Enlightenment E19 Pre-Alpha Released 89
An anonymous reader writes "While it took over a decade for E17 to come out, Enlightenment E19 is being readied for release just two months after E18's debut. The Enlightenment DR 0.19 update has a rewritten compositor that can fully act as its own Wayland compositor (not dependent upon Weston). The update integrates OpenGL canvas filters support, contains many bug-fixes, and has other improvements for both X11 and Wayland users. The 1.9.0 alpha1 pre-release was issued today as the initial testing version of the new window manager."
If only they'd bring back tvtwm I'd be happy. (Score:2, Interesting)
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You mean vtwm? It's availabale at https://github.com/nkadel/vtwm-5.5.x-srpm for Red Hat based systems.
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Yes.
Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge). Or windows occupying more than one desktop (e.g. top left part in "1", bottom right in "4").
Unfortunatelu tvtwm, last time I checked, was lacking too much.
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Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge). Or windows occupying more than one desktop (e.g. top left part in "1", bottom right in "4").
FVWM2 does both: your world consists of multiple disjoint virtual desktops (windows can be present in multiples of them) each of which is larger than the screen. In the latter case, you can also stick windows so that they pan around with you.
I go for 2x10 or 3x10 screens in one large virtual desktop, personally.
With the
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Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge). Or windows occupying more than one desktop (e.g. top left part in "1", bottom right in "4").
FVWM2 does both: your world consists of multiple disjoint virtual desktops (windows can be present in multiples of them) each of which is larger than the screen. In the latter case, you can also stick windows so that they pan around with you.
But in a way that feels broken compared to TVTWM. With FVWM2 it seems you need to choose which corner of the window in that example you want to see. With TVTWM you can move the view so it's centered on that window spanning multiple desktops.
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But in a way that feels broken compared to TVTWM. With FVWM2 it seems you need to choose which corner of the window in that example you want to see. With TVTWM you can move the view so it's centered on that window spanning multiple desktops.
Not 100% sure I follow. If you right-click in the pager, you can pan around freely.
I don't know of any built in function off-hand which pans the desktop to make the current window centred, but I don't think it'd be hard to write. You can access various parameters, such a
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However, it also pops up a file manager which seems to involve re-setting the desktop background.
If thats nautilus then if you run it before hand with 'nautilus --no-desktop . &' it will behave it's self.
Bigger Virtual Screens (Score:2)
"Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge)."
X itself does that! You have to have an Xorg.conf file. Then you can set the virtual screen to whatever size you want. It doesn't matter what window or desktop manager you are using.
I don't know if Wayland has this capability or not. My guess is no, afterall, it's Wayland! If a feature isn't used by a majority of gamers and movie watchers it shouldn't be there. Right?
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"Still no alternative gives virtual screen bigger than real screen (scroll when mouse hits edge)." ... X itself does that!
Kinda. tvtwm had it integrated nicely and cleanly so it was easy to scroll to where you want. Using X itself I get too many unintentional scrolls.
My guess is no, afterall, it's Wayland! If a feature isn't used by a majority of gamers and movie watchers it shouldn't be there. Right?
Not sure if I want to laugh or cry.
There used to be a buzz (Score:3)
I remember when there was a buzz about Enlightenment, right around the time of the big internet meltdown. Well, I'm glad they persevered. I guess they will "ship no code before it's time.(C)" I hope it will prove to be worth the wait.
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I remember rolling my own E16 themes back in 2002 or so... I really did love that window mana... wait, I don't believe they liked that term.
If there were a way on OS X to completely replace the native WM with Enlightenment (meaning for the native ones too, not just X11 or whatever), I might do it for a while. Then I'd likely be reminded of why I switched from Linux to a Mac back in 2003, and give the project up - but still, those were kinda fun times, back in the day.
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I don't know if you can replace the native display server, but you can get somewhat closer to what you want by installing XQuartz and running it in full-screen mode.
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Login as >console and you should be dropped into a darwin environment.
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Right, I understand that. That's always been the case (and the appeal, at least for me) with a Mac. But I'm referring to the case when I'm running Photoshop, or Safari, or whatever non-X11-based program I choose to run - you can't replace the native Window manager when it comes to native Mac apps.
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E16 is the only window manager that I found that natively supports compositing and is why I am using it today. After looking at E17 it appears to be more of a "desktop environment" or at least that's the direction it's moving towards. There are developers now working on standalone compositors for X11 (such as Compton) which will be nice when they're done, but for now it's E16.
Re:There used to be a buzz (Score:4, Informative)
e17, 18 and 19 are really just like e16 - just with more bits thrown in. the filemanager is built in. it's not a separate app (like nautilus for example). it's really in the same vein/design just with a vastly more modular codebase and a small mountain of custom written toolkit behind it.
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more fun that qml? interesting. why? i'm curious.
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On a lower end laptop I had X installed and decided I wanted something more capable than Fluxbox. For some reason Enlightenment popped into my head so I gave it ago. Enlightenment started as more a window manager, and then became surpassed by "Desktop Environments". I was surprised to find Enlightenment now meets nearly all my needs. File manager, task bar, window manager. With desktop environments going overboard (KDE) getting fatter than intended (XFCE) or simply going the wrong direction (Gnome), it's o
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that's what we're trying. have the core desktop. all the things you need to make your machine and world function. it's missing bits still and a lot of what is there could be polished more, but the goal is to give you just what you were after as above. any applications after that are optional extras.
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e17 took a very long time.
e18 didn't
e19 likely won't.
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But this is just an alpha pre release. Isn't that the same thing as a pre-alpha release?
Historically pre-alpha is a long way from ready.
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I don't really care, yeah, it's an early release, people who want a stable desktop maybe shouldn't use it.
It just recently went into feature freeze, so I guess it's "done" as far as deciding what will go in at least:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]
Here it says mystery release 2k14:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]
But on the previous link it says:
"there is currently no set date or estimated date for E19. My only goal with regard to time is to release before July 2023, though I may be forced to delay until S
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historically every dev uses e right from git master... and that's where the alpha comes from. so it is being dogfooded every single day. generally speaking except for small transitory blips here and there, our unstable "master/trunk/head" is in the same ballpark stable as releases. unlike releases you get fixes for things within sometimes minutes, but mostly hours or a few days. releases (even point releases) take at least days if not a few weeks. :)
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Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a (Score:5, Funny)
Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a tale of when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the likes of which you do not see today. Ancient Behemoths as AOL, Compuserve and Yahoo. They lived in an eco system so rich in investment that web companies could grow to companies of unusual size in the swamp of private equity. They existed by new rules, profit was bad, you had to make losses but not any losses, you had to make losses per trade but promise you would make it up in bulk! The new companies traded in paper shares, showering them around and using them to buy each other up and make even bigger companies. Golden times that were never going to end.
But the power of the old economy could not be denied. Investors ran out of money and started to demand profits and when none was to be found, companies went up for sale and sold for a fraction of their worth, if at all. Infrastructures build on Sun crashed while Intel powered desktop servers took over. Those that had grown rich were now food for leaner faster moving predators who feasted on the remains of the behemoths that came before. It was the greatest economic collapse the world had ever seen. And a billions totally failed to notice any real impact as if the sudden collapse of the future of thousands of web companies had no real effect whatsoever.
It was called the crash... and man has grown wiser since then, long gone are the days that a company that has never made a profit, nor makes a product for which there is a need, nor has a business plan to make a profit before the next ice age can go to the stock market and collect a billion in investment at a cost of half a billion in money it doesn't have. No sir. Not possible! Because the market is wise and all seeing.
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In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie
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In the Valley of Silicon where the prospectuses lie.
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You had me with you up until you said "grown wiser". Yes, we learned that lesson, but I fear that rather than truly growing wiser, man has just found different and new expressions for folly.
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Mod this up to 11!
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Referred to as the "dot-bomb" era this period of history was preceded by one ripe with the kind of fiscal exuberance responsible people see as a bubble called the ".COM" era. You could not make an IPO with a name ending in ".com" or as an Internet or Linux company without getting crazy rich. Caldera, a tiny Linux maker, got so happy with their IPO money they bought AT&T Unix in 2001. They all bought a lot of Lambos, threw months-long company parties and generally had a great time before the world rea
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Oh yes!
I have no idea when I stumbled on E for the first time, but I loved it immediately and still do, to this day. Even though my tries of actually using it were short-lived and it's been 7 or 8 years since I last had a Linux desktop (and my Debian servers don't need a GUI).
Still, E has always pushed the boundaries and that alone makes it a project worth to exist. I wish them all the best even though I'll probably never run E again. Still all the best.
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Good for E! (Score:3)
I'd love to see E succeed after all these years of promise. But I installed from Debian some time ago and it immediately crashed (E17).
I tried Bodhi in its 2.0 version (E17), and the file manager crashed on certain themes, but the DE didn't go down.
Perhaps the E-team could make a truly stable version before moving on to more esoteric goals?
Please? I'm so tired of XFCE....and too old for blackbox.
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If you tried before December 21, 2012 that was a pre-release. The 0.17.0 release was on Doomsday.
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Well, I tried 0.17.0 and, heck, it managed to freeze my display. That didn't happen to me for years nor did it happen since. And lots of other things kept crashing.
Many of the themes were unmaintained, and the black one that came bundled had this gross faux-racecar aesthetics of a "pimp my ride" episode gone wrong. Well, IMO, anyway. But I didn't manage to get the others working. You could claim that it was my f
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i have no idea why you have so much trouble, but as compiled from source and used every day.. it's really stable and the few hiccups are an easy click away. remember the devs dont use the packages from debian nor even bodhi. we've gotten a lot more rabid about forcing a single universal build of efl and e making it harder and harder for packagers and even users to digress from the default build config. i suspect the issues people see are primarily a result of the insanely flexible build setup that auto-adap
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Thank you for your comments. I've been a fan of the E concept from when I first heard of it, waaay back, maybe from the time I was on RH-6.2.
From time to time I tried it out, but it never ran smoothly until the first Bodhi release. At the time, I was in a hurry, and crunchbang just worked out of the box for me.
Frankly, I have not tried compiling it myself, but as I am tonight installing SolydK (yes, KDE!) I'll try compiling it from your clean source, to make sure I'm being fair to you guys. I haven't had
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git master. if there is a problem... mention it and it gets fixed really fast as long as you find a dev awake and listening on irc. things like:
hey - if i do x, y and z i get crash blah. here's the backtrace dump e put in ~/.e-crashdump.txt ... 30 seconds pass :)
hmmm wtf?
fix in git. update.
Re:Good for E! (Score:4, Insightful)
options are not for e- but for things like.. you are building an embedded device and you don't use gl.. but you want to cut down a few hundred kb of ram, so using xcb vs xlib is what you want. you can do that, BUT the xcb back-end is 99% complete and you still need xlib if you plan to use opengl due to the binary apis demanding an xlib display handle. you have to have an option. it's not for the wm - it's for the toolkit and special cases. there re lots of such special cases for special purposes. the problem is some smart-butt user thinks it's a great idea to fiddle with every option there with a "ooh i hear xcb is faster" (which is basically is not), and then discovered their fglrx or radeon drivers don't like xcb as the primary display connection and then things crash/hang/don't work... or something like that. this is not the DEFAULT config - it's an option, but it's turned on by people who want to tweak everything - even for packages. it's not bloat - it's features that can be switched for different back-ends, dependencies REMOVED and so on. you really should study up before making assumptions.
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The first install was after the stable version was released. I misspoke on Bodhi, though; I had trouble with 2.2 -- the newest stable, not 2.0.
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BWAAHAAA!
I used bb for six or eight years on Red Hat 6.2.
I now prefer a ready-made desktop so I can get some work done.
Too old to play with WMs.
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I'd love to see E succeed after all these years of promise. But I installed from Debian some time ago and it immediately crashed (E17).
I tried Bodhi in its 2.0 version (E17), and the file manager crashed on certain themes, but the DE didn't go down.
Perhaps the E-team could make a truly stable version before moving on to more esoteric goals?
Please? I'm so tired of XFCE....and too old for blackbox.
So what you are saying... is that it's as good as the other Linux DEs out there!
One word... (Score:2)
font hinting & antialiasing (Score:2)
Font hinting and antialiasing seem to take inordinate amounts of CPU time. Won't notice it on a fast system, but low power or old computers are much more responsive with those features turned off. Don't think any GUI environments address this issue. Maybe Wayland will help, but I don't know, haven't tried it.
Of course, the fonts look horrible without hinting and antialiasing. Only monospace font that looks good is Terminus. There isn't a good looking proportional font. I keep hoping someone will mak
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There isn't a good looking proportional font.
Dude, Helvetica.
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that won't help with e or efl. all fonts are drawn the same way. it only affects look. fyi we use efl and e on phones... and not even the mid range ones. talking 200-300mhz things from way back... my standard low-end test box for x86 is a pentium-m@600mhz with 512m ram, no gpu accel at all. e runs decently on that even with software compositing. it's not silky smooth, but it good enough. and as i said.. changing the font mode won't help e - the font glyph is stored as a greymap and renders the same way rega
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1.6ghz atom. LUXURY! :)
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Some folks are more particular about fonts than others, but I really like Adobe's (free/libre) Source fonts:
Proportional Sans: Source Sans Pro [adobe.com]
Monospace: Source Code Pro [adobe.com]
I've been using those as my system default sans and mono fonts for a few years now.
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Slashdot back to its roots (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as your not viewing this through the beta site, posts like these remind me of the early days of Slashdot.
CmdrTaco was a big fan of Enlightenment when /. was first launched and he had written some software for it so we always used to receive updates about new releases. I think that's how I first heard about Slashdot as I was searching for info on Enlightenment and found the site. I had a friend who was a big fan of Enlightenment but I ended up going with WindowMaker because I thought it was more efficient and fitted my working pattern better.
I also remember when Slashdot let you just type in a name, rather than registering ('Anonymous Coward' still existed but only if you didn't bother to enter something in the name box), once registration was introduced it took me a while to decide whether I really wanted to register, otherwise I'd have had a 3 digit UID.
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Enlightenment DR14 was the first window manager to make me say "holy shit." That early theme Rasterman made that looked like it was made out of very old television tubes just blew my mind.
In my mind they didn't lose their way when the dot-bomb crash happened, they lost their way when they hooked up with the GNOME project and RedHat started driving the show. How many of us remember Raster's well-published rant when he left RedHat and took Enlightenment back from the clutches of GNOME? Well probably nobody
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I ran across /. similarly to the gp while looking for information on enlightenment. I just googled raster enlightenment redhat rant and google returned a link to a /. article about it. Clicking it, it took me to /., but the BETA site. Okay, I've yet to look at the beta and now I fucking understand why everyone is complaining about it. /. beta.. is HORRIBLE. Jesus god, if /. actually pushes it to production, it'll be digg (ugh) and reddit from here on out. Sorry dudes.
Re:Slashdot back to its roots (Score:4, Interesting)
i don't remember pulling my rant... ? i'm very much in a habit of "what's done is done". i stick by my words. even to this day.
and yes - i agree. lost my way in hooking up with gnome. i did this because redhat asked me to. it was my job. what i didn't know is that enlightenment and gnome were total polar opposites in goals and design. the hookup was a result of a year+ saying "you need a wm for a desktop" and miguel saying "we don't need no wm for gnome. we can do everything without" and at the end of the year there being a "holy shit. we need a wm now!" and i was the person who could most easily deliver the things needed. so i did. it was my job.
but that process kind of required selling my soul to do so. gnome wanted a wm that dumbly emulated windows 95/98 as closely as possible, would give up all of its extra bits (desktop menus, pagers, wallpaper handling, etc. etc.) and hand over most of its soul and features to gnome and be as bland as possible. metacity was a much better fit for gnome. enlightenment wasn't. the majority of e as disabled for gnome. they just don't fit together. end of story. the idea that you can do a full desktop and not integrate a wm that does just what you need/want was the problem to begin with.
either way - after the divorce, e got e16 out and we started big bang planning for the future, imlib2 (much better imaging support), and then even started messing with opengl to render accelerated graphics with all the fanciness with imlib2 as fallback... and yes - the dot com bubble crashed and everyone - me included had to run for the hills and make a living and we lost a lot of time we used to have... it was some evenings and a weekend then. thus the slowdown. lots of big plans were underway and i was not in the mood for screwing with the plans and work.
these days that work has come to fruition. evas does all the opengl acceleration and has software backed rendering. both are fast. the compositor can use either. it does a lot more besides. e is modular yet a single unified process much like the kernel. we have even widget sets and a full ball of toolkit under it all. it took a while, bet we got there. and now we're reaping the benefits of the work and moving forward. thus e19. :)
Pre-Alpha? (Score:2)
It'll be the perfect WM for the Hurd (Score:3)
Enlightenment 1.0 (or, at this rate, Enlightenment Beta) will be the perfect window manager for the Hurd, as they should release about the same time. Maybe I'll have them toss some USB sticks of the release versions in my coffin after I die of old age.
WTH is Enlightenment? (Score:2)
OK, even visiting the link did not tell me what Enlightenment was.
And "Enlightenment" is not the easiest thing to Google without even knowing what it is.
It is an alternative to GNOME and KDE, btw.
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How can you not know what enlightenment is?
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While this "is" Slashdot, you can't expect every Slashdot user to use Linux and/or know "every" package/application/library/Desktop Environment out there. I sure don't, though I did run one of the E16.999foo's on a PS2 at one time. Worked fairly well, it was the default WM for YDL on the PS3 as well. Didn't work as well on the PS3 though, Gnome 2 was better on that.
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Technically, E is a DE as much as it is a WM
If you cared to install entrance you have a decent alternative to KDM/GDM/LXDM....
It's pretty nice; i only wish it did XDMCP as well as KDE.
One thing that makes E indespensible for me is the remote tool and that despite the ominous 'something bad' message, restarting never fails.
Combine E with compositing a la ecomp/ecomorph and the result is a pretty stable system that's worked for me for ages. And like all DM/WM's not as smart as i wish they would be.
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