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.
- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
In the end, don't you get what you pay for?
Traditionaly yes, but with free stuff, you get what someone else paid for. If they paid a lot, you'll get good stuff.
However people who pay a lot to make something will usually want to get their investment back.
Now software came along with people who had ideas for the greater good. People donated their time and skill for this noble goal. What do we get, in some cases quality stuff for free and in other cases junk.
With normal stuff you can actually hold in your hand, I agree that you get what you pay for, or someone scammed you.
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.
I'll bite.
Enlightenment is not a flavor of anything.
Enlightenment is not a desktop environment a la MSWindows explorer.exe .
KDE and Gnome are something like that.
Enlightenment is a window manager evolved into a desktop shell and lots more.
Imagine you were not a Windows user, and you didn't feel their metaphor is the natural metaphor for a GUI system.
Enlightenment proposes a different interface, plus a different interaction with objects from the user perspective. You can't really compare enlightenment with gnome, because they are completely different in their own essence.
Aside from that, enlightenment is a project that provides lots of useful general purpose libs, but back in the day, they defined what general purpose meant in many areas (e.g.:imlib, esd).
They are building libs that they think should be available to anyone building next generation stuff. They can be right, like before, or they can be coding useless stuff. We'll see.
Which way?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I find this strange... Enlightenment is not a product you are paying for. You are not paying people that are writing it. You are not a stock holder in a company developing it. What right to you have to say the people working on it shouldn't?
If you do not like it don't use it. If you want a customizable engine like StyleXP then write it. Nothing is stopping you.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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...
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
What you are missing, however, is that no matter how many skins you can toss on XP it is still just XP painted a little differently. Can you get tabbed windows like Fluxbox? Multiple desktops like... err... everything? These different window managers and desktop environments all have different purposes and design goals. For a full desktop, there is Gnome (with its huge collection of themes), for something a little lighter on resources there is XFCE, for bare bones but slick as snot there are window managers like Fluxbox. For a shiny gaudy desktop whose applications all start with the same letter, there is KDE. These different interfaces don't just look different from each other, they also *work* differently.
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
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 this window manager do that Mac OS X's doesn't?
Run on Linux? It's free software?
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 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
What a vacuous, inane, empty load of rubbish. I use OSX alot, Linux moreso. If anything OSX is UNIX done 1 Way, and a reasonably inflexible, non-free, hardware dependent way at that. Is that "UNIX done right"? Next you'll be telling me the one button mouse is necessary because it encourages software developers to write applications with simpler interfaces.
particularly if you take into account that it actually looks half decent.
Unlike FVWM.
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.
Well, that's an elitist attitude! This is the EXACT reason why Linux has a rough time on the desktop. Users are used to saying well I like this like that and I wish the taskbar was green instead of blue. Linux developers need to design FOR the user instead of themselves if they want to take market share from Microsoft.
Elitist:
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.
2.
a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.
Ok, now what is there in this definition that matches the developers? Are they expecting favoured treatment from someone because they are developers? No. Are they making demands that they feel they have an intrinsic entitlement to because they are developers? No. Are they attempting to use their developer status to control anyone? No.
Now, lets apply this test to YOU, the user. Are you expecting favoured treatment from someone because you are a user? Yes, you're demanding that the developers should cater to your needs. Are you making demands that you feel you have an intrinsic entitlement to because you are a user? Yes, you appear to think that being the user makes you the King, and apparently you're used to being listened to when you make stupid demands like changing colors etc. Are you attempting to use your "user" status to control anyone? Well, your whole point was that there is some natural order to things that places you at the top of the heap because you are a user.
So, I guess what I'm basically saying is stop being elitist, and go learn what the word means before you use it in public.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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 ]
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.
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.
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