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E17, Slimmed Down For Cell Phones

Posted by timothy on from the durned-amazing-looking dept.

twitter writes "Want to run Enlightenment on your cell phone? The Rasterman's recent efforts bring E17 to Open Moko FreeRunner and Treo 650: 'According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz. To prove it, he is distributing a Linux kernel and E17/Illume/Elementary stack for Palm's Treo650. The stack can be launched from PalmOS without touching the device's flash storage, he says.' While Microsoft fumbles with limited 'instant on,' GNU/Linux rules the embedded world and that's the only thing going in the IT market right now."

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. What a guy by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Informative

    Raster has always seemed to me one of the unsung heroes of the open source world. Richard Stallman has his following and has even seen a biography published by O'Reilly, and Eric S. Raymond's witty sayings have often been chronicled here and on other tech sites, but Raster just doesn't get the attention he deserves for his elegant technical solutions--even coverage on Enlightenment here is more about eye candy than superb architecture.

    1. Re:What a guy by chromatic · · Score: 4, Informative

      Raster just doesn't get the attention he deserves for his elegant technical solutions...

      He did a lot of work on imlib2, which languished for years until better software replaced it (where "better" might mean "less buggy" or "released more frequently" or "appears maintained"). I've never thought that he had much interest in releasing stable versions of his code with any frequency or rhythm. That's not the sole criterion for positive notoriety, but releasing software that people can actually use is important.

      (One caveat is that I stopped using Enlightenment a decade ago, around E14, because the new versions weren't stable or releasable.)

      --
      how to invest, a novice's guide
  2. Running E17 full time. Wouldn't use anything else. by deek · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm running E17 on my desktop right now. Been running it both at home and work for the last few years. It's by far my favourite window manager, for a variety of reasons:

    * It's fast. Very fast.
    * It feels clean and simple.
    * Looks very good.
    * Very customisable.
    * Keyboard shortcuts for just about anything!
    * Just about everything can be controlled or configured from the command prompt.

    With E17, I can configure my desktop to be just a background picture. No start menus, strips, clocks, nothing. Then I can add whatever I want, starting with a simple left click on the background to bring up the Enlightenment configuration menu. From there, you can build it to your taste. Sure, it has it's own way of doing things, but it never forces a display feature onto you. It's all your choice to show.

    Given, I run the development version, so it's not the easiest to get running. There's a nice script I use to download via CVS, compile up the source, and package it into deb files. I keep a copy of the deb packages for the last version I liked, and revert to that if the latest version is buggy. It's worked well for me so far.

    As such, I wouldn't recommend E17 to your average user. For the more technically inclined, though, it beats anything I've ever used. I've tweaked E17 to behave exactly how I want it. Now I feel like I'm working with my computer, instead of struggling against it. Truly, I have been enlightened.