Slashdot Mirror
Enlightenment 0.16.0 Release
Mandrake writes "Enlightenment 0.16.0 came out this afternoon. Come play with what we've been toiling over for the past few months. Lots of new features from 0.15 - come check it out. Maybe now we can go and get some sleep. If you are at Atlanta Linux Showcase this week, we've even got shirts to hand out."
That is very strange... Enlightenment runs very quickly on my measly 120 Mhz. Not choppy in the slightest bit. Also due to Enlightenment's design all of the eyecandy features don't slow the program down any if they are disabled. If you do turn on all the crazy features and use a theme with a big footprint it could be a bit slow though. I recommend that you give E another shot. It has definitely been getting progressively better and better. Just when i think i can't think of any thing that would make it better, they add some cool new feature that i quickly can't live without.
"Weasling out of work is important to learn; it is what separates humans from animals. Except for weasels."
Version numbers in open source projects do not mean the same thing as they do in closed source projects. I found that very often the version number of a closed source product is akin to one's penis size: heh heh, my version number is bigger than yours'. Vendors bump up version X.0 to version X+1.0 solely because they want to leave an impression that the new release contains major changes and new features, instead of what it really is, most of the time: a couple of bug fixes.
Open source projects have no need for this, and thus the version numbers are often just a reflection of the developer's mood. One of my own projects is currently at version 0.73, even though I feel that it is as stable as anything you'd find on a production machine. Yup, I did find a bug earlier this week, so I bumped up version 0.72 to 0.73, end of story. That's all (shrug).
--
you've been suffering needlessly. You know why it's called Englightenment, don't you?
- "What are you doing?"
- "Waiting for Englightenment"
has been the running joke about starting up E for quite some time.
Yeah it looks pretty cool, but the heavily pixmapped themes are pretty bloody expensive (along with just about everything else).
If you want raw speed and lightweight, use fvwm. It flies on a 486, where Windows feels slow (and is a major memory hog).
If you want a nice compromise, try Sawmill (current favorite of the GNOME hackers) or WindowMaker. They run quite fast, and are nice and lightweight.
Anyone else notice that transparent Eterms seem to dump core when they start up? Turn off the transparency, they get run fine, but with it on, break out gdb and start poking around in core files. BTW, none of the libraries on the mirror are newer than the libs I have with my RedHat 6.0/E15-100 install, so if you are on a modem, don't worry about them.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I tried running Enlightenment, but switched back to fvwm2 when I could not find a way to do what I've been doing for years with fvwm2. Namely, defining keys to perform functions OTHER THAN the ones on the enlightenment config application. In fvwm I can define any key to do anything (i.e. launch an app, lock the screen, move the mouse cursor, etc.). Have I missed an E feature, or has E missed a feature?
The other things I like about fvwm is the flexibility of defining what mouse clicks do - E seems to be less flexible there as well. And the fvwm2 pager is very feature-ful (although I have not yet tried the new E pager, so I shouldn't talk yet).
My SGI doesn't have a development environment, so... Does anybody know where I could grab myself some pre-compiled binaries of this bad boy? :)
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Yes! Yes! We want windows-like configuration tools EVERYWERE. I want to have tools that ask me every time "do you really want to quit this application?". Tools that give me two choices "OK" and "cancel". Tools that give me a limited selection to the problem at hand. Tools that fight me every step of the way to a solution. Yes! Yes! I want GUI everything that damn command-line is too hard. I feel sooo uncomfortable dealing with it.
Really? :( There are no known bugs left. Have you reported the bugs? If not _pleeeaase_ do that and i'm pretty sure they'll be fixed very shortly. Btw, are you sure it wasn't an xserver problem? For example the fullscreen mode is very buggy on some xservers
middle button click, then under Maintenence, the "rebuild menus" script
--bsDaemon
My K6-200 with 64MB runs E fast, although I don't use opaque window moves & resizes. Some themes with lots of pixmaps and shaped windows are slow and eat memory. I suggest trying a lightweight theme and turning off opaque window moves and resizes. If you do that, it's speed is on par with WindowMaker, AfterStep, and KWM.
I love the little blinky lights of my dockapps :). Will they work under the new E?
Absolutely. Actually, the dockapp support has been in since 0.15.x. As well, there is a new API that raster's been working on for enlightenment-enhanced dockapps (epplets).
------
I hate it when ppl do that.
I have to disagree with the win95 gui stability. I would have to say that the win95 gui is no more stable than windowmaker + Xfree86 3.3.5 (at least in my experience). I haven't had an X crash in a while. Of course speedwise, I'd have to say the win95 gui can be a little more snappy doing the same thing, but not much more.
ah yes, but I was looking more for debian packages. (I haven't had the greatest experience with setting up clients on my own)
Are colormodifiers still broken? My theme depends on this feature, and now its gone. I don't really want to use the new version if my theme will stop working. Also, whats up with e.themes.org? Why isn't it working yet? If you follow the links to the top 5s on the front page, they show a different top 5!
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Try mixing and matching GUI components and build your own interface. If you've got the time, of course. Run a lightweight window manager, Sawmill (I forget the URL), WindowMaker, or a few others. WindowMaker has KDE hooks, I don't know about SawMill, never used it, but I hear it's excellent. Pick a good file manager, there are several lightweight ones out there. A search of "file managers" at google.com/linux presents a good start. Pick a "launcher" of sorts, like the Gnome Panel or KDE's thingy... I forget what they call it. Netscape's a hog regardless, but it will run, try getting navigator only and have a seperate email app.
It can be done. On a 75MHz pentium I had a quick desktop, but the standard Gnome and KDE just about choked on it, so I made my own. Here's a list of what I consider important in a GUI for users that pretty much just use what you throw at them:
That's a short list... by no means definitive. But if you can find a combo of these things and put them together, you can create a pretty good GUI out of these bits and pieces that may run. That's the best thing about Gnome and KDE, they let you pick and choose between the two, for the most part. No, you won't get a full-fledged GUI, but you can come pretty close.
Hope this helps a little...
I find the Win95/98 GUI a great deal less stable (in the sense that it's very often explorer.exe that crashes), and not particularly any faster.
I can't remember the last time X crashed. And while the standard way for clients to use the X server is on the slow side, to prove network transparency (a feature I rely on every day), there are ways to get around the slowness -- X shared memory, and direct framebuffer access. Both of these are available to apps that really need them.
I have to say I would like to see better speed on the part of GLX. My Ultra2 is noticably slower under Linux than under windows, due to the architecture of the GLX Xserver/GL extensions.
I'm running E on my 486/66 laptop. It's a cvs checkout from a few weeks ago, so it probably has most of the things in the new release.
:) If you're not in it for knocking peoples' socks off, I suggest fvwm. It's very usable and stable and all that boring stuff :)
It starts up nice and fast and has all the features I want (new icon tray and screen capture pagers... oooh... ahhh...) Oh, and it looks real purty, even with 256 colours.
Of course, I like E because you knock the socks off of every windows user who happens to notice your desktop
F0 07 C7 C8
There is. Its called claim. People use it on ishmael (one of the systems i ran) all the time. It runs debian.
With lynx supporting graphics at console the only thing I need X for is raplayer now.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Ah, I'm serious. /. started announcing every Netscape, Mozilla, E, and other craps, among tons of commercial stuff. I would like to see Hemos and Andover.net toys announcing new Lynx releases too, since it's the browser I use, and why not IceWM too, the Window Manager I use. Just to say that: Stop announcing software here. There are better sites to announce this.
Links to some epplets can be found here.
Good job on getting this out. I really like
Enlightenment and am looking forward to playing
with all the features in the new version!
Share data. Share code. Share ideas. Share the wealth.
http://stockfilter.org
I would definately NOT use Linux for it. I love Linux too, but not for Java development...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Its been a long time since I've celeberated the release of a new software version. It usually means bigger binaries, buggier code, and slower execution.
For example, if I compare my GUI in Linux(enlightenmend) to the GUI in Windows, Windows has a much more mature design. Even on my 350 Mhz, Enlightenment can get very choppy, and dragging a windows can bog down the entire system, while Windows GUI functions are much more transparent. This doesn't say anything about the rest of the OS, but for the mainstream, GUI is a large part of what matters.
Lets hope the new version is a step up, not a step down.
Don't forget #e on efnet for any help that you need. >:)
-- filgy
*cough* *cough* The Start Menu was a radical innovation? I remember thinking when it first came out, "Gosh, now I have a menu that's around all the time, so I can drop apps in it and have them easily accessible at all times like I've been doing with the Apple menu on my Mac for over half a decade!" But that's par for the course -- throughout the 80's and early 90's, innovations came to the PC world about 5 years behind when the appeared in the Mac world. Then Apple stagnated. Don't know why. System 7 was awesome when it first came out, but it got really embarrasing to be still running it 7 years later with virtually no change in it.
The one and only innovation I ever liked from Windows (and that seemed to truly be an innovation, but for all I know it was somewhere else first and I just don't know about it) was the right-click context menus. Now THOSE I've found to be truly useful...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
As I remember, I never restarted X after I ran Enlightenment for the first time and then installed Eterm. So I got back to work this morning logged in started X and reinstalled Eterm. It works just fine. Hmm...?
"enlightenment-0.16.devel.9-1mdk "
Works pretty well.
You don't need a separate Wharf program.
Just read the dox.
What exactly is the point of using Java if you're only going to use Solaris on SPARC HW? If that really is the only good Java platform (which I doubt) then the language is pretty much useless.
Not to nitpick because I really like E and all, but there were a lot of typos. I wasn't going to say anything but this one crossed the line:
All companies and trademarks are copyright by their respecitve owners. Linux is a trademark of Linux torvalds.
I mean, come on guys...that just doesn't look good at all.
I've spent a lot of time both on 16 meg Windows and Linux machines.
...). I suggest AbiWord and nedit as some light weight editors (taking 4.4 and 3 megs of ram respectively at the moment). Nedit is a programmers editor, and AbiWord is an MSWord compatible Word Processor.
I found no way to keep Windows from thrashing madly every time you change applications; there's no way to fit that much stuff into memory. Those are 2 of the most bloated apps for Win95.
Similarly, Netscape and KDE are some of the most bloated apps for X. On the 16 meg machines, I used fvwm2, which helped a lot. There's no way around Netscape (I detest it, but need it
You're still going to get some thrashing, but things should improve. Also, go through and kill stuff that doesn't need to be running. No dock apps, no panels (just a root menu should suffice), no extra daemons.
The truth is, if you want the flashy graphics stuff you're going to have to pay. I don't find Gtk+ (I happen to use GNOME) any slower than the Win95 GUI, but I don't find it any faster or smaller either. But the great thing about Linux is its modularity; you can build a solution that leaves out the extraneous stuff, resulting in a much friendlier experience on old hardware.
It's the real thing. Give it a try!
hmmmm. Although I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Enlightenment team, I recently switched to the Sawmill window manager. I found it to have a more focused development effort, to me much more lightweight than enlightenment, and IMHO it's easier to create themes for. Congratulations to the Enlightenment though!
Why you say you no bunny rabbit when you have powder puff tail? --The Tasmanian Devil
If you don't like the button-1 mouse menu on the desktop background, you can change it... E's nice like that :-)
:-)
look at the documentation (middle click on the desktop and go to Help) there's a section on configuring menus
If you follow Enlightenment, a minor version number is not a minor version number :-)
Mandrake is still very much with the project. I see him on #e every night tinkering with stuff in the code so that it was ready for release. I can guarantee that E is not becoming more arrogant, as they're still more than happy to play with everyone... I'm running E with KDE, and not only does it play well, but its FAST.
I'm tempted to call this post a flamebait, but I'm pretty sure that he just hasn't used E in a long time. Every time there's a new version, the speed increases.
trust me, this code is very un-buggy and fast. I've been using E 0.16 since the first CVS version (like in May or something), and not once was it ever buggy. It always worked, and worked well. with every CVS update, the speed increased a bit. Trust me, E is not only fast, but it keeps getting faster. the new 0.17 CVS versions will be even faster, as Raster and Mandrake rewrite more of the code for the backend so that more things can be done. I can promise you that with imlib2 and E0.17, Enlightenment will have even more converts. :)
Mog the Moogle
Theme's in enlightenment are incredibly powerful, but if a theme takes advantage of all the possibilities there's going to be a major performance loss. Personally I've written 2 E themes, and I know that my 2nd slows down E a lot. In my next theme I plan to pay particular attention to what it takes to keep that from happening.
That said, to me many themes in E are works of art. They aren't meant to be functional. If you want good performance out of E get a simple and functional theme. Recognize that not evey theme out there is meant for real work - particularly if your computer is slow.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Just to burst your last bubble -- Those right-click menus were on OS/2 long before they ever showed up on Windows. :)
---
Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
Heh. I always figured Micros~1 got the idea from somewhere, I just never knew where before. Thanks...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
If you reread the post you're replying to, you'll see I said I wouldn't want to do Java development on anything but a SPARC. As far as running Java goes, there are plenty of decent VM's out there for many different platforms...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
the iconification is much nicer. the iconbox is really cool, and the sound effects kinda help that along. :)
:)
:)
:)
:)
Raster did an extremely good job making the sounds for BrushedMetal. Mandrake told me one night about how he has this fetish for "odd clicky sounds"..
the KDE support rocks my world. (I'm using KDE 1.1.2 with E 0.16, and it's an *ahem* enlightening experience. did I mention it runs flawlessly?
it runs faster. partially because of BrushedMetal, but also because the speed has increased during each CVS update I made... and I'm on a p133/32MB RAM, so I can tell a larger speed increase than you can.
the menus are a bit more intuitive, they're not as good as windowmaker yet, but by 0.17, this is going to be as easy to use as KDE/mac... even theming will be done via a widget, a-la KDE2.0.
the extremely fast pager. I used the pager from 0.13, and it was dog slow. I can't even notice a speed decrease from disabling it, so I know it's not eating many resources.
tho I've seen bugs pop up in E (not from my own experiences, but from people on the mailing list), but they're fixed/solved completely.
Note: if someone could help us with the memory leak that occurs with Color Modifiers, I know we'd all be grateful. it's driving everyone insane...
the dockapp abilities are quite good, if not what you would expect. Let's just say that they don't work the same way that windowmaker/afterstep's work.
All in all, this is an extremely solid and fast window manager. When 0.17 comes out, this is going to be one of the "Killer Apps" of the X/*nix world. be sure to keep up on E, as it's only going to get better.
I already did customize it. I was merely pointing out that the default things sort of screw with GNOME, which might or might not matter, depending.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
NT == No Text..
I swear it was perfectly OK in the preview.
I would go with windowmaker in this situation. You can build a pretty cool environment: make buttons for the applications that you need, and associate icons with them (if necessary).
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
B) Are the default rpms built for RH? Yes. I'm downloading one right now (from ftp.enlightenment.org).
Whenever there is any discussion on Enlightenment, many people complain about how slow it is, while many other people comment on how fast it is. The truth is that it is highly configurable, and if you use the features, you pay in RAM and CPU. One option is to play with all the different features, and find a good balance of featurefull-ness. This takes time. Perhaps it would be easier to obtain this balance if E's configuration program gave the user some indication of how much resources their configuration was taking up.
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
Is it FASTER? Can I use it on my PII 266 with a Millennium II? I tried the last release and it made it worth it to spend hours getting Window Maker the way I wanted it even though Enlightenment worked fine. Now I'm stuck on Window Maker, but I'll go back if Enlightenment can switch desktops as quickly as Window Maker.
E is more stable than any windows software you've ever used?
ROFL that's god damn funny.
I guess you've never used any windows software.
You must not be tracking E that closely. Snapshots are made VERY frequently ie. 0.16-devel-x and 0.16-pre-x (after feature-freeze). CVS access is also always available for those wanting the bleeding-edge.
On the mailing list, I've seen people submit patches, suggest grammatical changes, ask for features, question design aspects, and so on. Raster and Mandrake have basically responded to everything.
Enlightenment is a very graphical hack, but polish has not been set aside. Mandrake just wrote a help system (loads the first time you run E to help first-timers), bugs are always dealt with whenever discovered, many usability improving features like the iconbox and pager, work on Imlib2 which should improve speed significantly (according to Rasterman), and work on a new filemanager. There's more but my point should have been made.
To sum it up, I see Enlightenment improving in just about every way including its polish.
Regards,
Andy
Oh, too bad. I got this and it's slowwwww in my AMD K6 200. You need what to run this mamuth? A K7 600?
This is one of a few mirrors listed at www.enlightenment.org.
ftp.enlighte.nu
This ones working fine for me. Good Luck!
Enlightenment sure looks cool. And, as a former Amiga user (and actually wannabe future Amiga user), I like the detail about the overlapping desktops. That is how it should be. The GUI in general (on Mac, Windows, Unix, Linux, etc) has been focussed around windows (I mean the things on your screen, not the 'other OS') so long people have forgotten that windows actually suck. I hate scroll bars and I hate windows, because they are only needed because you cannot see everything at once. But there are more elegant methods and one of them is to stop using windows for every application an instead giving them an entire screen each. The Amiga did it and it works better. So thumbs up, you guys at Enlightenment!
But enough about Amiga. I was asking where the desktop OS was. Really, where is it? Making cool looking GUI things is ok, but what are you going to put it onto? Linux sure needs a lot of work before it can become a desktop operating system, so why not focus on that, instead of on the cool looking GFX. I know, it's probably a lot more boring, but who IS making Linux better suited for the desktop at the moment? It needs to be a lot faster (booting, GUI-feedback, that kind of areas). I hope it is not going to be just forgotten, or we'll end up with something of a Microsoft taste: fat, sluggish and narrow-focussed. We don't want that, now do we?
Weird that you would mention Open Source. How come non-OpenSource stuff like Netscape gets special treatment? If you want a site that really supports Open Source, try AppWatch. You'll also find out that E 0.16.0 has been announced there several hours ago, full Changelog included.
From personal experience, E on Solaris (2.5 and 2.6) is slow, extremely buggy, and crashes very, very, very, often. I hope 0.16 bucks this trend.
--
N. Thomas
holy shit this is my first reply to slashdot...
There are a few mirrors to enlightnment. Just open their home page and click on download. There are several mirrors listed.
Sean Long
Wmboldended by my previous post...
What we need to make Linux mainstream in terms of graphical user interface, is ALL configuration options available via a standard interface. Whether this is available from a "standard" distribution (aka RedHat or whatever) or a default linux X-config interface, is moot. The root of the problem lies in the fact that there are few standard configuration frontends that can configure the entire OS with a single interface.
Microsoft has gone almost as far as the redhat configuration tool, but there still some distance to go. A single standard interface to all configurations is a holy grail we should be reaching for. I'm just a USER so my opinion can be discounted appropriately, but users worldwide are looking for a single button they can click on that will let them set up or configure any feature or service regardless of window manager or OS GUI interface.
That said, I'm limited to make config because I'm too stupid to understand the error messages printed after the first (and only) time I ever use make menuconfig on any given system.
Resizing is the window manager's responsibility - ie, it's an E bug, not a Gnome one. It might only occur under Gnome, but that doesn't make it Gnome's fault. :)
evidently you've only used windows software.
while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.
Well, yes and no. Windows isn't out of the box themeable, but there are third party solutions available. There are also virtual desktops available.
For example, there is a port of Afterstep to Windows called Litestep (I don't have a decent URL to post... you can try Litestep.net but it seems to be dead) which will give you virtual desktops.
Stardock has a product called Windowblinds which will skin titlebars, window borders, menus and buttons (not scroll bars or progress bars yet) as well as allowing translucency and bitmap backgrounds for explorer windows. They also have IconPackager (theme manager for icons) and Control Center (virtual desktops and app launcher [kind of like CDE bar or KDE bar). You can learn more at their web site.
I noticed the same problem, it seemed as if moving around windows or desktops sliding around were incredibily slow and choppy compared to what my card is capable of (TNT2 Ultra 32 meg). A couple of weeks ago I decided to try out the XFree 4.0 snapshot. It took forever to compile but when it was finally installed it was a world of difference, moving windows and desktops was silky smooth, even at my 1600x1200x32bit resolution everything was very responsive even with a complex theme - subjectively I felt it was more responsive then windows at the same resolution, and that's considering that in windows I don't have any themes or wallpaper.
.16 for quite a while now, I like it.
ps. I've been using the cvs E
100 people max on ftp.enlightenment.org is getting annoying.... Are there any mirrors around yet?
This is almost as bad as downloading the pre.6 the night before to wake to find the finished version out.....
Anyway, I have used the delopment and pre-release versions, and E16 does rocks, so anyone reading this should go get it (if they can) NOW!
>Let's say you are in the GIMP. And select file|save. Then you wan't to make a new dir to save your file. Now how do you do this now.
Click on the create dir button.
Well, that certainly hasn't been my experience, especially not with IE4 / IE5. AFAIK 32MB is recommended for Office 97.
But if what you want is a simple, locked-down environment, you don't need to bother with KDE. You could use a small, fast window manager like icewm with a Win95-style look-and-feel. (But avoid fvwm95 like the plague.) KDE is more useful for the users on the next rung of the ladder, who want to open file manager windows, drag things around, configure their own screensaver and so on. You can run KDE applications without having the whole KDE environment running. You could also try editing the 'startkde' script (or whatever) to stop loading the root window manager, sound server and other unneeded stuff. (Mine just loads kfm, kcontrol -init, kpanel and kwm.)
Also, remember that KDE comes with its own web browser (integrated into the file manager in a very Redmondian kind of way), so you might not need Netscape.
Finally, to improve performance in general, try using a 2.2 kernel and a distribution like Stampede or (IIRC) Mandrake which is Pentium-optimized. (You are using 586es, right?)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Enlightenment makes it's own user menus, for the left button. I'd recommend to use those instead, they index almost everything. If you're really concerned, go to freshmeat; you can download RPMs of the pre.4 without the left and right mouse buttons assigned to E.
Why did they chose to roll anti-aliasing into E
rather than adding it directly into XFree? Have
they done it in such a way that it will be easy
to remove once XFree 4.x comes out? Seems like
it would be pretty redundant then. I'm not
critisizing. It's their baby and they can do what
they want with E, but it seems to me it would have
been a better decision to add the code to XFree.
Unless they just *had* to have that feature before
the XFree release. And just let me say that I
don't read the E devel. list so this may have been
addressed there. Just curious....
I'm playing around with the new E, and the one question that comes to mind is: where can I find a wharf like application in e? (Wharf is a bar where you can dock apps in afterstep.)
This sig is false.
Actually many 1000s of people run E by itself. That's usually how it comes.
Anyway, try MIDDLE clicking or BOTH-BUTTON clicking to get the menu.
If that doesn't work I'd say your mouse has issues.
Actually many 1000s of people run E by itself. That's usually how it comes.
Anyway, try MIDDLE clicking or BOTH-BUTTON clicking to get the menu.
If that doesn't work I'd say your mouse has issues.
It's not a bug.
Sounds to me like a feature of Buddux. Now we only need to invent it.
--JT
Sounds like a feature of Jesux...
Patrick Barrett
Yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Enlightnment is a great example of open source at its best...a great improvement over the last version, but we could possibly help it along some more to achieve the attention and success it needs.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I've been playing with the pre-16 releases for a few weeks now, and I like 'em. The iconbox is pretty nifty (especially after the bugs in devel 6 or so got worked out), and I like the pager, too. There are a couple things I don't like, like the button-1 mouse menu on the background, but there are a bunch of cool features. More FX thingies (Raindrops and Waves), and individual control panels, f'rinstance, plus a new BrushedMetal theme.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
What am I doing wrong? (More interestingly, what should I be doing?) How do I squeeze usability out of old hardware, when most of the users barely can use Win32?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Thoughts?
I'm running E16 right now.. Very smooth.. This version is a lot cleaner of 15.5. Lots of REALLY cool features. I really enjoy the minimizing task bar.. definately worth a look. To bad e.themes.org's image server is down right now so I can't download themes. ChiefArcher
Bugger.
I download the pre-6 pre-release last night. First thing this morning, I see that that a new version is out.
Tchah!
Still, Enlightenment is just so cool. All of the others are nice and efficent, but E is just spoogeworthy.
I think Enlightenment is good for Linux because it gives Linux (or UNIX/X-Server based systems) a distictive look. Look at Mac, you can recognize it from a screenshot. Same with Windows, OS/2, commercial UNIX running CDE, probably BeOS and Job's NeXTStep system.
The problem with most windowmanagers, like WindowMaker, AfterStep, and desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, are that they try too much to *look* like Windows or NextStep or whatever, which is wrong, I think.
Yes, it's important to give the user the choice to make their environment to look like they want it, whether it is WIndows, Mac, OS/2 or NextStep.
And yes, if I were to set up a Linux box for my admin, I would probably give her a Windows look for the GUI. But the default Linux GUI look should be distinct from those other boxes.
That said, I haven't been using Enlightenment since 0.14, mostly because all the configuration changed between 0.14 and 0.15, and I just had better things to do than learning how to setup Enlightenment.
That's one of the things that bugs me about OS software, I guess. Weak documentation, and hard to configure (although forgivable for Enlightenment since it's still in alpha, but unforgivable in GNOME since it went 1.0 months ago).
Well, enough of my rants...
Je ne parle pas francais.
It's simple, CmdrTaco is actually #e's bitch, and he posts whatever we tell him to do. We are in fact the shadowy team behind slashdot, and Taco is just our puppet.
Muhahahah. No, seriously, Taco was a regular member of #e before he got too busy with slashdot, so I guess it's an old time thing.
One poster mentioned that they used Enlightenment on their notebook computer to impress Windoze users. Heck, try MacOS 8.5 window tabs... that usually gets Win98 users drooling in a matter of seconds.
Also, looking at the screenshots on their site... I notice that check boxes and radio buttons look the exact same when un-checked. Possibly confusing for the user.
- James Schend
Comment of the year
Dockapps should work without WMaker, they just dont get pulled into the dock.
;)
I used some dockapps with wm2
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
E has always been polished. It looks nice and is relatively fast. The ability to theme and specifically customize to the extreme are a god send. The iconbox is posh, really fancy but effective. Bad sides? Well, here I was half way done with my own theme and damn, more things to do. Now I have to become familiar with it again. My pager has disappeared! Ye gods no... As always Raster and Mandrake continue to impress.
ftp://ftp.dti.ad.jp/pub/X/enlightenment/enlightenm ent/
Why did they choose to roll anti-aliasing into E
rather than adding it directly into XFree? Have
they done it in such a way that it will be easy
to remove once XFree 4.x comes out? Seems like
it would be pretty redundant then. I'm not
critisizing. It's their baby and they can do what
they want with E, but it seems to me it would have
been a better decision to add the code to XFree.
Unless they just *had* to have that feature before
the XFree release. And just let me say that I
don't read the E devel. list so this may have been
addressed there. Just curious....
I'm sure the Usual Places(tm) will have the important files mirrored soon, but if there is a crunch to get them, I have placed them on a (gasp) NT machine (excellent uptime, however ;~) with a fast connection.
Mirrored are the tarball, the RPM, and the source RPM.
anon FTP-> 152.2.174.242 port 29
As was noted by another poster, the file_menu stuff doesn't work currently under solaris...but that was a recent change in one of the 0.16 pre releases.
If I can ever connect to ftp.enlightenment.org, I'll download 0.16 and try it out. (Using 0.16.pre5 right now).
slashdot.com All the news that isn't.
For starters, I don't run GNOME with E, I just run plain ole E (it's faster), so this isn't a problem for the rest of the world.
.Xclients and add in a exec term, just to do anything
I start it up, and everything looks beautiful.
I click around.
hey, that's funny. where is the program menu?
"right click on the background for the user menu" they say.
Hmm doesn't work
so I had to edit my
How can you miss not being able to do anything in X? Does anyone else use E without GNOME?
Enlightenment can (I think) still use X fonts if it is told to. However, the X font system is absolutely brain-dead -- and fixing it without breaking backward compatibility is harder than writing an AA font system from scratch.
Stable?!? You've got to be kidding me. My NT box has greater uptime than linux+enlightenment. And whats with java? Everytime I run anything java enlightenment crashes -- I can't use VisualAge in that wm anymore. Needless to say, I'm switching back to my old wm... (afterstep with a nice dock and zharf. Easy to use, configure, and doesn't crash... ever.) I've tried enlightenment since 0.13 and still it has not become any more stable. I don't care about new features dammit - fix the wm so it doesn't crash.
The great thing about e is that you can configure it however you wish. e allows the user to make dragging of windows transparent along with a whole slew of other features.
Considering that e has not even entered the .2 phase, rasterman and mandrake should have such long stints inbetween the big releases. I could see waiting a year to go from .99 to 1.0, but .15.5 to .16.0 should not of been a half a year. Is there any harm in incorperating less new stuff in such a early release as pre-.8 status?
blow it out yer ass
You miss the point entirely. Me using GIMP as an example was probably a bad idea. As I didn't recall the menus.
The problem lies with any other program that does not have the funtionality I proposed. The GTK file selector should be standard across all programs. Right now it is to sparse to be *very* useful, but it is useful.
Wouldn't it be nicer if you could manipulate files from the GTK file selector in some ways. And let's say you had two GTK file-selectors from two different programs open, and you could just drag a file across to the other GTK fileselector.
The GTK file-selector really should have these features:
Then get a menu with the following choices:
Theres probably a lot more that could be nicked from windows, and maybe some innovative improvements could be done too. Just look at the file-selector in Windows. Then look at the GTK fileselector. I am confident you will understand that there is a hell of a lot missing functionality in the GTK file selector. IMHO adding better functionality to the GTK file selector would make the entire use of ALL applications programmed with GTK a hell of a lot easier.
Many of these ideas are shamelessy nicked from Windows, but that doesn't mean they are bad ideas. I think the right click whils in a file-selector is a real time saver. In fact, that was one of the better improvements from win 3.11 to win95.
If you feel-like torturing yourself, you might want to give win 3.11 a try, I'm sure you will miss the right clicking in the file-selector.
If any hackers from GNOME or GTK are reading this would you please clarify what exactly is the deal with the GTK file selector at the moment, and are any of these feautures scheduled for inclusion allready, are there anyone working on something like this ?
B) Are the default rpms built for RH?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
E 0.16 has Anti-Aliasing in its titlebars via its built-in truetype font renderer. All that you need is a font which supports Anti-Aliasing and the theme to use E's TTF engine instead of X's.
Really cool. Hopefully we'll see more anti-aliasing soon enough. E now has support for epplets, which are like dockapps, and as far as I can tell, this version is actually somewhat faster... check it out. Also, this may be the last release before E becomes a desktop environment instead of a window manger. DR17 may have an E file manager... we'll see. For us GNOME users, there is now Sawmill (), which is shaping up nicely and will hopefully remain as fast as it is while getting a few more features... check that out if you want a light window manager for GNOME. br/=; Julianbr/=;Check out freshmeat.net and search for AIM clients. I think there are 2 or 3 console clients.
There are lots of programs out there besides Enlightenment, the Gimp, and Netscape. What does it take for an app to get posted on /. every time it's revised by a minor verson?
Not much info on what's new & updated though, it's mainly just thanks to various people and organizations.
There is a list of features, but there's no annotation as to what is new.
And I forgot to say. I know the previous post is a bit off topic, but please moderate it up. I'm sure someone else here feels the same way about the GTK file selector as I do. It would have been really nice to know what is going on with it...
If you like gnome so much why don't you just use the gnome dock apps? They are better than the window maker ones...you can put them in menus, and you can resize them and stuff....I personally like window maker a lot, and I can't stand gnome,..its to slow....I'll go with E any day........I actually run a couple window maker dock apps...like a I have a network monitor...
Running Enlightenment with an X-server set to 16bbp or 32bbp is a difference like day and night, concerning speed of window movements and memory consumption. At least on my machine ( 333Mhz, 128 Ram )
One of my co-workers in charge of purchasing heard me complaining about a two button mouse in E, and ordered me a nice new 3 button job.
Who needs configurability with co-workers like that?
Anyway time to go get E16.
Middle button -> Maintenance -> Regenarate Menus
Yes, I am disgusted.
No, this is not a flamebait, but probably offtopic.
Last year I made a new friend that seemed not to be a Microsoft droid (i.e. he didn't like Windows) and I encouraged him to give Linux a try. I gave him some advices and warned him because Linux is very different in philosophy to Windows.
Today, he thanked me by e-mail to help him make the plounge and said he didn't regret it.
So, why am I disgusted?
Because I'm stuck in England (which is a foreign country for me) with only windows boxes and a Unix account via Telnet on Tru(e?)64 Unix (Alphas) while he has got a Linux box for him alone.
I'm disgusted to have to support MS crapware while my friends can enjoy Linux. True64 may be a better technology than Linux for many things but they just didn't install all the cool stuff that come with quite every Linux distros. I don't even have GCC (and so no Objective-C/C++ compiler AFAIK).
Please everyone, make Linux (or another Free Unix, I don't care) world domination break MS monopoly so we can have the choice between crap and a true OS.
I'm jealous of all of you, so take the most fun out of it while you can. Many of you don't like Enlightenment, so what? You can switch to Window Maker/Sawmill/YAWM (Yet Another Window Manager) but all of us windows users (by will or by force) are stuck with only one interface, only one desktop, only one type of BSOD...
Being forced to use Windows after having used Linux for quite two years is worse than a nightmare, it is a curse. And a curse don't disappear before winning over the originator of the curse. So don't forget to have a thought for all the people that make all this great software, they are worth your respect.
'nuff said.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
I'm an avid Window Maker user, but have tried E in the past. It was way back, like DR14 or something, but I didn't like it because I love the little blinky lights of my dockapps :). Will they work under the new E? If they do I would seriously consider switching, since I like GNOME so much and WM's GNOME support is flaky.
Thanks,
Matt
Enlightenment is cool, it's pretty fast.. and I've found that after 2 releases, any feature is debugged well enough to be used in production. On the other hand, I wish gnome would get it's act together - those original 1.0 rpms were 100% eeeeviiill, and the new ones, while fixing ALOT of those bugs still has a ways to go yet. My biggest complaint is a kind of temporary-lockup when resizing a window for the first time after starting gnome. :\
--
I used to hate Enlightenment. I thought it was way too slow, way too oriented around the eyecandy, and too surrounded by some weird fanboy culture (which wouldn't keep me from using it, but did keep me from admitting to it.)
During my explorations of Gnome, I warmed to E a little, largely thanks to Red Hat's reasonably conservative defaults, which made it seem less intrusive and reminded me of its underlying configurability.
Now that they've worked support for KDE into the mix, along with support for Gnome, along with some reasonably functional standalone features, I'm really impressed and pleased. This release marks Enlightenment truly coming into its own.
A perusal of e.themes.org reveals there's still a general obsession with "industrial" themage, but that's not a real showstopper. There are also some fairly pleasant, non-headache inducing, non-urban decay invoking themes. I can even play my Run Lola Run soundtrack without feeling like a total Sprocket.
I'll be monkeying around with the menu configs (cursed two button mouse that I never get around to replacing), but I'm pretty sure the versatility alone in regards to Gnome and KDE support will keep me as a user this time.
Congratulations to the team. You've taken a lot of abuse and derision in the past, but the product is catching up with the vision and it's worth it.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
E 0.16 has Anti-Aliasing in its titlebars via its built-in truetype font renderer. All that you need is a font which supports Anti-Aliasing and the theme to use E's TTF engine instead of X's.
d ex.html), which is shaping up nicely and will hopefully remain as fast as it is while getting a few more features... check that out if you want a light window manager for GNOME.
Really cool.
Hopefully we'll see more anti-aliasing soon enough.
E now has support for epplets, which are like dockapps, and as far as I can tell, this version is actually somewhat faster... check it out.
Also, this may be the last release before E becomes a desktop environment instead of a window manger. DR17 may have an E file manager... we'll see.
For us GNOME users, there is now Sawmill (http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~john/sw/sawmill/in
Julian
btw, sorry about the messed-up post... it was fine in the preview...
I'm glad to hear it's finally out. I've been using enlightenment for a good while now, being an afterstep convert. I must say though that the 15's hardly ever let me down. Maybe it was my experience of having a kind of new machine, but it seemed faster and usually more stable. I'm not *REALLY* bitching though. E rocks my world, much better than any other w/m out. Ennh, change comes and we adapt. I remember going from straight dos to os/2, I bitched that it wasn't as fast and whatnot when really the reason was that I had been engrained to think command line rocks, I don't need pictures. While I still use console in linux about 20-30 percent of the time, having a gui has kept me more productive and sane. I'll go into E 0.16.0 whining, but when I look back in a few days a little more unbiased to what I am used to, surely it will be the best.
In terms of mass acceptance of Unix in general
as a desktop, Enlightenment is very important.
It combines the usability, speed, and flashiness
that users would generally look for. Best of all,
it looks far nice than Windows.
However, in terms of personal use, I ran
0.15.5 for a while, but I've gone back to
a very old standby: VTWM. It isn't flasy,
it isn't very pretty, but it's fast, and I've
found that I get work done better when I don't
have all the chrome and glitz.
Having said that, once the port is updated,
I'm going to give 0.16 a whirl. Enlightenment
0.15.5 has always been rock solid on FreeBSD,
and very easy to build out of ports.
I salute Mandrake, Rasterman, and anybody else
working on E's excellent work. A consistent
GUI across various Unix platforms (I've used E
on Linux and FreeBSD; I bet it'd run on Solaris
without any real trouble) is key to keeping
Unix a serious contender on the desktop.
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