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E17, Slimmed Down For Cell Phones
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."
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.
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.
Cool!
Next step: Running E17 and an application! =D
The enemies of Democracy are
It is clear that the Windows API with all its backward compatibility and all that are completely unsuitable for the variety of computing devices in use and development today. When the push was for bigger and faster, that was not a problem for Microsoft -- their bloat and instability were less noticeable in that environment. But now that things are shifting to smaller, lighter, more efficient devices, the pressure is on Microsoft to answer that need -- and so far, their answer is WindowsXP... which isn't good enough. (Makes me wonder why they don't pull Win98se out of moth balls, hide DOS and work from there.) WindowsCE seems like something they might try to use but it doesn't "look" suitable in all the places I have seen it applied... I could be wrong, but as Microsoft's efforts seem to be focused on putting WindowsXP on everything that a small computer that normally sells with Linux, I would have to say that Microsoft sees WinCE as functionally unsuitable to compete in that arena. (perhaps it is because there are few apps for WinCE and those are typically written by the OEM distributor of the devices that contain WinCE?)
Bottom line? WinXP isn't suitable and Microsoft will have to make something ENTIRELY new if they want to complete with Linux in this market... or... adapt FreeBSD like Apple did. Either way, it would be a huge blow to the Microsoft ego and very upsetting to their developers.
It's funny that Microsoft feels they can't afford NOT to compete.
Wouldn't a slimmed-down Enlightenment just be Blackbox with transparency, menus that "slide" a bit, and more "textured" themes? What did I miss?
Blackbox seems to be using all of 4MBs of RAM here, and next to no CPU time. With a 3MB binary, that's not surprising.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Excuse me, did I read that right? 32 meg? I hope that was supposed to be 32k. For 32M, I would expect it to do my taxes as well.
So enlightenment has been hanging around almost non-updated for 10 years (seems like anyway, I ran it in 2000 on Mandrake). Back then I was running a 500MHz Celeron. They were just waiting for cell phones to catch up to pick back up on development. Brilliant!
Would it have killed the submitter to clue us in to what Enlightenment is? All I can get from the summary is that it is Linux related and now runs on cell phones. This isn't a telegraph, you're not paying by the letter, and there is nothing wrong with saying "the Enlightenment window manager" instead of just "Enlightenment".
"E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz."
The last time I tortured myself with Enlightenment, that's almost exactly the kind of machine I ran it on, about ten years ago.
I wonder why Rasterman didn't just grab some old Enlightenment code from his geriatric tree and nearly do a straight port.....oh.
At a first glance I thought this was about E17, the boyband.
My reaction remains unaltered though: wow, it's still around?
Do not trust this signature.
Consistency is overrated. If there is a program that is better than all the rest, people will learn use even if it doesn't fit the exact mold of other programs.
x million iPod and iPhone users would strongly suggest otherwise. As a music player, the concepts behind iPods suck -- here's proprietary client software, we sell DRM music, our music doesn't work on any other player, can't replace the battery, higher priced than most other players with similar audio quality -- there's a lot to dislike about the iPod.
So why do so many people buy and use and love them? It's the user interface. It's intuitive, it's consistent across the platforms, it's responsive, and it's not butt-ugly. It's the part that people see and interact with that make them desire the product.
Open Source projects are starting to learn this. Ubuntu is a big success in large part because they're pushing hard for a consistent GUI experience, and making it easy to use. We hackers may think that "being the best on the inside" is enough, but for Joe Sixpack to accept it, for it to be a commercial success, it's far more important that it looks good and is easy to use. To an end user, that is performance.
John
More people play DVDs than use iPods and iPhones, and DVD menus are by no means consistent.
More people drive cars than use iPods and iPhones, and minor things such as light controls, wiper controls, and parking breaks are not consistent between makes or even models.
You're just parroting the industrial designer's version of the geek fallacy that the best technology always wins. People buy iPods and iPhones because that brand is particularly popular and because music players let you carry thousands of songs in your pocket.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
Apart from that last point, the same could be said about fluxbox.
I myself migrated from E to fluxbox a few months ago, and found it to have that same no-frills attitude. (Or rather, just-the-frills-you-want-and-nothing-else.) From what I gather, Blackbox and its offspring appear to have filled the void left by E16 rotting away and E17 never releasing.
Want some homework? Go find a hundred iPod owners who don't read Slashdot. Ask them about the alternatives to the iPod and how they decided to buy an iPod instead of another device. If 20% of them even mention the "intuitive interface", I'll admit shock and surprise.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Enlightment (e16) has been used for a longtime as the actual window manager for Gnome.
But PC's have gotten more powerful, we are now dual core. That means a window manager no longer locks up because the CPU is busy. Even windows (and windows has ALWAYS been terrible as a window manager) runs smoothly now.
E17 doesn't use the GPU, the most powerful component on your PC that is often idle when showing the desktop, by design. That idea was GOOD when GPU's weren't common, but on the PC they are now.
In fact mobile phones are now getting GPU's. Since E17 is far from ready, even if goes to the mobile phones, will it be needed?
I use the Duke Nukem Forever reference for a reason. Part of the reason for its eternal delays is that they took so long that each time the engine they used got outdated. As the industry moved on, DNF got left behind and had to get started again. E17 is running the same risk.
Linux is good, a low powered OS is good, but is anybody waiting for say an 8 bit OS? That is low power, but we moved on.
As said, I use E17 because it is good at something else beside being fast, being minimal. I don't need desktop icons and don't want them. Nor sounds not bells and whistles. I just want the basics to look pretty and E17 does that. But I don't need it anymore, I only still run it because I really do NOT like KDE or Gnome. I do NOT want a coherent desktop where everything works together. I run an app, the app does what I want and the window manager draws the window and THAT is it.
But I am a very small market. Others want transparancy, something e17 doesn't do. Others want hardware accelerated graphics, something e17 doesn't do.
When raster first showed a vid of E17 running on a mobile app (Zaurus if I remember right) it was nice looking. But we got more power now. We got iPhone and Android and Nokia's phones. E17 is out of date before it every launched, just like every build of DNF.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, I don't want to run software designed for a desktop on my phone. Stop trying to shoe horn software into places it doesn't belong and focus on releasing it where it belongs.
Why is it that techies think this sort if thing is cool, but if a handyman or construction worker saw you trying to use a jackhammer to put a nail in your house they would realize you were a complete moron instantly?
Do because you should, not because you can.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager