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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.

14 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. Slashdot editors know their readers by PetriBORG · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. 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.

    1. Re:Stable, beautiful.... by crimson_alligator · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not trying to be snarky, but comments like this regarding "stability" just baffle me.

      You've used E17 for the "past few days", and it is "as stable as" or perhaps more stable than any desktop environment you have used.

      Therefore you have never used a desktop environment that could run for more than a "few days" without crashing?

      I thought "stable" means runs for days/weeks/months/years on end without crashing. Am I wrong? If not, how do you already know that E17 is EITHER as stable as OR more stable than any other desktop environment?

      This reminds me of someone telling me that Mandrake 9.2 was more stable than 9.1---the day after it was released! (No, they hadn't been using cooker.)

  5. 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.

  6. 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

  7. Re:StyleXP by orasio · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Precision in all things by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 5, Funny
    All I have to say is Enlightenment on VectorLinux is absolutely off the scale.

    Which way?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  9. 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...

  10. e17 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 :P

    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.

  11. Re:Not trying to start a flame war (honest)... by mobrep · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. It's a trap! by MrHanky · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.