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Enlightenment GUI

Raster and Mandrake Interview 118

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-e dept.
Lynnaea writes "An interview from Linuxpower gets Mandrake and Rasterman together to talk about the future development of E, what it's like to work at VA, and whether/how E will play with KDE and GNOME. " Also nice to see what the boys are up to. Not eating vegemite is a possible answer.
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Raster and Mandrake Interview More

Raster and Mandrake Interview

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  • I suspect the real problem with E for most people (including myself) is that to get the "full eye candy effect" you have to run it at 1280x1024 with 24-bit colour. As it happens, on ordinary machines this is quite slow - not because of E, but because 1280x1024 in 24-bit colour requires a ton of bashing bits around. In my experience, you can "solve" this problem by downshifting to 1280x1024 at 8-bit colour, or 1024x768 at 24-bit colour. The only problem with this is that then you just don't get the full effect, which is why you run E in the first place.

    As a result, I haven't run E in some time, even though I like and admire E and its developers. Instead, I run 4DWM on my old SGI, which serves my needs very well and is quite a bit less expensive than a dual Pentium III/500.

    Overall, my sense is that E's reputation as a pig is undeserved, unless you count the "need" to run high resolutions and colour depths that come with the experience.

    D

    ----
  • I haven't had it go down on me yet. Seems to be doing fine, I built it from CVS.

    Mike
  • actually, you can check out exactly what is going on out of CVS as we're working on it. I figure with that sort of ability you don't have to have as many full-head-on releases. I mean, every time there's a new feature we could always release something, but it wouldn't be so big of a deal that there's a new release when we do.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • no kidding. that's something that there should be more people complaining about than what they're all beating around right now. We DO have a serious lack of documentation. But it's all coming... hopefully we'll have some better documentation online in the near future.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Think they use Red Hat? (ducking)

  • Re:Vegemite? Come on. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Really? I bring up Celine Dion.

    But that's just because I'm unnaturally cruel.
  • Actually as a born and bred Canadian it's really funny watching how ignorant americans are of Canada. Basically up here we think that americans are complete idiots. You always hear stories of americans crossing the border in the middle of summer with skis on the roofs of their cars expecting the whole of Canada to be under 10 feet of snow. You laugh and think americans can't really be that stupid. Then you go down to the US and you get stupid questions (from college engineering students!) asking how living in an igloo is!

    But its all good for laughs. It works both ways. Recently when I saw Big Daddy (in Canada) and the line "you know Canadian beer, its like moonshine" came up, the whole theatre went up in a roar of applause. Personally I find molson to be a bit week.

    So take off eh, ya hosebrain. Like okay, pass me a beer eh.. And ah, now I get I'm done.

    Okay eh..

  • Yup, the great thing about E is that it is useable and beautiful while still being in beta version. I don't think windows even came quarter closer at version 0.15 (hahahaha, given what windows 1.0 was like the Beta versions should have been ridiculous).

    BTW, I first tried e 0.13 and the theme rocked. I know they are some port in 0.15 but I have tried two of them and they weren't quite the same (the 0.13 pager was beautiful, I am eager to see the new pager).

    Thanks you guys for doing so cool stuffs.
  • Not bashing E, here: it is good and all, but
    I would put my money on SCWM being the most
    configurable window manager. It uses GUILE
    to achieve a very high degree of flexibility.
    Nearly everything can be changed dynamically
    (even on a per window bases -- how many other window managers do you know that can have different decorations themes on different
    windows). The constraint-base layout module
    is also fantastic. GUILE/SCWM scripts that call
    GTK+ widgets... etc..

    Check it out at http://serveuse.mit.edu

  • A few months ago there was a discussion on gnome mailing list about how to do the auto-mounting stuff so people don't have to mount like under windows. Their are the little applets for the Gnome bar that are cool but this still need to educate the user to mount and unmount the disks.

    At the time I was wondering if this would be useful to add this kind of properties to directories: something to execute when you enter/leave a directory so when you enter /mnt/floppy it mounts the floppy disc but when you leave /mnt/floppy it unmount it.

    This looks like what you are doing and this is something that i am looking forward to ;)

    Good job guys.

    BTW: in another post Mandrake is talking about "tools tod do that" in reference to change themes and configurate themes. I was wondering if there was such a thing already into work and even wanted to do one (unfortunately I am stuck in a foreign country with no Linux box around so right now I can't).

    This would be cool to have a general theme creator software that give some general functions and support plug-ins so you just need to create a plu-in with the help of the provided functions to add the support of the creations of E.x themes when E.x is out a break the theme compatibility (if this happen again), or do a plug-in to be able to create KWM themes...

    Is there something like that begun or even planned ?
  • Yes, that is really true. Both Mandrake and Rasterman have really fast machines since they need them--they compile (at least parts) of Enlightenment and other pieces of software daily.

    Very few people, who have old slow machines update CVS daily, much less recompile E every few minutes. You really don't want to try this on your typical PC, it will drag it down too much.

    If your work requires it, you can afford those nice high tech tools.

    (Although, they do recommend that you test all of your software reguluarly on the minium supported configuration, it's stupid to waste time on those machines compiling it on them).

  • olvwm too (Score:1)

    by acb ( 2797 )
    On my home Linux box I use olvwm as well... it's a pretty nice WM. Then again, OpenLook is a pretty nice GUI. (The rounded buttons and pushpins look tres stylish.)

    One thing I found annoying about olvwm: the way it clears the X selection whenever I raise a window.

    My laptop runs Enlightenment though. (It also has more RAM than my desktop Linux box.)
  • Anyone who uses drugs will clinically experience a gradual loss of brain cells and therefore have decreased academic preformance...

    really, and what are your sources of this info. DEA's website? go read some of the work tim leary ph.d did, or john lilly ph.d . their studys seemed to show a INCREASS in intelligence ( defined as finding and communating info. ) these "drugs" seem to also cause a decrease in sanity in those who never think to question their elders ( read MASTERS ), dogma. :)

    now, dont i didnt say that everyone should do them, or that they are "GOOD" for you. cause NOTHING is good all the time.

    HINT: think for yourself, get out of the genepool.

    nmarshall
    #include "standard_disclaimer.h"
    R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
  • Everyone notice that Mandrake is working on an O'Reilly book? Exciting stuff. From my perspective as a (gasp) business applications programmer, perl + gtk is one of the things that could really help speed corporate acceptance of Linux. Businesses want their programs rapidly developed, easily changed, and adorned with GUI stuff. My (very limited) experience with C + GTK is that it is good but not quite quick enough (in the coding sense, not the execution sense). Swapping Perl for C should help that out quite a bit. Keep on writing, Mandrake.
  • mohohahaha! I'm running E right now *with* gnome-panel at 1024x768 on a 486dx2/66!!! :)~
    teeheehee... Granted, this isn't any ordinary 486dx2/66, it's got 32megs of parity *60* ns memory, and 2 1.35gig scsi drives. The most surprising thing, is that it still runs fairly well. It's usable. Even transparent window moves arn't too bad as long as it's not a huge window like netscape. Gnome stuff I just leave going, I don't touch it, it doesn't bother me (besides having slashapp) and it all works out good. ;)
  • yeah, well bein a pixberger an aht ain't dat great neither. All dem people frum ahtside ar area make fun of pixburg like it's all smoky an aht. But it rilly ain't since da still mills moved out er closed up cuz of dat japanese still.

  • Well, I don't know where you're coming from. Everyone in my group runs E on their solaris desktops and linux laptops. Only one of us has any crashing problems, and he's running the latest alpha and poking around with all the bleeding edge features...sure, it's gonna crash when you do that.

    Solaris 7 on a 24" monitor (HDTV aspect ratio) - no crashing.
    Redhat 6 with the latest kernel on a Dell Latitude - no crashing.

    I love E. there are just a couple of things that I could do in fvwm2 that I miss a little bit, but they are minor. I don't have any issues with its stability.
  • Sooner than me I am running (and have been) running on archaic machines starting with a 386 I am still using a 486dx66 with 16M or ram and a 340M hd basically a piece of $hit
  • Definitely something that I would want, also. you'll notice from some of the screenshots that raster and myself put up that those sorts of tools are coming, even though slowly. A lot of the user-end customization can already be done through easy-to-use menus. You will be seeing more of this.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • People like you get a chance to get their own domain? and I don't seems fair to have things distributed to those least able to take advantage of them.
  • I would sure like the problem that I mentioned earlier (about things like color depth problem at 16 colors) to be solved. I think my opinion as a low level user counts too and not just high end.

  • Well maybe the dual processors are, though even that is a little much for most.

    Certainly, having 3 21" monitors is pretty rare, no matter where you work though.

    -Nic
  • Got about 14MHz up on me anyway

  • Clear thinking (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't think either Gnome or Kde should be a desktop. They should be an application framework, and provide behind the scenes hooks for communication between applications and data sharing. Not desktops with tacky panels and broken, poorly implemented X basics.

    I'm dismayed by several posts here disparaging these guys as drug-crazed ravers. They seem to be quite rational to me, at least in their talk about the Linux desktop and in the hard work they have already done to bring that about. Various implications that E is not so practical or is necessarily wild and flaky are not true. I'm using the latest CVS version of E, and the new E widgets for desktop settings work well and are simple and attractive - much beter than the grotesquely buggy and memory hogging Gnome control panel or the ugly, kludgy Kde control panel.

    Believe it or not, Fvwm2 is also becoming an excellent desktop environment and handles graphics much better than Kde. It's a shame about the ugly default settings for Fvwm2 used by distros like Slackware that turn people off, but fvwm2 can also look *very* good, as good as E without the fancy window borders though. Like E, it can a good desktop shell for launching and managing apps as well as managing windows.

    E is on the right track. Fully utilize X at a fairly low level and provide a framework which users can customize (or they can use any one of dozens of very stable, good-looking premade themes) and also provide hooks for Gnome and Kde apps to use.

    Only a few window managers today provide anything like this - E, Fvwm2, and Afterstep. These are the only modern window managers that fully take advantage of multiple desktops with multiple pages within each desktop and useful pagers. E and Fvwm2 also allow users to make the desktop look like almost any other desktop, something the NextStep based Window managers can't do because they are limited to squarish, large icons and fixed docks.

    Many people do not want all this so they will use something like Icewm or Window Maker or Kwm. That's ok but really the Linux desktop deservers more full featured setups as well - desktop systems which are so overwhelming versatile and beautiful and useful that they *REALLY* impress people coming to Linux from a Windows background, in being so much nicer than the Windows desktop. Already, E provide this.

    Kde and Gnome will keep adding bloat. The appearance of the Kde desktop will certainly improve (better icons, better gradients, etc) so that it will look as good as Gtk themes Gnome uses, but neither address the need of a *desktop* manager - which E does address. Really they have no business providing a desktop. They should concentrate on toolikts to build apps and communications between apps (Corba, etc).

    Right on Raster and Mandrake !



  • As an ozzzzzztralian (sic), we do get sick of these silly references after a while, and then we start bringing up references to other things about other countries...

    Take for instance, this joke(?, perhaps true story)...

    A man goes from the US to Canada, and at the border is stopped by customs and asked if he has any guns. The man say no, and is allowed to continue on. On the way back across the border to the US, the customs officers stop him again, and ask the same question, have you got any guns, and again, the man says no. So the customs officers ask him which one he wants......

    As for us bringing up other references in regards to other countries, the whinging poms just don't get it, and the kiwis are to busy doing unmentionably things with sheep that we australian have grown thick skin.

    Note: Vegemite is no longer Australian, and so being the patriotic person I am, I am going to hold off buying vegemite until Dick Smith releases his Ozziemite to the world.....

  • agreed. If some of the E crap that I do not need can easily be removed (perhaps modules) I'll be happy. Who really needs the raindrops, wave patterns, etc that .16 has to offer?

    E is beautiful and relatively fast (but by no means as fast at fvwm or windowmaker), but has too many needless features and the development of useful things (pager for one) is too slow.

    I wish them both the best of luck, but I'll stick with WM till E is a little better. .16 (from cvs/snapshot) seems to have a pager and few other differences from .15.
  • Yeah and just because you Pay several hundred dollars for things in the M$ world suddently makes it better? Fat chance? Maybe some factual data to support that claim?
  • This is a way-cool combo. I can't wait to see what this team can accomplish. VA should lock these guys away with some 486/66's to test on and they Xeon's to compile...
    VA should make them a team and not scatter this awesome collection of talent amongst projects.
  • raster, have you been playing with Mac OS and AppleScript lately? Because you have just described the "Scriptable Folders" concept under Mac OS >= 8.5 :)

    --
  • The best thing is to have different people working on what they think is cool. That way, we get lots of choices and we all get the desktop we want.

    It is an unfortunate aspect of our society that we insist on finding the "best" and the "winner". What is wrong with having different people working on different desktops?

    That choice is one of the biggest things that drew me to Linux in the first place.
  • E's screenshots look cool, and I installed and played with an old version about a year ago, but I always end up going back to my standard window manager: olvwm

    See, I was imprinted when I worked for a couple of years on a Sparcstation 2 (that was about 10 years ago) and I am comfortable with the background and menu configuration, etc.. I was overjoyed when I discovered that it had been opened up and came with my Linux distribution - no need to learn somthing strange (like WindowMaker - ick!). I judge my current machine to be just as powerful as the Sparcstation was, at a fraction of the price. :)

    If I ever do change WM's it will probably be to convert to E, but it never seems the right time - I guess I'm just a stick-in-the-mud. Maybe when E 1.0 comes out?
    --

  • I run it on a 75 Mhz Pentium and am quite happy. It is not utterly crisp, but it is certainly usable, and it doesn't seem particularly slower than other desktops.

    There are some things that don't go quite the way I'd like, but well, that's what the '0' in '0.15' there for.

    (I'm not going to mention them here because it is mostly the same old configuration stuff other people have mentioned.)

    It irates me when people nitpick about works in progress, especially when they are not putting their own code on the line. Sending a bug fix or a comment by e-mail is one thing. Publically saying "it sucks" when "it" isn't done is just bad form.

    (Unless it is a Windows Beta, of course.)

  • FVWM2 (Score:1)

    by Bishop ( 4500 )

    Fvwm2 has been my favorite wm for some time now. It is becuase of Fvmw2's very powerfull configuration options. It did not look as pretty (until recently) as E, nor do you have the (insane) level of fine grained control. However the Fvwm2 config file (~/.fvwm2rc) is very easy to edit. I find that it is easier to quickly setup the keyboard and mouse controls under Fvmw2 then E.

    I currently am using E on Debian (unstable). E is very nice on faster hardware, and I like the direction that it is going. On slower hardware I prefer Fvwm2 as I can configure it to use few resources and still have a look and interface that I like without too much work.

    To the other poster: you will find the configuration file "system.fvwm2rc" is decently documented and combined with the man page you can figure out how to do most things.

  • I dunno, I think I'll be doing the dual overclocked celerons in the Abit BP6 w/512MB RAM.. I mean, dual P3s is very cool, but there's just something subversive about that BP6 board..

    (And maybe an Alpha DS10-alike when they're available..)
  • True jealousy comes not from those of us with slower machines but from those of us who have to do Windows programming for a living. I don't want their machines. I want their jobs. [sniff]
  • Because, depending on what you do, they can make a lot of things a whole lot easier. Example: say you have to move a whole bunch of files that don't have an easy wildcard mask (eg, not *.gif) into another directory seven levels deep off your root partition. Kfm may let you select and drag the files from one window to another faster than a command line, and you don't have to use the command-line history like a maniac to get everything shuffled easily.

    Here's another example - I run windowmaker and kfm, and have a large image library. I use xv to view the images, but since they were taken from my digital camera (go Olympus! woo!), they often end up with non-descriptive names (pic00001.jpg, pic00040.jpg, etc), and yeah, I should rename them, but how often do you organise your paper photos, either? ;) So I use the kfm-feature "show thumbnails" and can browse into a directory and find the single, poorly-named image I want by examining the thumbnails, rather than xv the whole dir and search by hand. Then I can drag it onto my nfs-mounted web directory, and voila- it's there.

    So, that's one reason to support desktop environments (or anything that makes operations less cumbersome.) As always, if you don't like it, don't use it.

  • Moonsihine is regarded in the us as crap alcohol.

    Just thought you'd like the know how they are refering to it. not by alcohol content, but by taste.
  • Currently some serious high-level cards like the nVidia chipsets only do 16 colors. They're working on the drivers to push them farther.
  • I'm Australian. I wouldn't be offended except that Vegemite is owned by an American Cigarette company. (true story).
  • I have two macs, too.
    But Apple didn't really pioneer most of these ideas, this is something that most people tend to mistake. They just happen to be the company that brought a lot of them together. But all of these people stopped short - I don't intend that we will make this same mistake
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • If you make E crash, I'd appreciate backtraces. I can't make E crash -- if I could it wouldn't be crashing. SEND CORE AND BACKTRACE DATA. Or tell me how it is you make it crash -- And I'll make it go away.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Hahahahahahaha... ice hockey.. and what else?

    Astroturf Football?
    Field Baseball?
    Court Basketball?
    Grass Soccer?

    Ice hockey.... heh...

    It's called 'Hockey'. And yes, it's played on a sheet of ice. Fun game.
  • Gee, I've always found a little weed gets my mind clicking over in new and unusual ways. Very beneficial when designing, not so much when coding from a design. Debugging, it's a wash--depends on whether the original coder was stoned, I think. But, to each his or her own--your mileage may vary. I wouldn't advocate drugs for someone who didn't like or want them. I guess some of us just have brain cells to spare.

    That does remind me, however, about an experience I had in 1981 or so. I was tripping, rainbow blotter, and took a notion to spend some time with the original IBM PC BIOS code, a printed copy of which was to be found in the Tech Manual. When I got to the beating heart of the serial handler and discovered that there was no way it could be fooled into being re-entrant, I could actually hear my mind ripping apart, like tearing a head of lettuce in half. I decided that there were more interesting things to do while tripping than look at IBM code, and have since limited the amount of coding I do when on acid. But weed and speed, now--watch out!

  • What a crock ... I HAVE to run NT at work (argggh!) on a PII 400 with 256mb RAM and it SUCKS! AND with no fancy graphics ... now I can understand you're use of 'AC' alias (I'll bet you're a VB programmer too...)

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by toolj23 ( 24597 )
    Nice to see that E will be getting a lot more development time!
  • only if the k is in small quantities, i think... :-)

    sigh....

    has anyone else noticed that this discussion slips really quickly into raver-drug references?

    I mean... come on the K desktop with the E manager... hehe... maybe we could get the LSD screensaver....

    person1: Hey look, the fireworks on the monitor are great!...

    person 2: umm... dude the computer is turned off.....

    coincidence in naming? i think not!

  • Where E is heading (Score:4)

    by Ethelred Unraed ( 32954 ) on Tuesday July 13, 1999 @12:12PM (#1804514) Journal
    Interesting to see that Raster and Mandrake are looking to possibly make E into a full desktop, a la GNOME and KDE. But I have to wonder if their efforts would be mislaid in that case...wouldn't it be better for them to properly contribute their knowledge and insight directly to GNOME or KDE, or better, both?

    For the secret message, check out the boldface letters. :-)

    cya

    Ethelred

  • According to Mandrake's page (http://mandrake.net), he's currently working on getting KDE hints into Enlightenment.

    e;
  • I'm Australian, so I feel qualified to comment here.

    Actually, since I live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I do bring up hockey every time I speak to a Canadian!

    After a while, the references do get annoying...
  • You forgot about Men at Work and Yahoo Serious.
  • At the risk of having this message marked Off-Topic and thereby lowering my average rating, i've got to ask the Australia Slashdot readers how sick they are of hearing Vegemite / kangaroo / dingo / boomerang jokes whenever anything happens in Australia.

    I mean, we don't bring up hockey when a Canadian does something, or royal family references for English people...

    Disclaimer: No, i'm not Australian, i'm actually from Long Island. And i hate it when people go, "Oh, Lawn Guyland?" and think that they're being clever.

  • Re:E is a pig; now we know why. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hrm? Weird, since I'm running E right now on:
    K5-75 (malfunctioning one as well, the secondary cache is a goner) w/ 64 meg of RAM
    and I've even run it on an Amiga w/ 68060-50 & 32-meg of RAM, so E's not so much of a pig as people think. anyone else ever tried OPTIMIZING the gcc? You'd be suprised how much faster it runs.

    Just my 2-beans
  • Before I upgraded the box, I ran E (0.14, 0.15.x, and 0.16) quite nicely on a Pentium 200, with 64M ram, Mach 64 video. The only thing that took any real time was changing themes, and I didn't do that all that often. I also usually had Netscrape, a half dozen Eterms, and X11amp running as well, and it was still ok as far as speed went (still faster than windows on the same box).

    Since you have a good processor and enough ram, maybe it's a video card / X server thing?
  • Mandrake: dual p3/500 with 512 megs of ram and 3 16 mb video cards with 3 21" monitors on it. I use vim :)

    Raster: my main machine(s) at home and work are dual xeon 450's with 2MB L2 cache per cpu and 512MB ram, 2x21" using 16Mb matrox G200's, 22Gb
    SCSI HD each, and the usual SB16 soundcard

    Uhhhh, must clean drool off keyboard.

  • > what happen when you drag a file
    > into a directory with a property of "tar zxvf -C
    > . %f" - gee -

    Is entering "tar zxvf -C %f" in a properties box really easier than typing it on a commandline?

    > we do cool stuff - Linux looks cooler -
    > their Linux hardware sells more :)

    See, VA Research makes money selling the base system so they fund basic system development. But there's only so much you can do with a window manager and a bunch of system utilities. How do you make them fund application development?
  • Actually in response to a few of the posts I've already seen on here, I'll say that I personally have been working on implementing KDE hints inside of E for the past few days. No sense in not supporting everyone's applications. Of course, I don't have many K apps installed on my system, so I won't be able to do a ton of testing quite yet, but you should end up being able to run any of the K*apps or Gnome*apps after this is done, and have them work "correctly"
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Actually, you won't have to do that.
    The point is to have it all set up and such so that you don't HAVE to go to the commandline for most stuff. I'm not advocating removing the commandline, I'm saying simple things should have simple methods of getting done
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • just out of curiosity... have you EVER used a mind-altering substance?

    you probably have and dont know it. Alcohol, Caffeine, sugar all alter mood and perceptions.

    and truthfully, alcohol is one of the most vile substances known to man, yet it is legal....

    and about coding in an altered state of mind... you really ought to try it some time. sometimes you need a little help thinking about things in new and unusual ways... ever try to debug a graph based branch and bound algorithm written in some of the most obfuscated c that you've ever seen? it gets alot easier when you have help looking at things from a diferent perspective.

    Face it --- This is really how code gets written. at least good, creative code. coding is much more of an art than a science. people tend to forget that, and try to force good code into a nice business-y type structure with protocols and all that... and unfortunately, you get suit-code. no creativity, horrible user interfaces, and no new solutions to problems.

    basically, you need to expand your minsd a little bit. drugs are not "evil". most of the "facts" that are spread are blatant misrepresentation of facts.

    try to expand your mind a bit. you will be able to look at life from a different perspective. Probably a much, much better perspective.
  • There are two things I love most about E

    1. It is amazing the amount of configuration you can do...finally a computer that looks (and operates) the way I like it...there is much joy in having a fly desktop

    2. the amount of pain that came from trying to get it to run right after installing linux for the first time...I think I gained more knowledge about just by trying to make it all work

    Now all I need is the SGI 540 to run it on

  • Of course, when you look at what we are doing all day on these boxes (compiling, debugging, etc) you'll see why. I don't want a fast machine because I need it to run E, I want a fast machine because I need to be able to compile and debug quicker :)
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Could you please elaborate on how this (let's be specific)
    unzipping scheme would work. At some point someone will
    need to specify that unzipping or untarring needs to take place.
    This is not necessarily as trivial as assigning a property to a
    directory: consider disk spanning for zipped files.
  • By the time you use the stuff they are programming a 500 mhz processor will be low end. Just keep thinking, in 18 months we will have 1.2 Ghz chips! I know people talk about bloat but unless you push the envelope, some things don't happen.

  • I seem to remember hearing AbiWord being bandied about by some rhad/gnome people as being the future word processor distributed with gnome... am I on crack? or is this kinda true, and if so, are Red Hat behind them in any supportive manner?

  • I feel sooooo relieved now that CVS E-0.16 has a pager. Before, E required the gnome panel to run the gnome pager and it was unbearable--- I went back to fvwm for a while. (It goes without saying that a pager is absolutely necessary.) The memory footprint of E-0.16 with a pager is smaller than that of the pager-applet alone (not counting the panel or anything!) GNOME-free and happy about all those extra cycles.

    I have the feeling that I will be using E-16 for a long time--- it does everything I want now. Alt-TAB for focus switch on each desktop area (fvwm couldn't do that), transients get focus from parents (if you want) so you can alt-f in netscape, type and do not have to use the mouse to move the cursor, etc... Oh yeah, and you can make it look however you want.

    Now my point---I wonder whether I will use E once it has a filemanager and DND and all the fixins to be CLI-free? I mean, I love E because it's trim and flexible. That could feasibly change soon. Maybe I'm the minority, but I don't want to use a filemanager and so I don't want one running. Yeah, I think the parser for the config-files might need some work and the config-dialogs are great, but a file-manager?

    Anyway, best to you both. You may be happy to know that it's raining in Raleigh-Durham right now.

  • I don't want to sound like a troll, but I think Raster should be spending his time making E stable instead of trying to re-invent the wheel. E crashes for me quite a few times every day (and I'm using a supposedly stable and recent version). I don't need no steenking file manager built into the window manager (why on earth?...)

    All I want is a window manager that doesn't crash, easy to configure, has all the basic features (pager, auto-raise etc). I've yet to find it. They all have their wierdness and instabilities. Tried E, fvwm2, scwm. I'm hoping scwm will start to stabilise soon and go with that.
  • Of COURSE you won't have to use all the features.
    that's one of the great things about E is the ability to turn off all the crap you don't want to deal with :)
    now, that being said, in CVS there's always some transitional periods (like the iconbox right now) that happen. but then again when we do the release-a-day thing like CVS that's the kinda thing you're willing to put up with :)
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • *Seriously* !!!

    I have to debug stupid stinking problems in Windows code written by idiots who were trusted with a really large and complex architecture... (whine, whine)

    I wish *I* could hack kewl user interfaces on a great OS and get paid for it!-)

    heh.
  • As for the different decorations for different windows, E does this on a daily basis, for almost everything. The most common thing i can think of, is in most screenshots you see with gimp and E, the gimp window has the 'titlebar' on the left. This isn't just saying 'put the titlebar on the left' to E, there is actualy a seperate window definition there, and you could make it look totaly different if you really wanted.
    Erik -- journey
  • actually, you can check out exactly what is going on out of CVS as we're working on it. I figure with that sort of ability you don't have to have as many full-head-on releases.

    That's one way of looking at it. However, remember that a large percentage of people access the net from work rather than home. My last 3 companies have all blocked CVS at the firewall level, and I (like many others) don't have enough bandwidth at home to get the entire E tree via CVS -- remember also that free local calls are rare outside the US. With regular releases, I can download them at work and burn them onto a CD to take home. That isn't possible at the moment with CVS.

  • To the 30-odd countries in the world who play on grass, it's called 'Hockey' ... to the small number of countries who play on ice, who cares?

    And yeh, we are world champions in Hockey, and yeh, I love vegemite too ...
  • I think most of us are pretty much used to it. We make just as many jokes about arrogant, gun-toting, lawsuit crazed yanks that think everyone wants to be american. :)

    Seriously though, vegemite/dingo/whatever jokes don't really have much impact. I think americans should watch more aussie tv to see what we're like (and then apply the same degree of scepticism as you do to your own tv).

    F.
    --
    make clean; make love --without-war
  • I run E0.16 on one of my low-end boxes (P90, 128mb RAM, 1mb S3Vision) and it's not lightening
    quick, but cetainly usable. If I were to load Windoze on to this box with themes and stuff, it would die. I can build E on this box in the time it takes to have a good crap.

    Surely you're not stupid enough to think these guys don't test on run-of-the-mill boxes? Have a look at the source for E; these guys know what they're doing. If I were you, I'd be looking at tuning my configuration before flaming the performance of E. Given the serious use of pixmaps etc. I think it smokes ...

    Ciao
  • E 0.14.x was an absolute PIG for me, but then I downloaded/installed the Debian (potatoe) E 15.5 packages with -nosound.

    A beauty, and fast. Disabling sound support was the key for me :-) I just had to get used to a few peculiarities and bugs with some themes, and with the desktops flipping away.

    Now I'm updating from CVS on a daily basis and since E installed uses only 1Mb of diskspace if you remove all the themes you don't want, I'm going to put it on my laptop too :-)

    --Tim
  • hockey for canada?wrong.. that would be ICE hockey..
    normal hockey is still played on a green field
    (and I think australia is worldchampion)
  • I still wish Gnome and KDE could agree on a common windowmanager support API. Then people wouldn't have to write in support for both; support one and you support the other. The two really should cooperate on more stuff (I'd say on everything but toolkits, but I know that's a bit extreme).
  • Actually, I run E on much lower machines than you do, and it runs fine. The point behind these big machines isn't so that we can actually run stuff. The point is so that we can compile and test and debug at a faster rate. I don't know about you, but compiling two megs of source code takes a while on all my other machines. I have a fast SMP machine because I want to be able to compile and test E while I'm still thinking about the code I just wrote. Keeps stuff fresh in my mind. I run E on everything from a low-end UDB (those multia alphas (ick)) to a p133, to a 486, to a couple of 66 mhz ppcs, to the machine you read about in the interview, which is my primary machine. Making E work efficiently in as little resources as possible is a VERY real issue for us. Please don't assume that it isn't.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Actually, I'll also point out that until recently raster was developing on a p120 and I was developing on a p133.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Interesting... out of all the corporate funding & hacker sponsorship we've seen lately, how much is directed application development? I love E, but I'd also like to see VA and RedHat throw some money at something like AbiWord.
  • This is *not* intended as a flame, so please don't flame me back... I'm wondering why the formal releases of E are so few and far between? I think the kernel revision frequency is about 4x that of E. :) Is there something fundamentally different about the way E is developed? Is Raster a perfectionist?

    I noticed that Mandrake is reading comments, so I figured I'd throw out this question. Oh wait.. maybe I just answered my question. Get back to work, man! :)

    p.s. I have no idea why this defaults to a score of 2.

  • su -c 'ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/x-cthulhu /usr/X11R6/bin/xlsd'
  • My question is why spend so much time on a window manager? What is the motivation about something like that? I use fvwm or something and it works relatively ok I just get an xterm and launch whatever I need from there. Why waste a bunch of resources on making the computer dance, sing, compose free verse while simultaneously calculating the US census all on the desktop every day? Maybe I am missing something but why spend so much time on this.
  • Is there are any performance gains from compiling E (or any Linux app for that matter) on my machine, over downloading pre-compiled binaries?

  • Well, E has no problems running on the 4-color grayscale Sun box I have here. It's not pretty, but it works.

    As for Gimp in 16-colors - why?!? For Gimp to be useful, it has to be able to render a graphic at least somewhat realistically, and that's just not possible with 16-colors (esp. as I suspect that by 16 color you mean VGA, which has an unchangeable palette). It would be like driving blindfolded, unless your were only trying to create a 16-color graphic - in which case Gimp is the wrong tool.

  • > Is entering "tar zxvf -C %f" in a properties box really easier than typing it on a commandline?

    actually it is. example.

    i create my download directoty - i set the properties action once and once only on creation
    (tar zxvf -C %w %f) or select this property from a list of provided templates.

    hence forth whenever i drag a tarball onto that directory instead of being copied or moved it getas untared in that dir. so henceforth we have a "smart directory" that will untar for me with a simple drag & drop.

    you could extend this idea from this simple task to quite complex ones with powerful shell scripts or utilities - example:

    you have freinds or people you work with who you exchange files with all the time - BUT you do it via mail with the dada uuencoded. easy.

    create a directory called "Friend" or whatever - set the drop action to be:

    uuencode "%f" | mail friend@work.com -s "%f"

    bingo - every file i drop on this dir gets uuencoded and mailed to my friend. sending a file to them has now become a single drag and drop action. use your imagination to make this feature work FOR you. it's one of the things i have planned asa "i must have this" feature.
  • Well, i don't know bout him, but a nice nested right/middle click contex menu could be used to perform actions based on specific file types, or on any file/files. This is not a simple feature to implement into a file manager or into a DE, but if done correctly, can be very powerful. and if it has a configurator where you can set up advanced options/features, you can have a pretty complex and powerful tool that removes most need to pop open a term

  • cause they can...

    have you ever heard of "CHOICE" or "FREE WILL"

    well, i am glad i don't live in your perfect little world where people only do things "good enough" to make you happy, then move on to something else that you want.

  • well make your own damn WM

    or patch one to do your work.

    why do you keep on posting crap about people not doing what you want? do you pay anyone of these guys for their time? i though so, then shut up and go back to playing your stupid games somewhere else.

  • Well maybe it needs another try. The problem with a window manager, of course, is that it's *always* running. It's not like gphoto, where I can load up a few pictures and suddenly it takes 24Mbytes.
    Anything E does, it always does.
    -russ
  • I just installed and started using E a couple of hours ago, when first saw this story posted. I must say I'm very impressed. I'm tinkering with it, and have tried a few themes setting on Brushed Blue

    I just wanted to say that the E developers have done a great job

    Mike

  • Aha. Good to know. Right-- of course I won't have to use it. I just got nervous at the end of the interview when Raster said

    I want to be able to just launch E - one executable, and have a working usable desktop environment...

    Anyway, even if I don't use a filemanager, I think emacs as a widget in E could be neat---I always have emacs running :)

  • Technically yes. If you have some extremely expensive/new processor like a PIII and want the app to be fully optimized for the platform.
  • Let's play a game of reality check with regard to how the body functions. If I take LSD and then try to program anything including "hello, world" there is a pretty good probability that it will not even look like line noise. Anyone who uses drugs will clinically experience a gradual loss of brain cells and therefore have decreased academic preformance.Life is hard enough for me as it is the last thing I or anyone else for that matter needs is less brain cells.
  • After looking at the state of Gnome (nearly impossible to get working) and KDE (bland Windows clone - well done if that's what you want, but not exactly what should propel us into the 21st Century), I know exactly why Raster and Mandrake are doing what they are.

    I've seen the screenshots and I think they look really cool. I'll probably try E again when I get a dual Pentium III/500 like they have.

    D

    ----
  • (and I hope the Guys are reading)... is that the infinite configurability is buried in a config file with little or no documentation. I love to configure, tweak, redecorate, and I am not afraid to go poking into textfiles... but it seems a shame to have such a system designed for such extensive configurability, and no pleasant way to configure. Maybe you -can- put a specific pixmap in as a custom windowbar, but you have to study an entire theme file to figure out what pixmap to replace. Honestly, it is not that much less trouble than editing the source for fvwm. I hope I am wrong here, that I have just missed a doc, or that spiffy configuration app... Man, I would love to edit my theme in place with d-n-d, realtime, and this unrealized potential is frustrating... This isn't a criticizm, consider it a feature request.
  • Sir there is one "simple" thing that I require. Something that comes in to proper focus. Basically all of the images that are associated with enlightment are all of a very grainy consistency the window manager should be made so that it will work well at 16 colors as well. Not only that put things like "the Gimp" that wonderful image manipulation program thing will not work for me because I can exclusively use 16 colors
  • Geoff,

    Thanks for your statements. I wonder why you bother however. Most people here are pretty hard headed and will believe what they want to believe.

    I think, E has gone through some outstanding changes. The one thing I would like to see is good documentation. You've gotten E to be very configurable, but you really need to give decent documention take advantage of it. Otherwise, people spend large amounts of time trying to understand and configure E.

    My two cents.

    sri

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