE LAZY EDITORS? Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
come on mods, sort it out, its a genuine question.
eEnlightenment
Get your Unix fortune now!
I have been using E17 for about a month on Ubuntu 5.04 and I have to say I really like it. The OS-X style iBar functions as a task manager/app launcher, and the file manager Evidence works quite nicely. My biggest problem with the entire environment is configuration is quite difficult. I can't seem to make the file manager right click menus work properly. They are supposed to use extensions and mime types to provide custom menus based on file content, but they dont usually show you what you need. The menus are quite nice, and I like the default window focus scheme of following the cursor. As far as stablility is concerned, it only usually crashes when I restart it to update the menus, and it starts again instantly at its previous state. Once it is polished a bit more I think E17 could be the flagship DE for Linux.
WHAT THE HELL?! Instead of looking at E17, trying it, using it, seeing how it fits your needs, you write it off as a "dead end street" like the majority of all linux users. You ARE toeing the line.
Not toeing the line?
Because you are harshing on one of the highest Holy Grail joke-butts in Slashdot history?
You could try to be a little more appreciative, but that's not troll-material on its own, A/C..
E17 is not E16, E15, or even E14.
Do yourself a favor, get it in front of you, and see the Easter Bunny do a jig with the Tooth Fairy under a fleet of Flying Pig musicians. There's more to it than "Oooh, shiny"
Are you trying to get us to convince you? Take a look - not at screenshots. See it in action, then look at some screenshots circa 1998.
Look at Avalon & Aqua, and consider the programming forces behind them.
Now, take a look at Rasterman.
And I'm no fan-boy of any spelling. It's just good stuff!
Also, ICQ has been in beta for about that long. Google was in beta for what, a year & a half?
Beta, shmeta. Is there code? Does it run?
Does anyone know if enlightenment plans on having tabs? IMO that's the single biggest feature missing from enlightenment and the reason I'm going to have to stick with fluxbox
How long has E17 been in Development?
I was using E16 until they mentioned that it would not longer be supported, because they were working on E17, which would not be backward compatible.
There's a lot of talent developing Enlightenment, I only wish it would maintain a code base long enough to get some real apps built for it.
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.
We are still waiting for binary.
I started compiling DR17 couple months ago and it's not done yet!
http://www.soulmachine.net/wiki/index.php?title=En lightenment_on_Debian_unstable
my blog
Here are some great Enlightenment videos. http://lycos42.free.fr/e17/cvs/videos/
http://enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/Screenshots /files/_files/e17_video.avi
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I got yer virtual desktops right here.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
I understand the need for backward compatibility, but why can't Enlightenment use the newer composite/damage/etc when the server offers it, and enable less candy otherwise?
The way I see it, EWM could do it using a plugin model, where the plugins/extensions are only loaded when supported (and not disabled by custom option)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The site is back up now
Oh, yay! MS finally came up with an add-on which lets you do something I've been able to do since I started using Linux in 1996. How very innovative of them.
Oops, Houston, we have a problem. I see that it lets you have a total of four virtual desktops. Lessee, I'm running nine right now, although only six are actually in use, so I guess that won't quite work for me. Gee, I wonder if things like dragging an application off the pager onto the current desktop, etc. work? Not.
Do us a favor; let us know when MS actually comes up with something that someone else wasn't doing better 10 years ago, 'k?
Read the name backwards: It's evile. EVIL-E! Get it? It will suck out your soul and install a Microsoft OS. Better stick to KDE until enlightenment has a distribution approved by the Pope.
We used to code in a showbox in the middle of the road.
Robert Anton Wilson
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.
I know that's a loaded question but that's why RH gave it the boot to begin with. I know some people love their eye candy but most I suspect most want something which has a passing familiarity with things they already know and are comfortable with.
Still I'll give it a go and see how far E17 has progressed.
Features
Blah Blah Blah
* In a nutshell: Everything you could want... and more.
But it can't be everything I want... and more. I don't want "more."
It seems like there's foundations/organizations out there supporting a few major linux components, there's some high profile linux devs that are sponsored and can work on it full time.
...
I'm just curious why that doesn't seem to be the case for Enlightenment. Of all things, it's not even some boring behind the scenes CompSci work that the user won't notice, it's got glitz and glamour. As far as wow factor it's so there and in your face. So I'm wondering why there's not someone or some company out there backing them and helping to channel more resources to it?
If I was a rich millionaire E17 is the thing I would be backing... Of course in the real world, there's going to be many factors I'm ignorant of. But for a project with so much promise behind it, I wonder why it seems to continue to putter on in the background at a slow quiet pace?
Does it really kinda bother anyone else that in one of the Enlightenment screenshots, the guy is playing videos with transparency enabled? Who the hell would watch video with transparency enabled?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Don't do that to me I thought it was finished when I scrolled past that article!
Of course no E ever gets truely finished until Rastaman decides he is trashing it and going onto The Next Great thing.... E17 will be finished when Rastaman decides he is trashing it all and doing E18 and replacing imlib2 with imlib3....!
I suggest everyone try using twm-gl, as created by brother Gary. twm-gl is a window manager based on twm, but improved by rendered in openGL context. Get it from the Icculus server, here! Hurry! Other Slashdot users are trying the same! Maybe you might see somthing before...
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
There's a BitTorrent for VectorLinux at http://www.mininova.org/tor/80583
I think you'd better revise your definition of vapourware. According to this website, it's software not yet in production, but has already been announced. Doesn't exactly match the perennial development of E17.
More than a tech demo, mate. It's very usable. I've been using it full time on my work desktop, for the last few months. It is perfect for what I want in a WM. For others, it may still lack some features, but for me, it's great!
Spoken like someone who hasn't even tried E17 lately. Do you often criticize before you try? I could make a snide comment about this being Slashdot, but I actually think most Slashdot postings are quite decent.
And no, I'm not new here.
Well, let's look up the meaning of Troll
So when will enlightenments interface not be orrid-not the eye candy, but the inanelysmall widgets and what not.
In the interim you may use "off the chizain" or "off the chizizain" to maintain the freshness of the slang. If pressed "off the chizzle" may be used but could lead to confusion since a chisel is a tool, not a chain.
Agreed. I use E16 fulltime most of the time because I'm in a dual-monitor dual-screen (not xinerama) configuration, and E17 has a few issues here. Seems no matter where I try to open an app, it always displays on :0.0. When I do manage to open the app on :0.1, if I move the window around or resize, the coordinate display is on :0.0, which is just kinda weird.
I really like Engage, though. I'd like it more if it was a bit more tightly integrated. I can't open a menu within a certain area of the icons, and if the zoom factor is set too high, the icons get cut off. Some sort of dynamic sizing would be nice to minimize the unusable area of the screen while still allowing for zooming. But the whole thing is still under development, so I'm hoping it eventually polishes up.
E17 has had a menu editor, called Entangle, for a few weeks now. All you have to do is checkout E17 and the E17 apps from CVS. You can add, remove, and edit icons in the menus or on the icon bar by right-clicking them like you'd expect to in a modern desktop environment.
"emerge e" is all that's required on Gentoo, other distros will be doing it manually. There is some good documentation at Get-E.org.
Blag Linux (http://www.blagblagblag.org/) has E17 preview in a production release for months, I don't see why this is so amazing...
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
Microsoft's implementation of multiple desktops is a joke. If you want multiple desktops on a windows machine, get virtuawin. It's still nowhere near to what you can do with FVWM or E17, and there seems to be no decent pager, but it actually works, and it makes the time I spend working on windows much less painful.
AccountKiller
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 remember hearing this around release 12 or 13.. several years ago.
One thing I also remember is the first time I saw E - it was running on a sparc box of some type, I assume locally - and my jaw hit the floor, as all I'd seen previously would have been windows 98 or Slowaris.
I -do- hope Raster sticks with it and puts a stamp on something that could be a platform, because there is a lot of good stuff in there.
..don't panic
It doesn't run on SuSE 9.1 without a lot of work.
Whoever who finds E17 cool and usable should be forced to use ratpoison for a while.
Oh boy, these days I'm so fed up with eye candy I sometimes find myself missing the Athena toolkit. And that is serious...
we discovered a new way to think.
e17 has been in Cooker for quite a while, and thus will be in Mandriva 2006 (in contrib), which will be out in less than a month.
Which distro gets the newest version of particular software first depends more on how their release cycle matches the release of the software in question, than how quickly they can package new software.
-500mb download (for a friken demo)
-nvidia gpus wont work
-nvidia driver in next few days?
Don't make me laugh. The virtual desktop power toy is shit.