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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."
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
the iconification is much nicer. the iconbox is really cool, and the sound effects kinda help that along. :)
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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.
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!!*****
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
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?
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
Sounds like a feature of Jesux...
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.
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
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/=;To be honest, no. I haven't noticed that to be the case at all. While Raster and Mandrake were pretty firm on sticking to the feature freeze leading up to this release (which might have looked like arrogance if you made a suggestion late in the game, but was more likely an attempt to get everything right before this release), I saw a lot of discussion about, and work on, all of the things you mentioned.
Sure, E's got its "cool graphical hacks" -- that's part of what makes it different, and I suspect they'll be a large part of E's development for the foreseeable future (and I like it that way)... But under the hood, they've done a lot of work to keep it stable, and it shows on my system.
---
Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
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.
If Java *crashes* E because E can't handle a malformed ICCCM hint, then E simply can't run Java, period. I've completely given up on Java development on Linux BTW. I'm tired of waiting for the stable version of the latest Java RSN. My latest kick is JPython (even though I'm not a huge fan of python), but I do all my hacking with it on my Solaris box at work (and play Homeworld on my windoze box at home).
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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. :\
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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
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.
Those three programs are some of the best known projects in the Open Source community. If you're looking to find out when other projects are updated, I suggest you check out freshmeat. It's a great page that tracks just about every Open Source project out there. If /. started covering all of them, there'd be no space on the page for anything else.
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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