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Enlightenment E19 To Have Full Wayland Support
An anonymous reader writes "Full Wayland support has been added to Enlightenment 0.19. Building upon earlier Wayland support, Enlightenment can now act as its own Wayland compositor by communicating directly with the kernel's DRM drivers instead of having to rely upon Weston. The Wayland support is still considered experimental but it's now the first Linux desktop with full Wayland support."
Quick README on building and using it.
"Direct Rendering Manager" has existed for something like a decade already.
If I'm not mistaken the Direct Rendering Manager is 8 years older: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wik... - you have to blame Hollywood for that :)
Hawaii was the first, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There is also a Wayland distro called Rebecca Black OS. Although when I tested it last time, it was super glitchy and crashed all the time. It has been recently updated so it might be worth another shot.
Anyway, great to see the Wayland stuff rolling in.
enjoy your lols. e17 -> e18 took 12 months. it's been about 4 months since e18.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
If only we had something like an abbreviation tag or something to prevent these confusions!
Unfortunately some parts of the HTML standard are so underused many people don't know they exist except for people who write things like accessible compliant pages.
The X11 remote support is used by a relatively small amount of people. Getting a fast and smooth local desktop is much more important.
It allows more direct access to application framebuffers, prevents tearing and, allows booting to a graphics mode early on and from there a smooth transition to desktop. As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.
No, it seems that half of the people reading this article crawled out from under a rock in the last couple weeks.
This isn't necessarily true. It simply does not provide a method for remoting of applications. However, given Wayland's nature it's likely that any remote Wayland solution will be more efficient than VNC and even X forwarding, rather than less.
Yes, the example is called Weston.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Oh right. So if I wanted a decent reference guide for the unix system APIs you'd tell me to go and read the linux source code instead of getting hold of a copy of Stevens?
@rsehole.
Interesting. Then the people complaining about Wayland missing remote support should actually be fine? RDP seems to be able to forward windows of individual applications.
I realize this is a specialized subject and that the people who are really interested in this already know what is being discussed. However, I feel your audience would be much wider if you added a short paragraph on what Enlightenment is, what Wayland is and why what you are discussing is a big deal. I'm not being sarcastic, the title is intriguing, but I don't have the time to dig through all the available resources to really understand what is being discussed. Just a suggestion.
No it will not take a decade to see E19 final. Once the project started back up again, they went from E16 to E17 in one year. E18 was quickly on it's heels and now a functional beta of E19 is already out. I am on their mailing list and follow the project closely. They are developing at warp speed. To all the people who install a recent version of E, play with it for a few hours, declare it crap and purge it from their systems: you have no idea what you are missing. If Enlightenment has a problem, it is that to use it to it's full potential - which is vast - one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there. Once mastered, there is no GUI\DE more powerful and flexible. I am currently running Bodhi 4.2 with E 17.4 and out 16 years of using Linux and every other DE\WM that has come along over that duration, this is the greatest setup I have ever had. I have one display setup with four workspaces, each setup in it's own tiling configuration and my other display setup in a more traditional, but heavily customized way. The window tiling abilities in E are no joke and one of the primary reasons I use it. Being able to use it both ways, one on each monitor is more than I could ever ask for. Now, if all E could do right after an install was limited to what you are presented with, then yes, it would be silly. But it is up to the user, perhaps with a little Googling, forum searching, and getting the mailing list to make it do whatever your hearts content. Because of this, Enlightenment is not for everyone: power users only need apply. I keep going, but i will stop here before I get too carried away. My only gripe is the current lack of documentation for Elementary, which makes writing software for it difficult since you can only learning by studying source code, but standard tutorials are on the way.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Enlightenment - an early X11 proto-DE famous for its Hollywood style UI in the late nineties that kinda died because development went into a black hole for several years, Duke Nukem style, with version 17. Ironically, considered in the 1990s to be an example of bloated style-over-substance engineering, the delay with the release of E17 resulted in it being considered a highly efficient lightweight system when it was finally released.
E19 - The next version of Enlightenment, one assumes.
Wayland - an attempt to create a "lightweight" graphics layer for Linux to use in place of X11. Extremely popular amongst X11 devs, but widely derided as unwanted, unasked for, and unsuitable as an X11 replacement (not to mention likely to end up with more problems than X11), by GNU/Linux users. Only gaining steam because some idiots at Canonical decided to create a rival project, Mir, which means suddenly the choice between X11 and Wayland has been turned into a fight between Mir and Wayland, like the GNOME 2 vs GNOME 3 thing became GNOME 3 vs Unity.
DRM - a Linux kernel subsystem that's used by various GNU/Linux userspace apps to access the graphics card. Usually applications proxy their access via X11 and OpenGL. In theory, the closer you get to DRM, the more efficient your use of the graphics card becomes, or something.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wayland is a protocol for client apps to talk with a compositor. The compositor can offer remoting if it wants to and indeed Weston does.
He's not telling you to read the linux source code, he's telling you to read the "Reference" compositor. i.e. it is meant to be the example code.
Weston has support for RDP. i.e. you establish a remote session to it via a RDP client and you see your apps. RDP has a seamless mode though I don't know if the compositor supports that although it could in theory.
One thing I've never understood. I understand the utility of KDE and GNOME (at least GNOME 2). If one wants something like the old NEXTSTEP, there are GNUSTEP DEs like Etoille or Window Managers, like WindowMaker. I can understand people using those. I can even understand people disgusted w/ recent trends w/ GNOME 3 or Unity going for XFCE, Cinnamon,, LXDE/Razor-qt.
What I'm not getting - what does Enlightenment offer that the others don't do better?
No, the people complaining about Wayland missing remote support know about this.
They're complaining because Wayland doesn't have the correct type of remote support. They'd much prefer it if their display server was responsible for drawing every widget (of every toolkit (used by every app)) primative-by-primative, instruction-by-instruction.
You know, because they're retarded.
For phones and tablets yes - hence Mr Stone's involvement in Wayland, for other stuff such as science and engineering workstations remote display support is still the killer app. Supporting "that app from 1996" that Mr Stone makes so much fun of is often the entire reason for the choice of windowing system.
So while it's a "relatively small amount of people" it's probably the majority of people using linux desktops in an office environment. That's far too important a niche to abandon IMHO.
What I'm not getting - what does Enlightenment offer that the others don't do better?
Cool window decorations!
There are some nice and clean themes for KDE/GNOME, but the theming system in both seems a bit lacking in flexibility. All the themes look kind of the same but with different colors.
Back in 1999 Linux desktops were horrible mismashes of different widgets and applications that didn't fit together, but the window title bars had beautiful pixel art vines running on them and stuff like that. That was fun, I miss those parts.
reference code != reference documentation
I'm still running Enlightenment DR .9 compiled on Irix 6.3. Can somebody on this forum help me with fixing dependency problems using XMKMF that prevent me from going to Irix 6.5?
Also, Windowmaker docklets are not always updating when rendered. Is this a libpng problem or Enlightenment? I emailed Mandrake, but no response.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
E does what I tell it to do and gets the heck out of the way otherwise. That's something that Gnome and, to a lesser extent, KDE seem to have a real problem with. As far as XFCE, LXDE et al, dunno. I've used Enlightenment off and on for rather a long time, and haven't found it necessary to spend much time with the other lightweight desktop options.
I understand what it is designed to solve but is there any evidence on how well it solves these problems? Do you know of any videos or benchmarks pitting Wayland against X?
ayottesoftware.com
I assume you have usage statistics proving your assertion. Otherwise you are just considering your own usage and think it represents everyone.
Quite a lot of people have asked that question on both sides of this debate. It would be nice if some professional organization with broad reach would just put up a fucking survey so we could find out already. Actually, I would hope we'd get a variety of surveys; an Ubuntu survey, some sort of survey of Unix professionals, etc. Then we could come up with some good idea of how many people actually remote X applications. In order for the results to be particularly useful, we need to know how many people run individual apps and how many run full desktops, although I do personally suspect that there's a fair amount of individual-app remoting going on — I would guess that there's been something of a resurgence of it since ssh became popular.
The average user at their desktop will never remote an app. They were much more likely to do so before the death of the UNIX(tm) workstation, but that day has come and now we have PCs everywhere. They might well run Linux or some other Unixlike or hell even some kind of UNIX(tm) but they're still going to be a PC, and they're going to have vast resources of processor and memory for very little money because nobody is having to pay the tax on extra-special, precious, overpriced architectures any more. It's still an option, IBM is happy to take your money for example, but it's not really necessary. The user can run the app on their own system on a PC that costs a nickel. Well, compared to buying an Ultra 5 back in the day — which was made mostly out of a bunch of chips which were used in PCs and Macs, and a very expensive processor that was quickly left behind by PCs thereafter.
So, other than a handful of diehard nerds, and some systems administrators, who's actually remoting X?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"