Lynnaea writes "An interview from Linuxpower gets Mandrake and Rasterman together to talk about the future development of E, what it's like to work at VA, and whether/how E will play with KDE and GNOME. " Also nice to see what the boys are up to. Not eating vegemite is a possible answer.
Re:E is a pig; now we know why.
by
daviddennis
·
· Score: 2
I suspect the real problem with E for most people (including myself) is that to get the "full eye candy effect" you have to run it at 1280x1024 with 24-bit colour. As it happens, on ordinary machines this is quite slow - not because of E, but because 1280x1024 in 24-bit colour requires a ton of bashing bits around. In my experience, you can "solve" this problem by downshifting to 1280x1024 at 8-bit colour, or 1024x768 at 24-bit colour. The only problem with this is that then you just don't get the full effect, which is why you run E in the first place.
As a result, I haven't run E in some time, even though I like and admire E and its developers. Instead, I run 4DWM on my old SGI, which serves my needs very well and is quite a bit less expensive than a dual Pentium III/500.
Overall, my sense is that E's reputation as a pig is undeserved, unless you count the "need" to run high resolutions and colour depths that come with the experience.
D
----
Re:Why so long between releases?
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 2
actually, you can check out exactly what is going on out of CVS as we're working on it. I figure with that sort of ability you don't have to have as many full-head-on releases. I mean, every time there's a new feature we could always release something, but it wouldn't be so big of a deal that there's a new release when we do. -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Re:E is a pig; now we know why.
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 2
no kidding. that's something that there should be more people complaining about than what they're all beating around right now. We DO have a serious lack of documentation. But it's all coming... hopefully we'll have some better documentation online in the near future. -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Re:What bugs me about E...
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 3
Definitely something that I would want, also. you'll notice from some of the screenshots that raster and myself put up that those sorts of tools are coming, even though slowly. A lot of the user-end customization can already be done through easy-to-use menus. You will be seeing more of this. -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Why bother with window managers indeed
by
198348726583297634
·
· Score: 2
Because, depending on what you do, they can make a lot of things a whole lot easier. Example: say you have to move a whole bunch of files that don't have an easy wildcard mask (eg, not *.gif) into another directory seven levels deep off your root partition. Kfm may let you select and drag the files from one window to another faster than a command line, and you don't have to use the command-line history like a maniac to get everything shuffled easily.
Here's another example - I run windowmaker and kfm, and have a large image library. I use xv to view the images, but since they were taken from my digital camera (go Olympus! woo!), they often end up with non-descriptive names (pic00001.jpg, pic00040.jpg, etc), and yeah, I should rename them, but how often do you organise your paper photos, either?;) So I use the kfm-feature "show thumbnails" and can browse into a directory and find the single, poorly-named image I want by examining the thumbnails, rather than xv the whole dir and search by hand. Then I can drag it onto my nfs-mounted web directory, and voila- it's there.
So, that's one reason to support desktop environments (or anything that makes operations less cumbersome.) As always, if you don't like it, don't use it.
Re:"new default theme - I love brushed metal"
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 2
I have two macs, too. But Apple didn't really pioneer most of these ideas, this is something that most people tend to mistake. They just happen to be the company that brought a lot of them together. But all of these people stopped short - I don't intend that we will make this same mistake -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
If you make E crash, I'd appreciate backtraces. I can't make E crash -- if I could it wouldn't be crashing. SEND CORE AND BACKTRACE DATA. Or tell me how it is you make it crash -- And I'll make it go away. -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Interesting to see that Raster and Mandrake are looking to possibly make E into a full desktop, a la GNOME and KDE. But I have to wonder if their efforts would be mislaid in that case...wouldn't it be better for them to properly contribute their knowledge and insight directly to GNOME or KDE, or better, both?
For the secret message, check out the boldface letters.:-)
cya
Ethelred
-- Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
At the risk of having this message marked Off-Topic and thereby lowering my average rating, i've got to ask the Australia Slashdot readers how sick they are of hearing Vegemite / kangaroo / dingo / boomerang jokes whenever anything happens in Australia.
I mean, we don't bring up hockey when a Canadian does something, or royal family references for English people...
Disclaimer: No, i'm not Australian, i'm actually from Long Island. And i hate it when people go, "Oh, Lawn Guyland?" and think that they're being clever.
Actually in response to a few of the posts I've already seen on here, I'll say that I personally have been working on implementing KDE hints inside of E for the past few days. No sense in not supporting everyone's applications. Of course, I don't have many K apps installed on my system, so I won't be able to do a ton of testing quite yet, but you should end up being able to run any of the K*apps or Gnome*apps after this is done, and have them work "correctly" -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
I still wish Gnome and KDE could agree on a common windowmanager support API. Then people wouldn't have to write in support for both; support one and you support the other. The two really should cooperate on more stuff (I'd say on everything but toolkits, but I know that's a bit extreme).
just out of curiosity... have you EVER used a mind-altering substance?
you probably have and dont know it. Alcohol, Caffeine, sugar all alter mood and perceptions.
and truthfully, alcohol is one of the most vile substances known to man, yet it is legal....
and about coding in an altered state of mind... you really ought to try it some time. sometimes you need a little help thinking about things in new and unusual ways... ever try to debug a graph based branch and bound algorithm written in some of the most obfuscated c that you've ever seen? it gets alot easier when you have help looking at things from a diferent perspective.
Face it --- This is really how code gets written. at least good, creative code. coding is much more of an art than a science. people tend to forget that, and try to force good code into a nice business-y type structure with protocols and all that... and unfortunately, you get suit-code. no creativity, horrible user interfaces, and no new solutions to problems.
basically, you need to expand your minsd a little bit. drugs are not "evil". most of the "facts" that are spread are blatant misrepresentation of facts.
try to expand your mind a bit. you will be able to look at life from a different perspective. Probably a much, much better perspective.
-- ... hi bingo...
Re:I wonder about E the wm versus E the desktop
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 2
Of COURSE you won't have to use all the features. that's one of the great things about E is the ability to turn off all the crap you don't want to deal with:) now, that being said, in CVS there's always some transitional periods (like the iconbox right now) that happen. but then again when we do the release-a-day thing like CVS that's the kinda thing you're willing to put up with:) -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Re:E is a pig; now we know why.
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 3
Actually, I run E on much lower machines than you do, and it runs fine. The point behind these big machines isn't so that we can actually run stuff. The point is so that we can compile and test and debug at a faster rate. I don't know about you, but compiling two megs of source code takes a while on all my other machines. I have a fast SMP machine because I want to be able to compile and test E while I'm still thinking about the code I just wrote. Keeps stuff fresh in my mind. I run E on everything from a low-end UDB (those multia alphas (ick)) to a p133, to a 486, to a couple of 66 mhz ppcs, to the machine you read about in the interview, which is my primary machine. Making E work efficiently in as little resources as possible is a VERY real issue for us. Please don't assume that it isn't. -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Re:E is a pig; now we know why.
by
Mandrake
·
· Score: 2
Actually, I'll also point out that until recently raster was developing on a p120 and I was developing on a p133. -- Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net) Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Interesting... out of all the corporate funding & hacker sponsorship we've seen lately, how much is directed application development? I love E, but I'd also like to see VA and RedHat throw some money at something like AbiWord.
Why so long between releases?
by
Booker
·
· Score: 2
This is *not* intended as a flame, so please don't flame me back... I'm wondering why the formal releases of E are so few and far between? I think the kernel revision frequency is about 4x that of E.:) Is there something fundamentally different about the way E is developed? Is Raster a perfectionist?
I noticed that Mandrake is reading comments, so I figured I'd throw out this question. Oh wait.. maybe I just answered my question. Get back to work, man!:)
p.s. I have no idea why this defaults to a score of 2.
Re:"I'm not tempted to drop into bash..."
by
raster
·
· Score: 2
> Is entering "tar zxvf -C %f" in a properties box really easier than typing it on a commandline?
actually it is. example.
i create my download directoty - i set the properties action once and once only on creation (tar zxvf -C %w %f) or select this property from a list of provided templates.
hence forth whenever i drag a tarball onto that directory instead of being copied or moved it getas untared in that dir. so henceforth we have a "smart directory" that will untar for me with a simple drag & drop.
you could extend this idea from this simple task to quite complex ones with powerful shell scripts or utilities - example:
you have freinds or people you work with who you exchange files with all the time - BUT you do it via mail with the dada uuencoded. easy.
create a directory called "Friend" or whatever - set the drop action to be:
uuencode "%f" | mail friend@work.com -s "%f"
bingo - every file i drop on this dir gets uuencoded and mailed to my friend. sending a file to them has now become a single drag and drop action. use your imagination to make this feature work FOR you. it's one of the things i have planned asa "i must have this" feature.
-- --------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Re:E and general Linux app question
by
bliss
·
· Score: 2
Technically yes. If you have some extremely expensive/new processor like a PIII and want the app to be fully optimized for the platform.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
(and I hope the Guys are reading)... is that the infinite configurability is buried in a config file with little or no documentation. I love to configure, tweak, redecorate, and I am not afraid to go poking into textfiles... but it seems a shame to have such a system designed for such extensive configurability, and no pleasant way to configure. Maybe you -can- put a specific pixmap in as a custom windowbar, but you have to study an entire theme file to figure out what pixmap to replace. Honestly, it is not that much less trouble than editing the source for fvwm. I hope I am wrong here, that I have just missed a doc, or that spiffy configuration app... Man, I would love to edit my theme in place with d-n-d, realtime, and this unrealized potential is frustrating... This isn't a criticizm, consider it a feature request.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the real problem with E for most people (including myself) is that to get the "full eye candy effect" you have to run it at 1280x1024 with 24-bit colour. As it happens, on ordinary machines this is quite slow - not because of E, but because 1280x1024 in 24-bit colour requires a ton of bashing bits around. In my experience, you can "solve" this problem by downshifting to 1280x1024 at 8-bit colour, or 1024x768 at 24-bit colour. The only problem with this is that then you just don't get the full effect, which is why you run E in the first place.
As a result, I haven't run E in some time, even though I like and admire E and its developers. Instead, I run 4DWM on my old SGI, which serves my needs very well and is quite a bit less expensive than a dual Pentium III/500.
Overall, my sense is that E's reputation as a pig is undeserved, unless you count the "need" to run high resolutions and colour depths that come with the experience.
D
----
actually, you can check out exactly what is going on out of CVS as we're working on it. I figure with that sort of ability you don't have to have as many full-head-on releases. I mean, every time there's a new feature we could always release something, but it wouldn't be so big of a deal that there's a new release when we do.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
no kidding. that's something that there should be more people complaining about than what they're all beating around right now. We DO have a serious lack of documentation. But it's all coming... hopefully we'll have some better documentation online in the near future.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Definitely something that I would want, also. you'll notice from some of the screenshots that raster and myself put up that those sorts of tools are coming, even though slowly. A lot of the user-end customization can already be done through easy-to-use menus. You will be seeing more of this.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Here's another example - I run windowmaker and kfm, and have a large image library. I use xv to view the images, but since they were taken from my digital camera (go Olympus! woo!), they often end up with non-descriptive names (pic00001.jpg, pic00040.jpg, etc), and yeah, I should rename them, but how often do you organise your paper photos, either? ;) So I use the kfm-feature "show thumbnails" and can browse into a directory and find the single, poorly-named image I want by examining the thumbnails, rather than xv the whole dir and search by hand. Then I can drag it onto my nfs-mounted web directory, and voila- it's there.
So, that's one reason to support desktop environments (or anything that makes operations less cumbersome.) As always, if you don't like it, don't use it.
I have two macs, too.
But Apple didn't really pioneer most of these ideas, this is something that most people tend to mistake. They just happen to be the company that brought a lot of them together. But all of these people stopped short - I don't intend that we will make this same mistake
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
If you make E crash, I'd appreciate backtraces. I can't make E crash -- if I could it wouldn't be crashing. SEND CORE AND BACKTRACE DATA. Or tell me how it is you make it crash -- And I'll make it go away.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
only if the k is in small quantities, i think... :-)
sigh....
has anyone else noticed that this discussion slips really quickly into raver-drug references?
I mean... come on the K desktop with the E manager... hehe... maybe we could get the LSD screensaver....
person1: Hey look, the fireworks on the monitor are great!...
person 2: umm... dude the computer is turned off.....
coincidence in naming? i think not!
... hi bingo
For the secret message, check out the boldface letters. :-)
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
At the risk of having this message marked Off-Topic and thereby lowering my average rating, i've got to ask the Australia Slashdot readers how sick they are of hearing Vegemite / kangaroo / dingo / boomerang jokes whenever anything happens in Australia.
I mean, we don't bring up hockey when a Canadian does something, or royal family references for English people...
Disclaimer: No, i'm not Australian, i'm actually from Long Island. And i hate it when people go, "Oh, Lawn Guyland?" and think that they're being clever.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Actually in response to a few of the posts I've already seen on here, I'll say that I personally have been working on implementing KDE hints inside of E for the past few days. No sense in not supporting everyone's applications. Of course, I don't have many K apps installed on my system, so I won't be able to do a ton of testing quite yet, but you should end up being able to run any of the K*apps or Gnome*apps after this is done, and have them work "correctly"
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
just out of curiosity... have you EVER used a mind-altering substance?
you probably have and dont know it. Alcohol, Caffeine, sugar all alter mood and perceptions.
and truthfully, alcohol is one of the most vile substances known to man, yet it is legal....
and about coding in an altered state of mind... you really ought to try it some time. sometimes you need a little help thinking about things in new and unusual ways... ever try to debug a graph based branch and bound algorithm written in some of the most obfuscated c that you've ever seen? it gets alot easier when you have help looking at things from a diferent perspective.
Face it --- This is really how code gets written. at least good, creative code. coding is much more of an art than a science. people tend to forget that, and try to force good code into a nice business-y type structure with protocols and all that... and unfortunately, you get suit-code. no creativity, horrible user interfaces, and no new solutions to problems.
basically, you need to expand your minsd a little bit. drugs are not "evil". most of the "facts" that are spread are blatant misrepresentation of facts.
try to expand your mind a bit. you will be able to look at life from a different perspective. Probably a much, much better perspective.
... hi bingo
Of COURSE you won't have to use all the features. :) :)
that's one of the great things about E is the ability to turn off all the crap you don't want to deal with
now, that being said, in CVS there's always some transitional periods (like the iconbox right now) that happen. but then again when we do the release-a-day thing like CVS that's the kinda thing you're willing to put up with
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Actually, I run E on much lower machines than you do, and it runs fine. The point behind these big machines isn't so that we can actually run stuff. The point is so that we can compile and test and debug at a faster rate. I don't know about you, but compiling two megs of source code takes a while on all my other machines. I have a fast SMP machine because I want to be able to compile and test E while I'm still thinking about the code I just wrote. Keeps stuff fresh in my mind. I run E on everything from a low-end UDB (those multia alphas (ick)) to a p133, to a 486, to a couple of 66 mhz ppcs, to the machine you read about in the interview, which is my primary machine. Making E work efficiently in as little resources as possible is a VERY real issue for us. Please don't assume that it isn't.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Actually, I'll also point out that until recently raster was developing on a p120 and I was developing on a p133.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Interesting... out of all the corporate funding & hacker sponsorship we've seen lately, how much is directed application development? I love E, but I'd also like to see VA and RedHat throw some money at something like AbiWord.
This is *not* intended as a flame, so please don't flame me back... I'm wondering why the formal releases of E are so few and far between? I think the kernel revision frequency is about 4x that of E. :) Is there something fundamentally different about the way E is developed? Is Raster a perfectionist?
:)
I noticed that Mandrake is reading comments, so I figured I'd throw out this question. Oh wait.. maybe I just answered my question. Get back to work, man!
p.s. I have no idea why this defaults to a score of 2.
> Is entering "tar zxvf -C %f" in a properties box really easier than typing it on a commandline?
actually it is. example.
i create my download directoty - i set the properties action once and once only on creation
(tar zxvf -C %w %f) or select this property from a list of provided templates.
hence forth whenever i drag a tarball onto that directory instead of being copied or moved it getas untared in that dir. so henceforth we have a "smart directory" that will untar for me with a simple drag & drop.
you could extend this idea from this simple task to quite complex ones with powerful shell scripts or utilities - example:
you have freinds or people you work with who you exchange files with all the time - BUT you do it via mail with the dada uuencoded. easy.
create a directory called "Friend" or whatever - set the drop action to be:
uuencode "%f" | mail friend@work.com -s "%f"
bingo - every file i drop on this dir gets uuencoded and mailed to my friend. sending a file to them has now become a single drag and drop action. use your imagination to make this feature work FOR you. it's one of the things i have planned asa "i must have this" feature.
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Technically yes. If you have some extremely expensive/new processor like a PIII and want the app to be fully optimized for the platform.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
(and I hope the Guys are reading)... is that the infinite configurability is buried in a config file with little or no documentation. I love to configure, tweak, redecorate, and I am not afraid to go poking into textfiles... but it seems a shame to have such a system designed for such extensive configurability, and no pleasant way to configure. Maybe you -can- put a specific pixmap in as a custom windowbar, but you have to study an entire theme file to figure out what pixmap to replace. Honestly, it is not that much less trouble than editing the source for fvwm. I hope I am wrong here, that I have just missed a doc, or that spiffy configuration app... Man, I would love to edit my theme in place with d-n-d, realtime, and this unrealized potential is frustrating... This isn't a criticizm, consider it a feature request.