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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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
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Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
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.
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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.
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.
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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.