Enlightenment E19 To Have Full Wayland Support 140
An anonymous reader writes "Full Wayland support has been added to Enlightenment 0.19. Building upon earlier Wayland support, Enlightenment can now act as its own Wayland compositor by communicating directly with the kernel's DRM drivers instead of having to rely upon Weston. The Wayland support is still considered experimental but it's now the first Linux desktop with full Wayland support."
Quick README on building and using it.
DRM drivers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DRM drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DRM drivers? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm still running Enlightenment DR .9 compiled on Irix 6.3. Can somebody on this forum help me with fixing dependency problems using XMKMF that prevent me from going to Irix 6.5?
Also, Windowmaker docklets are not always updating when rendered. Is this a libpng problem or Enlightenment? I emailed Mandrake, but no response.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing involving imake is "brilliant" anything.... ;-)
Re:DRM drivers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately some parts of the HTML standard are so underused many people don't know they exist except for people who write things like accessible compliant pages.
Re: (Score:2)
Even without accessibility... who has ever used the dl/dt/dd tags?
Re: DRM drivers? (Score:1)
And fully supported means experimental?
Offtopic: Are there any decent docs for the API? (Score:2)
The main wayland API docs are pretty meh and any others I can find are also not great. Does anyone know of a site gives proper C/C++ examples akin to the venerable Xlib Programming Manual?
Re:Offtopic: Are there any decent docs for the API (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the example is called Weston.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh right. So if I wanted a decent reference guide for the unix system APIs you'd tell me to go and read the linux source code instead of getting hold of a copy of Stevens?
@rsehole.
Re: (Score:3)
He's not telling you to read the linux source code, he's telling you to read the "Reference" compositor. i.e. it is meant to be the example code.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
reference code != reference documentation
Re: (Score:2)
Especially if it is in C++, the most readable and unobfuscatable language in history....
Re: (Score:2)
I don't want to write a damn compositor - I want to learn the user API FFS!
Not the first exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
Hawaii was the first, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
RBOS (Score:5, Informative)
There is also a Wayland distro called Rebecca Black OS [sourceforge.net]. Although when I tested it last time, it was super glitchy and crashed all the time. It has been recently updated so it might be worth another shot.
Anyway, great to see the Wayland stuff rolling in.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I hear the sound is pretty awful on that one.
Re: (Score:3)
E19? (Score:2)
I'm sticking with E17 [wikipedia.org].
Huh? (Score:2)
I have absolutely no idea what the summary is talking about, but I did recognize the word "Linux" at least. And "DRM", but apparently it's not that DRM.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
There was a time when Slashdot seemed full of articles about Enlightenment and new levels of graphic eye candy with much fawning over Rasterman.
Is it time to hand in my geek card? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The reason is that Enlightenment was awesome in the late 1990s -- a window manager you could do beautiful things with. Then it hibernated forever as Rasterman, it's lead developer, did years of meditation on how to refactor the code. The refactoring, amazingly, actually did happen and the project sped up again and started doing regular releases. If you still visit /. because it was cool in 1998 and still think of Ubuntu as some sort of recent Linux upstart, then the chances are good you'll be interested
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The 'rebirth' of enlightenment coincided with said Rasterman getting a full time job at Samsung.
The libraries that underpin E are the basis of a fledgling mobile OS, Tizen.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Haha. Makes a nice change from all the pyramid-scheme stories about bitcoin.
Re: (Score:3)
No, it seems that half of the people reading this article crawled out from under a rock in the last couple weeks.
Emerging (Score:2)
No, it seems that half of the people reading this article crawled out from under a rock in the last couple weeks.
Well, it *is* spring in the northern hemisphere, that might have something to do with it.
:-P
Re: (Score:2)
I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?
Latest craze and buzz? No, Enlightenment was pretty popular about the time you registered your slashdot account. Wayland has been in the works for years now, too.
Re: (Score:1)
I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?
Latest craze and buzz? No, Enlightenment was pretty popular about the time you registered your slashdot account. Wayland has been in the works for years now, too.
Enlightenment was all the rage when I register MY slashdot account. It's positively ancient and has never had any real install base. In fact its pretty much the buggiest pile of shit on earth and even trumps Google in terms of length of time in beta.
Re: (Score:2)
Enlightenment was all the rage when I register MY slashdot account.
Well, that was only a couple of years before Opportunist registered his.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, way out of the loop. Maybe wayland is the latest craze, bue Enlightenment is old school. It was for a long time the year of the linux desktop hope. People here used to call linux desktops ugly. Then someone would chime in about how beautiful enlightenment was. So its kind of burned into the linux desktop nerd's memory.
Wayland has been discussed for at lest 4-5 years now.
Terminology (Score:2)
Enlightment is one of those things which always seems great from an distance but somehow I never get around to really using. I've been playing with terminology recently and it seems pretty good (shiny effects are even smooth on my venerable eee 900).
But lots of people Ive spoken to share the same sentiment. Does anone here use it and is it any good in practice? Ultimately I'm not very sold by merely shiny things. Terminology does at least seem to be really functional.
Works for me (Score:2)
The window snapshot thing is nice but even win7 has that now so it
Re: (Score:1)
Faster and smoother than X? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is designed to have much less round-trip communication between program and server which was a performance problem that plagues X.
In other cases it does not necessarily make programs more responsive, but it is designed to avoid tearing and visible redraw.
Re: (Score:3)
A little additional information would be useful (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wayland is a display method that differs from X windows in many ways to get around situations like it being difficult to port X windows to phones and get iPhone style display performance - so it's part of the same iPhone eyecandy inspired drive that includes Windows8 etc. It's a reduced feature set based on the premise that some sit
Re: (Score:1)
E 0.19? (Score:2)
WTF... look away for a few months and it skips two wole versions after having sat on 0.16 for years...
Anyway, the enlightenment website itself only mentions Enlightenment 0.17... so where the heck is this 0.19?
Heading off all the E haters (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
If Enlightenment has a problem, it is that to use it to it's full potential - which is vast - one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there.
In other words then, it will never get used. At least, not in it's current state. A new WM either needs:
-to be similar enough to a well established one that people can at least get going with it immediately
-be intuitive enough so that, even if unfamiliar, people can very quickly get up and running
From your description, not only do you have to be a power user to make it work, you have to spend a lot of precious time just trying to get familiar with it and configuring it. Which all but a very very slim min
Re: (Score:2)
I tell that to people all the time, encouraging many not to bother with it. It has reached enough critical mass with developers and admins that it's not going anywhere. If you take the time to mold it into what it can be, there is nothing better. I have considered drafting a proposal for a version of E that lacks much of it's current complexity while still being awesome. Past that, I am not denying it exists in a niche market. The goal of my post was to
Re: (Score:2)
I have considered drafting a proposal for a version of E that lacks much of it's current complexity while still being awesome.
Why should you need that? Why not just a tool that makes it easy to configure it in a way that's useful to more humans? If E is so great, it ought to at least be possible to do, if not easy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have considered drafting a proposal for a version of E that lacks much of it's current complexity while still being awesome.
Why should you need that? Why not just a tool that makes it easy to configure it in a way that's useful to more humans? If E is so great, it ought to at least be possible to do, if not easy.
Clearly you have never used it, or at least never learned it.
Clearly you did not read my comment. And I ran Enlightenment back in the olden days, sonny boy. On my 386. It was very pretty, but there was no compelling reason to run it otherwise as compared to, say, fvwm.
They do have such a tool. It's called settings, it's five-miles across, ten-miles deep
That's not what I said. I said a tool that makes it easy to configure, not a tool that makes it possible to do anything with it. How specifically is Enlightenment functionally different from fvwm2 or windowmaker? Because last I remember, it differed mostly in that configs were harder to write, and that
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can't design a configuration tool with everything E has to offer and make it easy to use
Good thing I never suggested that anyone do that.
Also, Enlightenment reduced to a basic "every other DE" kind of configuration is no better than any other DE and in some respects may be worse.
Worse? So it's not that good, just configurable?
If you really want to know the difference between Enlightenment and what you mentioned as well as others, I would say install it and spend some serious time getting to know it, but I am not going to sit here and write you a manual in a Slashdot comment outlining all the differences
Nor, in fact, have you named one difference.
Re: (Score:1)
one must endure one of the, if not the, steepest learning curves of any DE out there.
steeper than the awesome?
Finally! (Score:2)
Jabs at the very weird fanboys aside, I wish the developers the best of luck (even the one that likes to make fun of Enlightenment) and hope it goes well. We need a range of options and not "one true desktop" like some of the fanboys want.
Re: (Score:1)
It's easy to be a fan of anything that replaces X.
Re:LOL, e19 might take until 2019 to be written :) (Score:5, Insightful)
enjoy your lols. e17 -> e18 took 12 months. it's been about 4 months since e18.
Re: (Score:2)
12 years, in fact. But E18 was only 1 year. I doubt they are eager to do another ground-up project like E17 any time soon, so E19 may well be ready in a reasonable time like E18 was.
that would be cool, since both unity & gnome s (Score:1)
these days, like most high end users we are fleeing gnome/unity/kde (tho kde is still my choice for non-lightweight) to use e17 or xfce or lxde etc
i do admit that e17 hits many sweet notes of art :)
Re: (Score:2)
Think you're confusing the acronym.. DRM in this context is Direct Rendering Manager.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
So while it's a "relatively small amount of people" it's probably the majority of people using linux desktops in an office environment. That's far too important a niche to abandon IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Most people only ever use X11 as a client and server on the same machine. You're living inside a bubble to think otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
I assume you have usage statistics proving your assertion. Otherwise you are just considering your own usage and think it represents everyone.
Quite a lot of people have asked that question on both sides of this debate. It would be nice if some professional organization with broad reach would just put up a fucking survey so we could find out already. Actually, I would hope we'd get a variety of surveys; an Ubuntu survey, some sort of survey of Unix professionals, etc. Then we could come up with some good idea of how many people actually remote X applications. In order for the results to be particularly useful, we need to know how many people run i
Re: (Score:1)
You answered the question yourself.. a handful of diehard nerds, and some systems administrators.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
One thing I've never understood. I understand the utility of KDE and GNOME (at least GNOME 2). If one wants something like the old NEXTSTEP, there are GNUSTEP DEs like Etoille or Window Managers, like WindowMaker. I can understand people using those. I can even understand people disgusted w/ recent trends w/ GNOME 3 or Unity going for XFCE, Cinnamon,, LXDE/Razor-qt.
What I'm not getting - what does Enlightenment offer that the others don't do better?
Re:Enlightenment is a toy system (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'm not getting - what does Enlightenment offer that the others don't do better?
Cool window decorations [penguinpetes.com]!
There are some nice and clean themes for KDE/GNOME, but the theming system in both seems a bit lacking in flexibility. All the themes look kind of the same but with different colors.
Back in 1999 Linux desktops were horrible mismashes of different widgets and applications that didn't fit together, but the window title bars had beautiful pixel art vines running on them and stuff like that. That was fun, I miss those parts.
Re: (Score:1)
That was fun,
turning a super-stodgy old HP-VUE desktop into wild ornate Giger nightmare with rust holes in the window frames. Too bad it was so unstable. What was that, 15 years ago, and it's now on 0.19? Good times in the server room. Wish I had a mod point for you today.
Re: (Score:3)
E does what I tell it to do and gets the heck out of the way otherwise. That's something that Gnome and, to a lesser extent, KDE seem to have a real problem with. As far as XFCE, LXDE et al, dunno. I've used Enlightenment off and on for rather a long time, and haven't found it necessary to spend much time with the other lightweight desktop options.
Re: (Score:1)
can you explain what that statement means exactly? I see this written all over the place as a virtue for almost all desktop environments and i don't have a clue what it really means.
Re: (Score:2)
Well the big thing it offers in 2014 is the GUI API (EFL) used by Tizen. Tizen depending on how things play with Google may or may not be core to Samsung's strategy going forward. The real advantage of E is on hardware well below what's normative even for netbooks around 128 MB RAM.
Re: (Score:2)
Possibly. I'm just not sure they have the money / resources. There are likely going to be lots of interesting niches in handsets I hope Jolla finds one or two and thrives. I'd love to see Sailfish keep being designed.
For lurkers: Sailfish is Qt based though so it doesn't use EFL. The tie was to Tizen not to the Enlightenment comments.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
yeah. the name is juvenile. just like windows. i mean - how will i find that on altavista? and macintosh. i mean it'll just hide among all the apple varieties of the same name. or what about android? all i'll find is robot porn instead. oh and a galaxy note... note.. gee - i won't find anything outside of a bunch of pictures of paper. or a galaxy gear.. i'll just find cogs all over.
you really know nothing about naming. names evoke ideas and concepts in someones head. a name is inspirational to most. the eas
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Can you explain (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
This isn't necessarily true. It simply does not provide a method for remoting of applications. However, given Wayland's nature it's likely that any remote Wayland solution will be more efficient than VNC and even X forwarding, rather than less.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Can you explain (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the people complaining about Wayland missing remote support know about this.
They're complaining because Wayland doesn't have the correct type of remote support. They'd much prefer it if their display server was responsible for drawing every widget (of every toolkit (used by every app)) primative-by-primative, instruction-by-instruction.
You know, because they're retarded.
It's about Weston, E19 has its own compositor.. (Score:2)
I'm glad you posted this, but note that the tittle of the article is wrong: the RDP backend was merged into the *Weston* compositor not into the Wayland protocol.
Which means that if you're using E19's own Wayland compositor then of course you **don't** have access to this this RDP backend, unless there is a way to stack compositors?
Re: (Score:2)
That is true, but adding the RDP backend to Weston does not appear to have required very much in the way of actual code. Most of the work is left to the FreeRDP library. I expect that most Wayland compositors will prefer to share a common library of backends once we have more than one in actual use on the desktop, much as the Wayland protocol handling is delegated to libwayland. Until then, the E19 compositor should be able to simply copy from Weston to get the same capability.
As for stacking compositors, t
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.
The use of a vaguely VNC-like protocol optimized for forwarding compressed video over a network rather than the X11 protocol optimized for primitive drawing operations very few applications actually use is not a downside. If you prefer, think of it as X11 as it's actually used by modern applications (a series of pixmaps), but with compression and fewer latency-sensitive round-trips. Or even better, like xpra [xpra.org] with fewer rough edges.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Like I said, modern applications. That means applications designed for modern computers, not just ones written recently. Sure, you can stick to X11 primitives provided you don't care about performance or power consumption or your UI looking like it dates back to the 90s. Apps written for X11 will continue to work using the same network protocols they've always used via XWayland, inefficiently emulating ancient hardware. However, programs written with modern graphics subsystems in mind will benefit from the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I was quoting someone. I was not, therefore no quote was taken out of context.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The same place anyone else would get it from, if they bothered to look: research on how modern graphics pipelines work, how modern toolkits work, and the design of the X11 protocol. With a few exceptions (mainly text via the new XRender glyph extensions, excellent for terminal emulators but not much else) the X11 protocol encodes pixel-oriented drawing primitives which are no longer directly supported by current graphics cards, or even efficient to emulate (e.g. pixel-accurate aliased ellipses, stipple patt
You are just making my point for me (Score:2)
Please try to understand what you've written and then try relating it back to my post above. Sadly there don't seem the be many "modern applications" in use by that definition so you are describing the minority of situations.
That's an opinion of what is possible - it's a goal and not a description of something that has been implemented and shown
I'm sick of this - broken toolskits are problem (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)