Enlightenment DR17 On the Linux Desktop

StephenJoiner writes "There's a new review on Mad Penguin of the latest VectorLinux release, which includes the in-development Enlightenment DR17 desktop. As far as I know, this is the first time DR17 has appeared on a production desktop... even as a "technology preview". All I have to say is Enlightenment on VectorLinux is absolutely off the scale." Enlightenment was in Slashdot news earlier for both the involvement with Elive and their use of Epeg bits to deal with thumbnailing.

Ok..

[Karamchand]

- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review [madpenguin.org]

Ubuntu + E17

[trevordactyl]

There was recently a how-to posted on getting Ubuntu and E16-E17 paired up on ubuntu forums if anyone is interested and hasn't seen it:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=54476 [ubuntuforums.org]

Fedora & E17

[SlashdotOgre]

For anyone interested in testing out Enlightenment 17 in Fedora, you can find a repository here: http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/news_e17.html [nus.edu.sg] I've used it with FC2 & 3, haven't tried FC4 yet, but so far it's been fairly stable. I do still prefer E16, but it's worth a shot.

Stable, beautiful....

[dhasenan]

I've been using E17 for the past few days. It's beautiful, and it's as stable as any desktop environment I've used--perhaps more so. Not all the features have been implemented; it still needs a menu editor to be really useful (or just tell me which config file to modify, and put one there by default), and I'd like to see an e17 terminal.

Still, it's lightweight, beautiful, features real transparency, and is unusually stable for being in heavy development.

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[RiotXIX]

Also, www.get-e.org is the best site i've come across for installing e17 (would have been lost without it).

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[i_should_be_working]

This thread [ubuntuforums.org] is a bit more straightforward as it's focused only on installing e17.

Re:LiveCD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd followed the Elive link in the article summary, you would have found a Debian-based LiveCD with Enlightenment.

Got it on FreeBSD

[FromWithin]

I use it daily on my laptop here on FreeBSD 5.4. It really is superb. I previously used xfce4, but have switched over to this now. Startup time is about 3 seconds, speed is excellent with loads of graphic effects. Themes available are really nice. The only criticism I have is the use of binary files for some config stuff (menus and icons).

I highly recommend it. Can't wait for the full release (not least because I haven't bothered to compile the extra utils).

Gentoo has had it for months

[glimt]

I'm not a Gentoo apologist or advocate, but it has had DR17 available as an ebuild (like the rest of the distribution) for months.

Re:LiveCD

[oringo]

Yes indeed. It's called elive. Get it at http://livecd.debianitas.net/index.html [debianitas.net]
There's a torrent for it also: http://torrents.osdir.com/index.php?view=Elive%20B eta%200.1 [osdir.com]

Speak for yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I need. What about that?
Sorry, but styles can't affect functionality [or] simplicity. If I want the eyecandy (KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment...), I can choose it. If I just want a screen to open a bunch of terminals in it (Ratpoison anyone?) I can have it too. It's called "option", and it's a blessing.

Re:Vapourware

[picklepuss]

Actually if you look on Rasterman.com, he does a few comparisons of different stock window managers using a script that he wrote, and E-17 kills.

http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News Scroll down to the post "E17 is being Optimized"

I'm particularly fond of the way the pager behaves. I like being able to drag and drop iconified windows between desktops. Although this works in Gnome, it will place the window in the new desktop at the same coordinates it was in the old one. With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...

Looks/works great on Ubuntu

[bad_outlook]

I run e17 (16.999.whatever) on Ubuntu from a HOWTO available in the forums. There is a .deb repository you can tie into, so now even the 'Ubuntu update' auto thingy even finds updates to those, so it's part of my system now. It's very slick, feels like the speed of Fluxbox but the look of, well...nothing really; it's in a class by itself.

Re:Stable, beautiful....

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, I've been using it for about 3 months on my A64 rig and it's been working fine here. You can get distribution-specific installation instructions here [get-e.org], although I can only attest to the validity of the Gentoo install instructions since that's what I use.

Re:Vapourware

[picklepuss]

Look, I'm not trying to get into a pissing match over which WM is better or anything. The parent subject indicated that E17 was vapourware, and you and I both know that's not true. He also wanted to know what was significant about it besides the eye-candy. Obviously high performance on a small footprint is significant - particularly if you take into account that it actually looks half decent.

Re:Not trying to start a flame war (honest)...

[Rick and Roll]

Shut up and read some history, bitch.

Enlightenment has been out longer than Mac OS X and has had an interface similar to the dock. So Apple may have copied Enlightenment, not the other way around.

I'm not trying to trumpet OS X...yeah the fuck right, you freakin' karma whore.

Re:Speedy Enlightenment?

[kwalker]

A couple of things:

First, Gnome Terminal is dog slow and fat-ass. I never use it because it's such a resource drain. I use Eterm 0.9.3 actually and with the exception of it not liking some UTF-8, it works great. It takes up about 1/6 of the resources GT does.

Second, are you using the nv (Open Source) driver or the nVidia (Proprietary) driver? I've noticed the nv driver is incredibly slow compared to the nVidia driver, especially dragging windows around. I don't see pixels update, but refresh goes to about 1fps when I'm dragging Eterm windows around. With the nVidia driver, it's smooth and slick, but it randomly locks up the machine if you have RenderAccel turned on.

Re:DR17?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this isn't a troll. If you are not familiar with Enlightenment, it is not obvious.

The last release of Enlightenment [wikipedia.org](an XWindows windows manager) was 0.16, and it used to be the default window manager for GNOME. It was released in 2000 (last stable) and an update was released December of last year (2004).

DR17 indicates it is a development release (i.e. not advisable to use in a production machine) of the next version (0.17, or "17" for short). There are some very novel things in it, and all-in-all, it is a very powerful engine. See the ./ article [slashdot.org] for interesting, albeit self-described, forward thinking of the project.

The best way to run E17

[poofyhairguy82]

The best way to run E17 is inside of Gnome. I call it Enlightened Gnome [ubuntuforums.org]. Then Gnome Apps look nice, you get to have nice Gnome things like it panel and its volume manager without dealing with the worst problem in Gnome (its default Window Manager-Metacity).

If you want the full effect you have to go into Gconf and tell nautilus to not draw the desktop, but otherwise it works pretty good. I have found that overall its faster than Metacity, and is more stable with xcompmgr. I just wish I could find another way to task switch in E17 that is not alt-tab, and I hope that one day E17 will conform to Freedesktop standards so I can use Kompose with it!

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[MynockGuano]

I agree; I stumbled upon that site yesterday--just AFTER I had finished installing Enlightenment CVS for the first time in about 6 months to see where they're at.

And where are they? It's there, it's usable, and I'm loving it. Obviously, it is also still in-development, but aside from the total lack of configurability by GUI or textfile--nearly everything must be configured via obscure, undocumented enlightenment_remote commands (thank goodness for the included zsh completion script!)--once you've managed to configure it, it's completely usable. I was extremely impressed, and will be back to using Enlightenment from here on out.

For those of you who prefer it, another thing I found right after installing was this great page [nus.edu.sg], which has binaries and source rpms of CVS snapshots, and includes apt and yum repositories! Very nice! I wrote a script to install the whole she-bang from CVS a long time ago, but this would be an even easier way to keep tabs on the development progress, if you use a distro that supports rpm.

----

Personal recommendations:

I like the engage launcher/tray better than the default ibar. You can enable it as a module with these commands:

$ enlightenment_remote -module-unload ibar (not essential, but having both is rather redundant)
$ enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
$ enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage

I also edited the data/themes/module/images/bg_[hv].png files in the engage source before compiling to be completely transparent (instead of 65% opaque) to remove the (in my opinion) ugly background rectangle on my engage bar. I think get-e.org had another solution for this which involved editing the module.ecj file, instead, which probably would have been easier had I known to do it before I did the install. >8)

Re:The best way to run E17

[dhasenan]

In e17, you should be able to centre-click for a list of open windows, whether shaded, unshaded, or hidden.

Re:Enlightenment version numbering....

[tuggy]

the latest stable version of enlightenment is 0.16, DR means Development Release (yes, a stable development release).
The next version will be 0.17, so its called DR17.

Re:Stable, beautiful....

[flithm]

Well put. Unless you've been using it non stop for a year or so, you probably can't comment on its stability... unless it's to say that it is unstable.

Having said that, I've been using E17 on and off for about a year, and although I still wouldn't qualify myself able to comment on its stability, I will say this:

It feels solid. You know how you can just feel the difference? Like when you first tried OS/2 and compared it to Win 3.1... you didn't exactly know why, but you knew it was rock solid.

That's the way E17 feels.

I haven't had it crash on me, but I certainly wouldn't suggest people rush out to start using it as their main WM. It's just not ready yet. There are tons of features that still need to be implemented before it's usuable full time.

I look forward to it though, for those who like the E style, it's going to be awesome!

Re:Looks/works great on Ubuntu

[poofyhairguy82]

Here is my deb line:

deb http://ubuntu.nooms.de/ [nooms.de] hoary/

To get it to work I had to comment out the Universe line.

Re: Multiple desktops for WinXP

[markhb]

I got yer virtual desktops right here [microsoft.com].

Re:StyleXP

[khellendros1984]

Windows powertools allows some fun stuff, like Linux-style mouse focusing, multiple desktops, MacOS-like Expose switching...

However, programs aren't expecting windows to have capabilities like that, so it's a bit glitchy, sometimes, haha

That said, Every Linux WM/DE that I've used has implemented these capabilities better.

Re:StyleXP

[jacksonscottsly]

Sure, gnome is a lot like windows... but if the contest was between which DE (gnome or KDE) looked more like which commercial WM, it's pretty obvious that gnome resembles OSX more than KDE resembles OSX and that KDE resembles windows more than gnome resembles Windows... This is why it's easy to compare the two as people do...Perhaps the ways in which gnome is more like osx and kde is more like windows are few, but they are also quite obvious, methinks: - gnome...er metacity or whatever has a bar at the top; windows has never done so standard, neither has KDE (to my knowledge)... but OSX has and gnome has. - gnome presents fewer options that "clutter" the screen, like OSX. Look at the doc in osx, it's pretty simple. Look at the menus in gnome, pretty simple. KDE presents every option on the face of the earth in some distributions... windows can be awfully cluttery, too.... ESPECIALLY on a new install loaded with dell/hp/gateway/whatever-company bullshit applications. Macs simply don't come loaded with all that crap visible, and Gnome keeps it to a minimum. There are other similarities, too, but these are the most obvious and therefore the most important... once you get much further than this, you start nit-picking into things people don't even notice.

Best window manager ever.

[twitter]

With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...

Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now.

The E pager is very nice and I hope everything is just as good. It's been a long time since I've used fvwm, just as it had been a long time since I used E. I like E's real division between virtual desktops and screens, so you can have multiple pagers in E each with it's own desktop with multiple screens. I also like being able to drag and drop between the different pagers.

E also gets minimized viewers right too. It draws a thumbnail or an icon and grows to accommodate what you have open or scrolls, your choice. You can also turn off the borders, so nothing but the icon or thumbnail gets in front of your background image.

Theme transparency already rocks. Add that to animated backgrounds and you have something unmatched in the commercial world.

Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.

Like this benchmark [madpenguin.org]?

It looks a little funny to me to, but it's a benchmark with both window managers on it.

Re:Gentoo has had it for months

[the_greywolf]

i really wanted to give it a try.

i now run this on a fairly regular basis:

schedtool -B -e emerge eet evfs edb evas ecore embryo imlib2 edje e epeg epsilon esmart entrance emotion eclair ewl engrave e_utils e_modules etox erss entice engage elicit eterm evidence e17genmenu

i've been happily using e17 for a couple months, keeping up with all the major CVS changes. (of course, i'm subscribed to the CVS list so i can keep track of it all.)

Re:Stable, beautiful....

[the_greywolf]

there is a menu editor. entangle.

also, you can edit the menu itself in ~/.e/e/applications/ wherein you can find engage's sticky icons, your icon bar, startup apps, apps to run on restart, as well as your favorites menu.

Re:Tabs

[schleyfox]

the devs are working on it, they aren't a secret cabal of enlightened devs, they publish a list of features they will implement on get-e.org and other places

Re:Cairo

[dbIII]

I wonder if they'll start taking advantage of Cairo and Glitz ... accelerate GUI drawing via OpenGL

They've been using Evas for a few years - which supports OpenGL and hardware acceleration. Cairo wasn't around, and they are a few years and a lot of features ahead of it.

Re:Fedora & E17

[the_greywolf]

I've been running E17 from that repository for a while now (On FC3) and I really like it. I still use E16 as my primary window manager because E17 is missing a few things I use (like remembering where windows go and a few other things) but it is really nice.

got good news for you then! window memory was implemented a couple of weeks ago. as were a lot of other must-have features from e16.

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[the_greywolf]

Personal recommendations:

I like the engage launcher/tray better than the default ibar. You can enable it as a module with these commands:

$ enlightenment_remote -module-unload ibar (not essential, but having both is rather redundant)
$ enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
$ enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage

I also edited the data/themes/module/images/bg_[hv].png files in the engage source before compiling to be completely transparent (instead of 65% opaque) to remove the (in my opinion) ugly background rectangle on my engage bar. I think get-e.org had another solution for this which involved editing the module.ecj file, instead, which probably would have been easier had I known to do it before I did the install. >8)

i take a bit of a different tact. i keep both the ibar and engage around. i settled on this for my normal configuration:

enlightenment_remote -module-unload temperature
enlightenment_remote -module-unload cpufreq
enlightenment_remote -module-unload battery
enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage
enlightenment_remote -module-load monitor
enlightenment_remote -module-enable monitor

enlightenment_remote -desks-set 4 2

enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 0 0 "Communications"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 1 0 "Browsing"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 2 0 "t3h 3mail"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 3 0 "Downloads"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 0 1 "Programming"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 1 1 "Testing"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 2 1 "Hacking"
enlightenment_remote -desktop-name-add 0 0 3 1 "Images"

and i have a unique background image on each desktop, including Firefoxy and iCandy from ToyboxArts.

Re:Got it on FreeBSD

[FromWithin]

Well I'm using it on my 800MHz Celeron laptop with the worst Trident graphics chip, so yours should be fine. It works great here.

Re:Ubuntu + E17

[poofyhairguy82]

What does E17 do that XFCE, or more important to me, KDE, doesn't do?

Looks prettier. And can run faster (I know it sounds like I'm lying, but I'm not). Its amazing. Its just kinda harder to use.

VectorLinux BitTorrent

[whitefael]

There's a BitTorrent for VectorLinux at http://www.mininova.org/tor/80583 [mininova.org]