Enlightenment E19 Pre-Alpha Released

An anonymous reader writes "While it took over a decade for E17 to come out, Enlightenment E19 is being readied for release just two months after E18's debut. The Enlightenment DR 0.19 update has a rewritten compositor that can fully act as its own Wayland compositor (not dependent upon Weston). The update integrates OpenGL canvas filters support, contains many bug-fixes, and has other improvements for both X11 and Wayland users. The 1.9.0 alpha1 pre-release was issued today as the initial testing version of the new window manager."

Comments

There used to be a buzz

[cold fjord]

I remember when there was a buzz about Enlightenment, right around the time of the big internet meltdown. Well, I'm glad they persevered. I guess they will "ship no code before it's time.(C)" I hope it will prove to be worth the wait.

Re:There used to be a buzz

[phantomfive]

Yeah, based on their commitment to continue the project, I might be willing to start building software on top of that. They have a core set of libraries that look kind of cool.

Re:There used to be a buzz

[symbolset]

Referred to as the "dot-bomb" era this period of history was preceded by one ripe with the kind of fiscal exuberance responsible people see as a bubble called the ".COM" era. You could not make an IPO with a name ending in ".com" or as an Internet or Linux company without getting crazy rich. Caldera, a tiny Linux maker, got so happy with their IPO money they bought AT&T Unix in 2001. They all bought a lot of Lambos, threw months-long company parties and generally had a great time before the world realized they didn't have a clue how to run a business. As they folded it turned into a proper recession that killed perfectly good tech companies by association because they couldn't get credit. The NASDAQ climbed from 1500 to 5000 in a few years to January 2000, and then fell back to 1500 in two yearrs. It still has not recovered the prior peak.

The same was true for telephone long distance and networking companies. As these went bankrupt Google bought their dark fiber for pennies on the dollar. Their business models were premised on long distance phone calls costing a dollar per minute and it became clear that day was over for good.

Re:There used to be a buzz

[raster]

e17, 18 and 19 are really just like e16 - just with more bits thrown in. the filemanager is built in. it's not a separate app (like nautilus for example). it's really in the same vein/design just with a vastly more modular codebase and a small mountain of custom written toolkit behind it.

Re:There used to be a buzz

[raster]

historically every dev uses e right from git master... and that's where the alpha comes from. so it is being dogfooded every single day. generally speaking except for small transitory blips here and there, our unstable "master/trunk/head" is in the same ballpark stable as releases. unlike releases you get fixes for things within sometimes minutes, but mostly hours or a few days. releases (even point releases) take at least days if not a few weeks. :)

Re:There used to be a buzz

[archen]

On a lower end laptop I had X installed and decided I wanted something more capable than Fluxbox. For some reason Enlightenment popped into my head so I gave it ago. Enlightenment started as more a window manager, and then became surpassed by "Desktop Environments". I was surprised to find Enlightenment now meets nearly all my needs. File manager, task bar, window manager. With desktop environments going overboard (KDE) getting fatter than intended (XFCE) or simply going the wrong direction (Gnome), it's odd that Enlightenment out of all of them came full circle and achieved the right balance.

Re:There used to be a buzz

[raster]

that's what we're trying. have the core desktop. all the things you need to make your machine and world function. it's missing bits still and a lot of what is there could be polished more, but the goal is to give you just what you were after as above. any applications after that are optional extras.

Good for E!

[Anna Merikin]

I'd love to see E succeed after all these years of promise. But I installed from Debian some time ago and it immediately crashed (E17).

I tried Bodhi in its 2.0 version (E17), and the file manager crashed on certain themes, but the DE didn't go down.

Perhaps the E-team could make a truly stable version before moving on to more esoteric goals?

Please? I'm so tired of XFCE....and too old for blackbox.

Re:Good for E!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you tried before December 21, 2012 that was a pre-release. The 0.17.0 release was on Doomsday.

Re:Good for E!

[raster]

i have no idea why you have so much trouble, but as compiled from source and used every day.. it's really stable and the few hiccups are an easy click away. remember the devs dont use the packages from debian nor even bodhi. we've gotten a lot more rabid about forcing a single universal build of efl and e making it harder and harder for packagers and even users to digress from the default build config. i suspect the issues people see are primarily a result of the insanely flexible build setup that auto-adapted to your dependencies. we've drumped pretty much all of that and you HAVE to --enable/disable things now... and we're getting even stricter on that requiring some hoop jumping before using any configure option we deem to be "not stable/for the masses".

Re:Good for E!

[raster]

options are not for e- but for things like.. you are building an embedded device and you don't use gl.. but you want to cut down a few hundred kb of ram, so using xcb vs xlib is what you want. you can do that, BUT the xcb back-end is 99% complete and you still need xlib if you plan to use opengl due to the binary apis demanding an xlib display handle. you have to have an option. it's not for the wm - it's for the toolkit and special cases. there re lots of such special cases for special purposes. the problem is some smart-butt user thinks it's a great idea to fiddle with every option there with a "ooh i hear xcb is faster" (which is basically is not), and then discovered their fglrx or radeon drivers don't like xcb as the primary display connection and then things crash/hang/don't work... or something like that. this is not the DEFAULT config - it's an option, but it's turned on by people who want to tweak everything - even for packages. it's not bloat - it's features that can be switched for different back-ends, dependencies REMOVED and so on. you really should study up before making assumptions.

Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a

[SmallFurryCreature]

Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a tale of when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the likes of which you do not see today. Ancient Behemoths as AOL, Compuserve and Yahoo. They lived in an eco system so rich in investment that web companies could grow to companies of unusual size in the swamp of private equity. They existed by new rules, profit was bad, you had to make losses but not any losses, you had to make losses per trade but promise you would make it up in bulk! The new companies traded in paper shares, showering them around and using them to buy each other up and make even bigger companies. Golden times that were never going to end.

But the power of the old economy could not be denied. Investors ran out of money and started to demand profits and when none was to be found, companies went up for sale and sold for a fraction of their worth, if at all. Infrastructures build on Sun crashed while Intel powered desktop servers took over. Those that had grown rich were now food for leaner faster moving predators who feasted on the remains of the behemoths that came before. It was the greatest economic collapse the world had ever seen. And a billions totally failed to notice any real impact as if the sudden collapse of the future of thousands of web companies had no real effect whatsoever.

It was called the crash... and man has grown wiser since then, long gone are the days that a company that has never made a profit, nor makes a product for which there is a need, nor has a business plan to make a profit before the next ice age can go to the stock market and collect a billion in investment at a cost of half a billion in money it doesn't have. No sir. Not possible! Because the market is wise and all seeing.

Re:Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you

[prider]

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

One word...

[dimethylxanthine]

Screenshots!!

Slashdot back to its roots

[linuxci]

As long as your not viewing this through the beta site, posts like these remind me of the early days of Slashdot.

CmdrTaco was a big fan of Enlightenment when /. was first launched and he had written some software for it so we always used to receive updates about new releases. I think that's how I first heard about Slashdot as I was searching for info on Enlightenment and found the site. I had a friend who was a big fan of Enlightenment but I ended up going with WindowMaker because I thought it was more efficient and fitted my working pattern better.

I also remember when Slashdot let you just type in a name, rather than registering ('Anonymous Coward' still existed but only if you didn't bother to enter something in the name box), once registration was introduced it took me a while to decide whether I really wanted to register, otherwise I'd have had a 3 digit UID.

Re:Slashdot back to its roots

[Anonymous Coward]

Enlightenment DR14 was the first window manager to make me say "holy shit." That early theme Rasterman made that looked like it was made out of very old television tubes just blew my mind.

In my mind they didn't lose their way when the dot-bomb crash happened, they lost their way when they hooked up with the GNOME project and RedHat started driving the show. How many of us remember Raster's well-published rant when he left RedHat and took Enlightenment back from the clutches of GNOME? Well probably nobody since he very quickly pulled his rant but still...it happened.

And yes, I remember the old Slashdot days when you could just type your name in. No mod junk either, which is exactly why my post won't be seen by you or anyone else.

Re:Slashdot back to its roots

[raster]

i don't remember pulling my rant... ? i'm very much in a habit of "what's done is done". i stick by my words. even to this day.

and yes - i agree. lost my way in hooking up with gnome. i did this because redhat asked me to. it was my job. what i didn't know is that enlightenment and gnome were total polar opposites in goals and design. the hookup was a result of a year+ saying "you need a wm for a desktop" and miguel saying "we don't need no wm for gnome. we can do everything without" and at the end of the year there being a "holy shit. we need a wm now!" and i was the person who could most easily deliver the things needed. so i did. it was my job.

but that process kind of required selling my soul to do so. gnome wanted a wm that dumbly emulated windows 95/98 as closely as possible, would give up all of its extra bits (desktop menus, pagers, wallpaper handling, etc. etc.) and hand over most of its soul and features to gnome and be as bland as possible. metacity was a much better fit for gnome. enlightenment wasn't. the majority of e as disabled for gnome. they just don't fit together. end of story. the idea that you can do a full desktop and not integrate a wm that does just what you need/want was the problem to begin with.

either way - after the divorce, e got e16 out and we started big bang planning for the future, imlib2 (much better imaging support), and then even started messing with opengl to render accelerated graphics with all the fanciness with imlib2 as fallback... and yes - the dot com bubble crashed and everyone - me included had to run for the hills and make a living and we lost a lot of time we used to have... it was some evenings and a weekend then. thus the slowdown. lots of big plans were underway and i was not in the mood for screwing with the plans and work.

these days that work has come to fruition. evas does all the opengl acceleration and has software backed rendering. both are fast. the compositor can use either. it does a lot more besides. e is modular yet a single unified process much like the kernel. we have even widget sets and a full ball of toolkit under it all. it took a while, bet we got there. and now we're reaping the benefits of the work and moving forward. thus e19. :)

Re:font hinting & antialiasing

[raster]

that won't help with e or efl. all fonts are drawn the same way. it only affects look. fyi we use efl and e on phones... and not even the mid range ones. talking 200-300mhz things from way back... my standard low-end test box for x86 is a pentium-m@600mhz with 512m ram, no gpu accel at all. e runs decently on that even with software compositing. it's not silky smooth, but it good enough. and as i said.. changing the font mode won't help e - the font glyph is stored as a greymap and renders the same way regardless... but we do care. efl 1.9 now has font compression. we realtime compress fonts with 4bit packed or 4bit RLE if big enough and decompress on the fly - saves memory bandiwdth... and thus gets you speed AND saves memory.

Re:If only they'd bring back tvtwm I'd be happy.

[serviscope_minor]

Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge). Or windows occupying more than one desktop (e.g. top left part in "1", bottom right in "4").

FVWM2 does both: your world consists of multiple disjoint virtual desktops (windows can be present in multiples of them) each of which is larger than the screen. In the latter case, you can also stick windows so that they pan around with you.

I go for 2x10 or 3x10 screens in one large virtual desktop, personally.

With the right daemons running, the desktop becomes quite modern, though I haven't 100% figured it out yet. I have a stalone tray swallowed by FvwmButtons, which makes all the tray like icons working.

On one system, some deamon is running which mounts thing on hotplug events (otherwise you can call udisks to do it semi-manually from the terminal). However, it also pops up a file manager which seems to involve re-setting the desktop background. Why people thought that sort of coupling was a good idea is beyond me. I've disabled that on other systems since I don't find GUI file managers terribly useful.

You can also send dbus messages with the dbus-send command run from a FVWMButton to do things like sleep the "proper" way.

I also have battery monitors and CPU monitors eaten by the Buttons instance. They're hand-crafted out of xterms but they're very compact and work very well.

It'll be the perfect WM for the Hurd

[sirwired]

Enlightenment 1.0 (or, at this rate, Enlightenment Beta) will be the perfect window manager for the Hurd, as they should release about the same time. Maybe I'll have them toss some USB sticks of the release versions in my coffin after I die of old age.