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Enlightenment GUI

Enlightenment and The Rasterman 67

Posted by CmdrTaco from the local-boy-makes-good dept.
Roxus wrote in to send us a nifty article about Raster and Enlightenment. It's a cool little piece, although I suspect he was fibbing about his fashion sense. Anyway check it out, and drool with the rest of us waiting for DR15 (/me wipes spittle off chin)
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Enlightenment and The Rasterman More

Enlightenment and The Rasterman

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  • Unless you didn't notice, DR0.15 is in cvs cos it's not really for the 'normal user' to use. I'm not saying that it's going to die and crash X or something, but if it dies, forgive it. Don't expect perfection, especially from something where even the people who wrote it say it's imperfect.

    Anyway, those RPMs from GNOME are pretty out fo date now. Get some new ones from e.themes.org, then see if it seg-faults.

    --
    David Coulson (TechNoir)
    technoir@themes.org
  • I never said don't use it. I said don't bitch when it doesn't work. It works every day for me too, but if you can't get it to work, you could always wait for the official release.
    --
    David Coulson (TechNoir)
    technoir@themes.org
  • I've you've been to e.themes.org recently you'll notice that there is quite alot of original stuff from me, including the new theme and screenshot gallery.

    To be perfectly honest, the docs on www.e.org suck, so go to http://cfg.will.enlighte.nu, which tells you pretty much everything about E's config.
    --
    David Coulson (TechNoir)
    technoir@themes.org

  • E (Score:1)

    by bob ( 73 )
    The main troubles I have had with E are:
    • Learning curve. There's nothing like getting a desktop that does approximately nothing to lure you into any sense of comfort. I'm sure that it is straightforward to add menus, but I had trouble figuring out how get myself functional enough to read what documentation there was. Even twm in X classic gives you more help here. The documentation that RedHat is writing should help. Also, starting up the Gnome panel by default will help as well, since that comes with a bunch of pre-done menus. However, when I started up the 0.99 build, clicking on the start menu scattered stacked menu trees all over the place.
    • Icon management. This could well be a learning curve thing, but I found I had to place icons manually, which is a real drag. I still pine for twm's icon managers, which give nice, compact and unobtrusive button arrays organized by application.
    • Intrusiveness. I did a fresh build of Red Hat 5.2, including most stuff except for the IPX stuff and any form of emacs (ugh!). I then grabbed the 0.99 Gnome release. In order to install gnome, I had to back out:

      • AfterStep-APPS-1.5-0.3
      • control-panel-3.7-7
      • gecko-1.6-0
      • gimp-1.0.1-2
      • gnome-linuxconf-0.14-4rh
      • usermode-1.4.3-1
      • usernet-1.0.8-1
      • wmakerconf-1.1.1-3
      • AfterStep-1.5-0.7
      • printtool-3.29-3
      • timetool-2.3-7
      (I saved the list so I could un-do everything). This seems a bit much, especially since there isn't any obvious way to restore the functionality.
    The one other comment I'd like to make about E, and I could certainly RTFM (it could be there and I just don't know it) but it is a point that anyone considering developing a window manager might take into account so I'll say it here: Please give a good amount of macro processing on the window manager's configuration file. At my office, we support about 350 users in a production X environment. We need to be able to deliver .*wmrc configuration files that (a) make sure that everyone has menus that deliver all the basic software, (b) allow for extensive per-user and per-workgroups customization and (c) are rdistable. This is extraordinarilly difficult to provide simply by giving include-file hooks. We still make extensive use, for example, of tvtwm and ctwm, precisely because of the extensive support for m4 preprocessing of the configuration files.

    But this is intended only as constructive criticism. E is an amazing piece of work, and the separation from the Gnome panel so that other, simpler wms can be used is a huge advantage of Gnome over other systems. No one should be flamed for developing a functional piece of free software. RedHat cannot shove anything down anyone's throat. Even when RH 6.0 comes out, assuming that it has a full-blown Gnome/E environment by default, users will still have a choice in desktop software, which those of us with memories going back to the '70s and '80s can only see as a wonderful, novel development.

  • Stefan Baums said something similar to:
    "It's the only window manager I use at the moment, and it has never crashed on me. You should be careful about iconization, though: I had icons disappearing from my desktop _and_ pager, so I couldn't access the associated program, even though it was still running."
    What pager are you able to run with E 0.15? I thought they hadn't even started on that module yet!
  • You know I'm making .deb's out of E15 CVS up at http://www.debian.org/~bma/e-cvs/debs [debian.org]
    If you find problems with them, just email me :)
    --
    Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/
  • 'Tis not a final release.. Merely a fairly stable development version..
  • I suspect WindowMaker will gain gnome compliance before E hits 1.0 (or becomes as usable as WindowMaker is at 0.20.x)...

    FYI, Alfredo just posted on the Window Maker devel list that the next version of Window Maker will have full KDE and GNOME compliance.

  • How does E compare, performance and memory-wise, wih other window managers? I like the look of the screenshots, but I'm on a limited-memory machine (16 megs) and need to pick-and-choose what's running.

    (Once upon a time, 16 megs was a lot, for Linux. 20 netrek clients and a netrek server on a 5 megabyte box, and 7 heavily-used MUDs on an 16 meg machine. Hardly any performance-loss, either.)

    Also, has anyone tried running E through either GGI's X server, or X11R6.4?

  • If you don't like where they're taking the code, d/l the versions you -did- like and take them in the direction you'd prefer. After all, that's the whole point of GPL. Alternatively, write a totally new system, using the ideas you liked.

    If you do either, at the very least you'll end up with the system YOU prefer, and that IS the ideal, in an open-source environment.

    There again, you might have stumbled on some key points that the current developers haven't seen. Easy way to find out - write, release and see what other people think.

    I'm not joking and I'm not trying to be patronising. To me, the essence of the GPL and of "free" or "open" software is the freedom to experiment and try new ideas out. One size does not necessarily fit all.

  • I don't know what planet these guys are from, but Rasterman's doing this OpenSource for a reason. If they have a problem with performance or documentation. Get writing!

    This is a Development release!

    ***mutters about flameing posers with no names***

  • The trolls just don't realize there asking for the a 1.0 release with a low-end machine config example. :) It always amazes me that when you give people a light switch they will complain that it is in the wrong position.

    Excellent work! I can't wait to see what you come up with next.

  • interesting machine...
    a slow processor with a hell of a lot of ram. (Well.. not exactly a hell of a lot these days.. but it is for that speed)
  • AC Writes:
    E is good for impressing your buddies whom use Windows, but pretty poor for doing anything reasonably productive. Sure, it looks nice, but it's simply not as useful as WindowManager.

    I recently installed the new DR15 available with gnome-0.99.0 and I have to agree with this sentiment. It *looks* nice, but it's unstable and tended to crash regularly. But I'm NOT complaining! This a a DR snapshot and as such we should expect that it's basically unusable for production work. Hell, gnome is basically still unusable in production - but it sure does look nice too!

    I suspect WindowMaker will gain gnome compliance before E hits 1.0 (or becomes as usable as WindowMaker is at 0.20.x)... In that case I'd say to Rasterman 'don't push yourself to release something broken just so RedHat uses E instead of WindowMaker when they release RH-6.0... spend time and make it right.' Of course I don't say this to disparage either Rasterman or E, just to point out that meeting this deadline is probably less important than finishing up E's featureset and ironing out the bugs before going 1.0.

    RH-6.0 is going to be an important release for the US Linux community because it will probably be tested out in the major corporations for ease of use and ease of administration issues. While RH5.2 is at the cutting edge as far as library support goes, its current AnotherLevel window manager configuration is badly broken, and FVWM95 is getting old.

    I'm pleased to see them incorporating KDE in the next RH developer release. This way RedHat is covering their butts in case gnome isn't ready for RH-6.0. KDE is something just about every PHB can understand... this is *important* for Linux to become accepted as a small departmental server like NT. Given Caldera's target market they were right to include KDE with COL 1.3, QT issues aside.

    Next thing: Linuxconf samba configuration module.... along with including (hopefully) samba-2.0...

    rantrantrantrant

    Thanks for all your hard work, Raster!
  • Actually, the article calls E a "graphical user
    interface replacement for Linux's X-windows." I read that as meaning it's a replacement for X's interface, not X itself. O.K., so it's still not technically accurate (X itself not having it's own GUI), and it's of questionable grammatical merit, but it's not THAT bad a mistake.
  • rule of thumb used in some large companies
    is that 10-20 lines of bug free code per
    working day is a typical output for an average
    programmer.
  • $ uptime
    2:56pm up 56 days, 1:12, 1 user, load average: 1.31, 1.22, 1.13

    Hmmm, E seems to work for me (I'm running 14).

    I could use iconization and LESS desktop buttons, though. :)

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • Raster, you can be neat at times, but DAMN your typing sucks. :)
    ---
  • hmm, the facts in the article are a little screwy...enlightenment doesn't replace X, it
    runs under (over?) X...but anyway, enlightenment 0.15 (available via anonymous cvs) rules!
  • It is available but it isn't the release.. I've had it blow up a time or two. Can't hardly wait for the release.
  • Anonymous Cowards seem to have a very bad case of NIA-itis (Not Invented Anything-itis) and since their development time is completely unused, they have mucho time to complain about what others have implemented.

    I like the approach that Raster & Mandrake have taken in developing Enlightenment. They haven't built on a flawed foundation. They have scraped the existing work when their knowledge has outgrown the limits of previous implementation. If MS had taken this approach, we might have a stable windows platform and no huge Linux growth.

    Of course, this is only my opinion...
  • Just to chuck in my 2p...

    Since I installed E CVS .15, and kept up with the CVS updates, i havent had any errors, except for the odd bad code, or memory problem which makes it segfault.. but this is _development_ software, you cannot expect it to be stable all day, everyday... And back to the bad code, if you wait around for a while, a fix is always up..
    ANd for me, E is pretty small, especially if you run Strip on the binary.. and (gee.. i love that word ;) speed is pretty good... only if i have netscrape running do i see any kind of slow down, speed in E has increased a lot in the past few weeks...

    Thanks a lot guys, E is just kickass!
  • Put more crap on the screen until all the real estate has been consumed with non-functional garbage.

    People who value their productivity know that minimalism is a science.
  • Hmmm. That's funny. I run it specifically for "lack of crap". Don't like tons of graphics? Pick a small theme with minimal graphics. Don't like all the buttons on the screen? Take them off and use the keybindings to launch your programs or do whatever. Change them to do whatever you want. Or just hide the buttons temporarily. (CTRL+ALT+B). You can hide every little thing on the screen, and just have a root window, with a root menu. That's about as clean a desktop as I can imagine.

    Yes, I'm actually using it, and doing precisely that. With gnome minimized to a little tab on the side. Real estate usage is practically ZERO. Minimalism is achieved, and quite nicely. The floating desktops add up to more real estate than I can imagine anyone needing on top of that. Use keybindings to switch between them. Turn off all of the animations, transparencies, opaque moves and whatever, and it flies. On a crappy Cyrix 6x86 200 that needs replacing, at that.

    If you still don't like it, don't use it. If you're not using it, complaining is silly. Unless it's to make a point that parts of it don't suit your needs, and you would like it to. And from what you've written, I'd say that it already does.

    And it's not even done yet. Yeah, there's still things to add, clean up, improve, and probably bugs to kill. It's looking good to me so far, at least.

    Keep coding, Raster. Your work is much appreciated, at least in my book...
  • I think that in order to write documentation, you have to understand how to use the program.

    At least in .14, though, the online help (just click the "?" icon) does a pretty good job in explaining what the buttons are supposed to do - but I do sympathise with the lack of feedback, I'd consider that a legitimate gripe.

    That being said, I've used both KDE and Enlightenment. I'm presently using Enlightenment because I've been seduced by (i) the sheer beauty of it all, and (ii) the fact that it was not, repeat, not, designed to look anything like Windows(tm). Too much Linux software (I'm talking specifically about KDE and StarOffice) is designed to fake Windows(tm) rather than doing something ground-breaking and original.

    I do have a question for E fans, though - what do the buttons on the upper left corner of windows do? I've tried pressing them and they don't seem to do anything, but I'm sure there's some magical function or other that I should know about :-(.

    D
  • Ah, okay - many thanks.

    Is .15 stable enough to use (I'd define that roughly as "crashes once a day in heavy use)?

    D
  • I have to defend Raster Man here. If you want to run a high-performance oriented product, you should own a high-performance computer. I put together a system that runs Enlightenment just great from a $ 1,000 consumer PC.

    But, curiously enough, Enlightenment is also running great on my home machine, an IBM ThinkPad 365XD which runs a Pentium/120 with 48MB RAM.

    It's one slick product. My only regret is that I can't figure out how to get 24-bit colour to work on my video card in X, but that's surely not his fault.

    D
  • Well, there's a fair chunk of Doc's on e.themes.org, as well as a message board there (looks full of questions and answers to me) Plus, there's Hilarion's (slightly outdated, but still valid) doc's over on enlightenment.org that might even get updated now that exams are over (hint hint!), and of course, if you've installed correctly (ie: installed imlib, gtk+, glib, and all that, in the correct order) then clicking on the little '?' button at the bottom right of the screen (between the dustpan and the swirly arrows) will pop up 'dox', the Enlightenment help program. If the buttons in the upper right area aren't doing anything, it's because you don't have the associated programs installed. The best one to start with is the 'web' button - the left mouse button starts Netscape. If you don't have Eterm installed, don't use the left button on the little computer, use the right button instead, since it gives you an Xterm. Plus, if you're using a current CVS, there's bubble help (ok, cloud help) that pops up when you leave your mouse over a button for a few seconds. Personally, I'm not sure what other Documentation you could want, execpt maybe an O'Reily 'in a Nutshell' book, which will have to wait for version 1.0. :)
  • I've used afterstep forever, and was saddened to see it's demise.. when it was toe to toe with fvwm2 it was faster than it, and had the same capabilities, Now we have E, KDE, etc... I despise KDE completely.. what a way to destroy linux... make a system that has apps written for it that will not work without it. KDE = Microsoft as far as that goes... Now If E starts a group of E only apps then I'll condemn that too.. a window manager is a window manager, it's not a platform, it's not a programming environment.. It's something that looks pretty and has buttons for us to click and make X easier to use.. Remember that E team.. noone wants a replacement for motif, we despise motif and it's new clones. (Gnome is getting way to close to being a motif clone! and if it requires that you run E then it's worse!)

    E is too slow, in fact it's getting to the point where I cant brag anymore to my friends that my linux windows manager is faster than the Win95/98. If there is another re-write of E I would love to see lean and mean, kill the fluff make it look cool and make your target model a 486 class computer, that way it will SCREAM on everything out there.

    If it Screams, works, and looks cool.... then people will use it.. If it's slow it's called microsoft. (New Windows 2001 written in JAVA!)
  • I guess it all depends on your system and how you use it. When i was using .14 (note this is not the same with .15) it used to crash at least once every few days, and there was a bug that kept getting worse and worse until i eventually had to stop using it where closing a window made me need to reboot my machine. Note: .15 is a lot more stabler and and a lot more usable (iconization, finally!).
  • Obviously you don't know much about KDE. I use IceWM + KDE apps all the time - check your facts before posting crap.
  • Hey. I DO wear that stuff! :)

    If anyone has seen me of late I actually tend to wear lots of black and long tailed jackets. :)

    Now back to code... :)
  • It already is all of the above. The solution isnt in code - its in configuration - I do not believe a person should ever have to recompile a program to ever turn a feature on or off - it shoudl be in the configuration - and that is exactly what E is.

    just turn "expensive" options off - make it do what YOU want - it can.

    as far as technicalities - loading graphics as an image or doing it the blackbox way makes almost zero memory diffrence - blackbox STILL produces pixmaps in the end of the same size as the pixmaps E produces. - E just gets to that end result a different way and via a much more generic mechanism.

    E is gnomne compliant already.

    E is alreayd pretty damn fast. It coudl do wiht more optimisations - I work on them on a regular basis.

    E alerady throws out all memory it doesnt need / inst using - it unloads images form memory continuously - reling on the cache in imlib tokeep the recent ones (commonly used ones) in memory for speed. E removes backgroudn images for other desktops from memory if you havent looked at the desktops for a while - it does this quietly behind the scenes for you.

    E is prertty stable - only some of the newer features I may have written int he last few weeks that aren't finished are not 100% stable - but even most of them are stable.

    E is Speedy - works liek greased lightning on my box. It's secure. There is no way another user or a user outside of your box can gain access to your user or machine via Enlightenment nor can you gain access to another users account via Enlightenment. If you use another users config for E that is another matter - but liek any WM they can have a button that executes somehting as oyu - just like menu and toolbar entires - so in that regard its as safe as any WM out there.

    Not to mention E has the ability to remote control it form the other side of the world if you wish - SECURELY. It has many features you probably have no idea are there.

  • I'm running Gnome 0.99 together with E. (I
    used alien to convert the ftp.gnome.org .rpms
    to .debs.) There's a panel applet "gnome pager"
    which cooperates beautifully with E.
    (BTW, E configuration can now be done inside the
    Gnome control center.)

  • E13 was nice, had alot of themes etc.. for it. However times change, people want more and more. Everything has to be faster, use less memory, make bleeps and noises, look better... and whats the catch to all this ? it just gets far more complicated. So E 15 requires a billion libs if you want everything, but isnt that always the way ? As for esd... bah i dont bother with sound.

    The only remaining archive of E13 stuff that I know of is ftp://e.hole.org mainly cuz i backed everything up after enlightenment.org killed itself.

    As many people have said, if its not like you like it, then modify it, and release the modifications. If you personnally cannot do it, perhaps make suggestions ?

    Anyways laters,

    J
  • I don't understand a lot of the negative
    comments on this page. I've been using E
    for several months now and it's extremely
    stable, and very functional.

    I also run gnome, so I turn off all the
    buttons in E (ctrl-alt-B) and have a very
    clean screen.

    Furthermore, compiling E and gnome from
    cvs is a breeze if you just follow the
    instructions on the gnome web page.

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