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Enlightenment GUI

Enlightenment 0.16.0 Release 159

Posted by Roblimo from the submitted-by-everyone-and-his-sister dept.
Mandrake writes "Enlightenment 0.16.0 came out this afternoon. Come play with what we've been toiling over for the past few months. Lots of new features from 0.15 - come check it out. Maybe now we can go and get some sleep. If you are at Atlanta Linux Showcase this week, we've even got shirts to hand out."
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Enlightenment 0.16.0 Release More

Enlightenment 0.16.0 Release

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  • That is very strange... Enlightenment runs very quickly on my measly 120 Mhz. Not choppy in the slightest bit. Also due to Enlightenment's design all of the eyecandy features don't slow the program down any if they are disabled. If you do turn on all the crazy features and use a theme with a big footprint it could be a bit slow though. I recommend that you give E another shot. It has definitely been getting progressively better and better. Just when i think i can't think of any thing that would make it better, they add some cool new feature that i quickly can't live without.

  • Version numbers in open source projects do not mean the same thing as they do in closed source projects. I found that very often the version number of a closed source product is akin to one's penis size: heh heh, my version number is bigger than yours'. Vendors bump up version X.0 to version X+1.0 solely because they want to leave an impression that the new release contains major changes and new features, instead of what it really is, most of the time: a couple of bug fixes.

    Open source projects have no need for this, and thus the version numbers are often just a reflection of the developer's mood. One of my own projects is currently at version 0.73, even though I feel that it is as stable as anything you'd find on a production machine. Yup, I did find a bug earlier this week, so I bumped up version 0.72 to 0.73, end of story. That's all (shrug).
    --

  • you've been suffering needlessly. You know why it's called Englightenment, don't you?

    - "What are you doing?"
    - "Waiting for Englightenment"

    has been the running joke about starting up E for quite some time.

    Yeah it looks pretty cool, but the heavily pixmapped themes are pretty bloody expensive (along with just about everything else).

    If you want raw speed and lightweight, use fvwm. It flies on a 486, where Windows feels slow (and is a major memory hog).

    If you want a nice compromise, try Sawmill (current favorite of the GNOME hackers) or WindowMaker. They run quite fast, and are nice and lightweight.
  • Anyone else notice that transparent Eterms seem to dump core when they start up? Turn off the transparency, they get run fine, but with it on, break out gdb and start poking around in core files. BTW, none of the libraries on the mirror are newer than the libs I have with my RedHat 6.0/E15-100 install, so if you are on a modem, don't worry about them.
  • My SGI doesn't have a development environment, so... Does anybody know where I could grab myself some pre-compiled binaries of this bad boy? :)
  • So far as launching any app goes, it's real easy with e-conf. You just define the shortcut to execute command X-Y-Z and it'll do so. Not sure about moving the cursor around...never tried that. As for the pager, I think that E's pager is far superior to any other one I've used. Personally, though, I still like Windowmaker alot. :) I'm gonna try this release of enlightenment, though, because if it's truly stable I'll probably switch back.
  • I've been using 15.5 up untill today. Oh was I disappointed when Eterm went south on me. I'm a bi g fan of the "transparent" feature. The Rpm of Eterm8.9 doesn't seem to crash but it just displays a black background and seems to even go to the trouble of shading the image. So I decided to grab the source and see if that would work. Things only went downhill from there. Seems like in the midst of all the gagging there was a message saying the background image file wasn't found. I guess something has changed in the way Enlighenment sets the background. It seem like there hasn't been much work on Eterm lately so I wonder how long this will take to be resolved.

  • fix (Score:1)

    by bsDaemon ( 87307 )
    middle button click, then under Maintenence, the "rebuild menus" script

    --bsDaemon
  • why not get GCC or somthing on your box?
  • I love the little blinky lights of my dockapps :). Will they work under the new E?

    Absolutely. Actually, the dockapp support has been in since 0.15.x. As well, there is a new API that raster's been working on for enlightenment-enhanced dockapps (epplets).

    ------
  • ah yes, but I was looking more for debian packages. (I haven't had the greatest experience with setting up clients on my own)
  • Are colormodifiers still broken? My theme depends on this feature, and now its gone. I don't really want to use the new version if my theme will stop working. Also, whats up with e.themes.org? Why isn't it working yet? If you follow the links to the top 5s on the front page, they show a different top 5!

  • Re:OT: how to run X without gobs of memory (Score:3)

    by edlinger ( 2999 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:48PM (#1624449)
    Off topic, but good question. Until 5 months ago I was running a 75Mhz pentium with 48MB of RAM. Alright, that still may be more powerful than the machines you've got, but that machine was by no means a speedy beast... I've got a much faster comptuter now... :)

    Try mixing and matching GUI components and build your own interface. If you've got the time, of course. Run a lightweight window manager, Sawmill (I forget the URL), WindowMaker [windowmaker.org], or a few others. WindowMaker has KDE hooks, I don't know about SawMill, never used it, but I hear it's excellent. Pick a good file manager, there are several lightweight ones out there. A search of "file managers" at google.com/linux presents a good start. Pick a "launcher" of sorts, like the Gnome Panel or KDE's thingy... I forget what they call it. Netscape's a hog regardless, but it will run, try getting navigator only and have a seperate email app.

    It can be done. On a 75MHz pentium I had a quick desktop, but the standard Gnome and KDE just about choked on it, so I made my own. Here's a list of what I consider important in a GUI for users that pretty much just use what you throw at them:

    • in no particular order
    • File Manager (with click on file and start app)
    • Point and Click to apps (an obvious menu)
    • Web Browser (opera soon? :)
    • Email Client
    • A Desktop (like desktop icons... some people tend to have all their files on their screen... not good practice and very ugly, but they do...)
    • Word Processing
    • Spreadsheet
    • Other apps based on what you've got going in the cluster...
    • Consistency

    That's a short list... by no means definitive. But if you can find a combo of these things and put them together, you can create a pretty good GUI out of these bits and pieces that may run. That's the best thing about Gnome and KDE, they let you pick and choose between the two, for the most part. No, you won't get a full-fledged GUI, but you can come pretty close.

    Hope this helps a little...

  • I find the Win95/98 GUI a great deal less stable (in the sense that it's very often explorer.exe that crashes), and not particularly any faster.

    I can't remember the last time X crashed. And while the standard way for clients to use the X server is on the slow side, to prove network transparency (a feature I rely on every day), there are ways to get around the slowness -- X shared memory, and direct framebuffer access. Both of these are available to apps that really need them.

    I have to say I would like to see better speed on the part of GLX. My Ultra2 is noticably slower under Linux than under windows, due to the architecture of the GLX Xserver/GL extensions.
  • I'm running E on my 486/66 laptop. It's a cvs checkout from a few weeks ago, so it probably has most of the things in the new release.

    It starts up nice and fast and has all the features I want (new icon tray and screen capture pagers... oooh... ahhh...) Oh, and it looks real purty, even with 256 colours.

    Of course, I like E because you knock the socks off of every windows user who happens to notice your desktop :) If you're not in it for knocking peoples' socks off, I suggest fvwm. It's very usable and stable and all that boring stuff :)
  • There is. Its called claim. People use it on ishmael (one of the systems i ran) all the time. It runs debian.

    With lynx supporting graphics at console the only thing I need X for is raplayer now.
  • Good job on getting this out. I really like
    Enlightenment and am looking forward to playing
    with all the features in the new version!
  • The main reason I'd give is that I already spend fourteen-hour days in front of it... :)

    I guess I'll have to grab GCC and get compiling, I was just hoping someone would beat me to it and spare me the effort. :)
  • Good move. I starting programming in Java on a SPARC running Solaris (2.3 IIRC) back before there were non-beta versions available for any other OS. As new versions for other OS's have come along, I've tried them, and never found any that seemed to work as well. If you're serious about Java development, do yourself a favor and buy a SPARC. I love my SPARC.

    I would definately NOT use Linux for it. I love Linux too, but not for Java development...

    --

  • Lets hope it doesn't follow the trend... (Score:3)

    by SadisticFury ( 75530 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @05:59PM (#1624459) Homepage
    Its been a long time since I've celeberated the release of a new software version. It usually means bigger binaries, buggier code, and slower execution.

    For example, if I compare my GUI in Linux(enlightenmend) to the GUI in Windows, Windows has a much more mature design. Even on my 350 Mhz, Enlightenment can get very choppy, and dragging a windows can bog down the entire system, while Windows GUI functions are much more transparent. This doesn't say anything about the rest of the OS, but for the mainstream, GUI is a large part of what matters.

    Lets hope the new version is a step up, not a step down.

  • #e (Score:2)

    by Filgy ( 2588 )
    Don't forget #e on efnet for any help that you need. >:)
  • ...there almost hasn't been any radical innovations in those desktops for years, the only thing I can thing of is MS's web integration, and maybe the start menu that appeared from win 3.11 to win95.

    *cough* *cough* The Start Menu was a radical innovation? I remember thinking when it first came out, "Gosh, now I have a menu that's around all the time, so I can drop apps in it and have them easily accessible at all times like I've been doing with the Apple menu on my Mac for over half a decade!" But that's par for the course -- throughout the 80's and early 90's, innovations came to the PC world about 5 years behind when the appeared in the Mac world. Then Apple stagnated. Don't know why. System 7 was awesome when it first came out, but it got really embarrasing to be still running it 7 years later with virtually no change in it.

    The one and only innovation I ever liked from Windows (and that seemed to truly be an innovation, but for all I know it was somewhere else first and I just don't know about it) was the right-click context menus. Now THOSE I've found to be truly useful...

    --

  • As I remember, I never restarted X after I ran Enlightenment for the first time and then installed Eterm. So I got back to work this morning logged in started X and reinstalled Eterm. It works just fine. Hmm...?
  • I would very much agree with this statement. One of the first things I noticed about linux was the slowness of the GUI (I'm on 75Mhz).

    The upshot is that the linux console is so quick and powerful that I rarely need to use the GUI. I only use it for complex/picture websites and gAIM. (I wish there was an aim client for the console in debian.)

    Andrew
  • I just hope it doesn't use unreadable fonts and colors...and useless huge graphics that do nothing but act as eye candy...next thing you'll know, they'll have a talking penguin.
  • I've played around with the E16 snapshots since right after E15 was released (I live on the edge too much; at least Sawmill is my regular wm). It's considerably faster on my P200. The new features are mostly seperate from the main GUI, and don't slow it down.

    That being said, E is still one of the slower and larger window managers out there, but also one of the most powerful, and nicest looking.

  • Not to nitpick because I really like E and all, but there were a lot of typos. I wasn't going to say anything but this one crossed the line:

    All companies and trademarks are copyright by their respecitve owners. Linux is a trademark of Linux torvalds.

    I mean, come on guys...that just doesn't look good at all.

  • I don't get it (Score:4)

    by aheitner ( 3273 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @07:03PM (#1624472)
    I've spent a lot of time both on 16 meg Windows and Linux machines.

    I found no way to keep Windows from thrashing madly every time you change applications; there's no way to fit that much stuff into memory. Those are 2 of the most bloated apps for Win95.

    Similarly, Netscape and KDE are some of the most bloated apps for X. On the 16 meg machines, I used fvwm2, which helped a lot. There's no way around Netscape (I detest it, but need it ...). I suggest AbiWord and nedit as some light weight editors (taking 4.4 and 3 megs of ram respectively at the moment). Nedit is a programmers editor, and AbiWord is an MSWord compatible Word Processor.

    You're still going to get some thrashing, but things should improve. Also, go through and kill stuff that doesn't need to be running. No dock apps, no panels (just a root menu should suffice), no extra daemons.

    The truth is, if you want the flashy graphics stuff you're going to have to pay. I don't find Gtk+ (I happen to use GNOME) any slower than the Win95 GUI, but I don't find it any faster or smaller either. But the great thing about Linux is its modularity; you can build a solution that leaves out the extraneous stuff, resulting in a much friendlier experience on old hardware.
  • hmmmm. Although I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Enlightenment team, I recently switched to the Sawmill [warwick.ac.uk] window manager. I found it to have a more focused development effort, to me much more lightweight than enlightenment, and IMHO it's easier to create themes for. Congratulations to the Enlightenment though!
  • If you don't like the button-1 mouse menu on the desktop background, you can change it... E's nice like that :-)

    look at the documentation (middle click on the desktop and go to Help) there's a section on configuring menus :-)
  • If you follow Enlightenment, a minor version number is not a minor version number :-)
  • Mandrake is still very much with the project. I see him on #e every night tinkering with stuff in the code so that it was ready for release. I can guarantee that E is not becoming more arrogant, as they're still more than happy to play with everyone... I'm running E with KDE, and not only does it play well, but its FAST.

    I'm tempted to call this post a flamebait, but I'm pretty sure that he just hasn't used E in a long time. Every time there's a new version, the speed increases.
  • trust me, this code is very un-buggy and fast. I've been using E 0.16 since the first CVS version (like in May or something), and not once was it ever buggy. It always worked, and worked well. with every CVS update, the speed increased a bit. Trust me, E is not only fast, but it keeps getting faster. the new 0.17 CVS versions will be even faster, as Raster and Mandrake rewrite more of the code for the backend so that more things can be done. I can promise you that with imlib2 and E0.17, Enlightenment will have even more converts. :)

    Mog the Moogle
  • Theme's in enlightenment are incredibly powerful, but if a theme takes advantage of all the possibilities there's going to be a major performance loss. Personally I've written 2 E themes, and I know that my 2nd slows down E a lot. In my next theme I plan to pay particular attention to what it takes to keep that from happening.
    That said, to me many themes in E are works of art. They aren't meant to be functional. If you want good performance out of E get a simple and functional theme. Recognize that not evey theme out there is meant for real work - particularly if your computer is slow.
  • I can agree with that one. I have RH6 on a P100 with 32meg, about every bloody server you can think of (Firewall - IPTables now, DNS, probably some masqerading lying around still, Apache, FTP, telnet, ssh, SMB ...), and E15 ran brilliantly on my machine ... it was really fast. Want an example of bloat and slow ? Need I mention it ? If you still can't guess, KDE. Now THAT is a slog on my machine. My theme involved a 200-something K jpeg as my background, too ..... Also, I have kernel 2.3.20 with the magic sysrq key there ... so that would slow it even more !! Any comments ? Some have suggested themes, but doesn't look like it, since I have a huge JPEG. =) d


    -
  • Just to burst your last bubble -- Those right-click menus were on OS/2 long before they ever showed up on Windows. :)


    ---
    Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
  • me too...Enlightenment 0.16 running on top of Gnome, fast as I could want, and more eye candy than "The Matrix." X-Windows performance depends hugely on your video card, as well--if you can use accelerated drivers, it makes a huge difference. I have a RivaTNT2 and it was "ok." Then Nvidia released accelerated drivers for Linux and it is much quicker. Riva128 cards are dirt cheap and well supported under XFree86-3.5.x SVGA server.

    Okay, it helps that this is running on a Celeron550MHz/128MB...but E looks better than Win98 regardless.
  • Just to burst your last bubble -- Those right-click menus were on OS/2 long before they ever showed up on Windows. :)

    Heh. I always figured Micros~1 got the idea from somewhere, I just never knew where before. Thanks...

    --

  • What exactly is the point of using Java if you're only going to use Solaris on SPARC HW? If that really is the only good Java platform (which I doubt) then the language is pretty much useless.

    If you reread the post you're replying to, you'll see I said I wouldn't want to do Java development on anything but a SPARC. As far as running Java goes, there are plenty of decent VM's out there for many different platforms...

    --

  • Things that are sooo much better with 0.16 (Score:4)

    by Mog The Moogle ( 59660 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @07:44PM (#1624485)
    the iconification is much nicer. the iconbox is really cool, and the sound effects kinda help that along. :)

    Raster did an extremely good job making the sounds for BrushedMetal. Mandrake told me one night about how he has this fetish for "odd clicky sounds".. :)

    the KDE support rocks my world. (I'm using KDE 1.1.2 with E 0.16, and it's an *ahem* enlightening experience. did I mention it runs flawlessly? :)

    it runs faster. partially because of BrushedMetal, but also because the speed has increased during each CVS update I made... and I'm on a p133/32MB RAM, so I can tell a larger speed increase than you can. :)

    the menus are a bit more intuitive, they're not as good as windowmaker yet, but by 0.17, this is going to be as easy to use as KDE/mac... even theming will be done via a widget, a-la KDE2.0.

    the extremely fast pager. I used the pager from 0.13, and it was dog slow. I can't even notice a speed decrease from disabling it, so I know it's not eating many resources.

    tho I've seen bugs pop up in E (not from my own experiences, but from people on the mailing list), but they're fixed/solved completely.

    Note: if someone could help us with the memory leak that occurs with Color Modifiers, I know we'd all be grateful. it's driving everyone insane...

    the dockapp abilities are quite good, if not what you would expect. Let's just say that they don't work the same way that windowmaker/afterstep's work. :)

    All in all, this is an extremely solid and fast window manager. When 0.17 comes out, this is going to be one of the "Killer Apps" of the X/*nix world. be sure to keep up on E, as it's only going to get better.

  • i read in Linux Journal (forget wihich issue...probabaly August 1999) that E doesn't fall into exact categories of wm. eg: kde-highly integrated wm, wm2-lightweight, fvwm2-highly configurable. E had several features from other wm and plus other. still, i do not use E. reason?

    for me...first impresion is everything. the fist time i got my E, it is too dark (the backgroud, the side bar, the font) compose of colors that near color of black. i dump it without second thought. even after visiting sites that provide the numerous theme for E, it just doesn't interest me. right now i'm sticking to icewm. icewm doesn't have the quality that i like but it will do for now.

    this doesn't mean that i bad mouth E. it got qualities that others wm neglect. the themes for E is very interesting compare to other wm. but E need more than that to get me in using one.

  • I already did customize it. I was merely pointing out that the default things sort of screw with GNOME, which might or might not matter, depending.
  • This is not aimed specifically at the post I replied to, but all these people whining about E being slow are really starting to annoy me, and here's a little test to show you why: Fire up E, and make (or download - wuss :) ) an insanely simple theme with just a title bar and basic stuff much like window maker has. no textures or anything. then take that window, and drag it around all over the place. Great. Do the same in WindowMaker... guess which one is faster? If you have the RAM of course, E is much faster. Drop your prejudices and test for yourself, dont take my or anyone elses word for it. Anyway, on a less bitchy note, whens that file manager coming along? :)
  • NT == No Text..

    I swear it was perfectly OK in the preview.
  • The problem with this WM is that it makes Windows users think that they know what they are doing, when actually, the system works completely differently. Also, there are subtle differences in look and feel.

    I would go with windowmaker in this situation. You can build a pretty cool environment: make buttons for the applications that you need, and associate icons with them (if necessary).
    --
    Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

  • B) Are the default rpms built for RH? Yes. I'm downloading one right now (from ftp.enlightenment.org).
  • well, i guess i just said win95's GUI is more stable in a mode of diplomacy toward the person i was replying to. i wasn't really specific in saying what it was more stable than, but i'd say that enlightment, at this point, does some pretty odd things sometimes that don't always make sense. meaning stability in terms of a user-interface predictability standpoint. as far as the win95 GUI itself crashing, it's really just hard to tell what is crashing in win95, because it's usually everything that goes down.

    i feel much more comfortable using the win95 GUI than using enlightenment, but this may just be a lack of experience. but i like windowmaker better than both of them.

  • fast or slow? (Score:3)

    by kip3f ( 1210 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @08:19PM (#1624495) Homepage
    Whenever there is any discussion on Enlightenment, many people complain about how slow it is, while many other people comment on how fast it is. The truth is that it is highly configurable, and if you use the features, you pay in RAM and CPU. One option is to play with all the different features, and find a good balance of featurefull-ness. This takes time. Perhaps it would be easier to obtain this balance if E's configuration program gave the user some indication of how much resources their configuration was taking up.
    --
    Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
  • Is it FASTER? Can I use it on my PII 266 with a Millennium II? I tried the last release and it made it worth it to spend hours getting Window Maker the way I wanted it even though Enlightenment worked fine. Now I'm stuck on Window Maker, but I'll go back if Enlightenment can switch desktops as quickly as Window Maker.
  • The default theme in 0.16 is no longer that real dark one that are talking about. It is a nice looking metalic blue/green theme.
  • You must not be tracking E that closely. Snapshots are made VERY frequently ie. 0.16-devel-x and 0.16-pre-x (after feature-freeze). CVS access is also always available for those wanting the bleeding-edge.

    On the mailing list, I've seen people submit patches, suggest grammatical changes, ask for features, question design aspects, and so on. Raster and Mandrake have basically responded to everything.

    Enlightenment is a very graphical hack, but polish has not been set aside. Mandrake just wrote a help system (loads the first time you run E to help first-timers), bugs are always dealt with whenever discovered, many usability improving features like the iconbox and pager, work on Imlib2 which should improve speed significantly (according to Rasterman), and work on a new filemanager. There's more but my point should have been made.

    To sum it up, I see Enlightenment improving in just about every way including its polish.

    Regards,
    Andy
  • Excellent ;) I prefer KDE myself.
  • This is one of a few mirrors listed at www.enlightenment.org.

    ftp.enlighte.nu

    This ones working fine for me. Good Luck!
  • Maybe if you get yer enlightened windows non-transparent it won't be choppy :))
  • > for me...first impresion is everything.

    How sad!
    You're not even prepared to go right-click, Themes, Ice in order to make it look palatable? How long does your Icewm config stay looking like its default? If you've configured it at all, you've been unfair in dismissing E because of a non-wonderful default.

    And of course, I find E considerably more configureable and friendly than ice, but that's just me - and I've actually played around with it for a while, too...
  • Enlightenment sure looks cool. And, as a former Amiga user (and actually wannabe future Amiga user), I like the detail about the overlapping desktops. That is how it should be. The GUI in general (on Mac, Windows, Unix, Linux, etc) has been focussed around windows (I mean the things on your screen, not the 'other OS') so long people have forgotten that windows actually suck. I hate scroll bars and I hate windows, because they are only needed because you cannot see everything at once. But there are more elegant methods and one of them is to stop using windows for every application an instead giving them an entire screen each. The Amiga did it and it works better. So thumbs up, you guys at Enlightenment!

    But enough about Amiga. I was asking where the desktop OS was. Really, where is it? Making cool looking GUI things is ok, but what are you going to put it onto? Linux sure needs a lot of work before it can become a desktop operating system, so why not focus on that, instead of on the cool looking GFX. I know, it's probably a lot more boring, but who IS making Linux better suited for the desktop at the moment? It needs to be a lot faster (booting, GUI-feedback, that kind of areas). I hope it is not going to be just forgotten, or we'll end up with something of a Microsoft taste: fat, sluggish and narrow-focussed. We don't want that, now do we?
  • Actually, I use KDE. I also used to use windowmaker.
    --
    Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
  • I bet it'd run on Solaris without any real trouble

    From personal experience, E on Solaris (2.5 and 2.6) is slow, extremely buggy, and crashes very, very, very, often. I hope 0.16 bucks this trend.


    --
    N. Thomas

  • holy shit this is my first reply to slashdot...

    There are a few mirrors to enlightnment. Just open their home page and click on download. There are several mirrors listed.

    Sean Long
  • Wmboldended by my previous post...

    What we need to make Linux mainstream in terms of graphical user interface, is ALL configuration options available via a standard interface. Whether this is available from a "standard" distribution (aka RedHat or whatever) or a default linux X-config interface, is moot. The root of the problem lies in the fact that there are few standard configuration frontends that can configure the entire OS with a single interface.

    Microsoft has gone almost as far as the redhat configuration tool, but there still some distance to go. A single standard interface to all configurations is a holy grail we should be reaching for. I'm just a USER so my opinion can be discounted appropriately, but users worldwide are looking for a single button they can click on that will let them set up or configure any feature or service regardless of window manager or OS GUI interface.

    That said, I'm limited to make config because I'm too stupid to understand the error messages printed after the first (and only) time I ever use make menuconfig on any given system.
  • Resizing is the window manager's responsibility - ie, it's an E bug, not a Gnome one. It might only occur under Gnome, but that doesn't make it Gnome's fault. :)
  • Agreed (WRT system resources).

    I have a windows machine at 16 meg ram that is barely suitable for it's job, while my linux box with enlightment with 128 meg ram is running just fine. A relative measure of system resource effiencicy might help those who are resource limited.

    With 128 meg ram (bought when 128 meg PC-100 SDRAM was ~$99) enlightment is very suitable.

  • Win GUI (Score:1)

    by vyin ( 3072 )
    while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.

    Well, yes and no. Windows isn't out of the box themeable, but there are third party solutions available. There are also virtual desktops available.

    For example, there is a port of Afterstep to Windows called Litestep (I don't have a decent URL to post... you can try Litestep.net [litestep.net] but it seems to be dead) which will give you virtual desktops.

    Stardock has a product called Windowblinds which will skin titlebars, window borders, menus and buttons (not scroll bars or progress bars yet) as well as allowing translucency and bitmap backgrounds for explorer windows. They also have IconPackager (theme manager for icons) and Control Center (virtual desktops and app launcher [kind of like CDE bar or KDE bar). You can learn more at their web site [stardock.com].

  • Actually it's XFree (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I noticed the same problem, it seemed as if moving around windows or desktops sliding around were incredibily slow and choppy compared to what my card is capable of (TNT2 Ultra 32 meg). A couple of weeks ago I decided to try out the XFree 4.0 snapshot. It took forever to compile but when it was finally installed it was a world of difference, moving windows and desktops was silky smooth, even at my 1600x1200x32bit resolution everything was very responsive even with a complex theme - subjectively I felt it was more responsive then windows at the same resolution, and that's considering that in windows I don't have any themes or wallpaper.

    ps. I've been using the cvs E .16 for quite a while now, I like it.
  • I'd say a hell of a lot of people are working towards Linux for the desktop. On the distribution side, there's Corel, on the application integration there's KDE and GNOME, and on the hardware configuration side there's quite a few kernel hackers doing good things with USB, Plug and Play, etc. Put it all together, and in not too long Linux for the desktop will seem quite logical.

    relating all this to Enlightenment though (to avoid being branded off-topic :) .. Where does E fit in to this picture I'm wondering? To me, it feels like it's going for a niche of perhaps graphic artists, power users, interior decorators, architects, investment bankers, lunch bar operators... uhh...

    el bobo
  • Does Imlib2 plan to have internal support for most of the gfx file formats that you need netpbm, ImageMagick, etc for?
    The biggest problem with E is that you go through 2 hours of library upgrades before you can ./configure and then install the thing.
  • 100 people max on ftp.enlightenment.org is getting annoying.... Are there any mirrors around yet?

    This is almost as bad as downloading the pre.6 the night before to wake to find the finished version out.....

    Anyway, I have used the delopment and pre-release versions, and E16 does rocks, so anyone reading this should go get it (if they can) NOW!
  • Why is it that a 16 MB machine can run Win95, IE, and Word97 at the same time, while a 24 MB Linux box bogs down with KDE, Netscape, and kedit!?

    Well, that certainly hasn't been my experience, especially not with IE4 / IE5. AFAIK 32MB is recommended for Office 97.

    But if what you want is a simple, locked-down environment, you don't need to bother with KDE. You could use a small, fast window manager like icewm with a Win95-style look-and-feel. (But avoid fvwm95 like the plague.) KDE is more useful for the users on the next rung of the ladder, who want to open file manager windows, drag things around, configure their own screensaver and so on. You can run KDE applications without having the whole KDE environment running. You could also try editing the 'startkde' script (or whatever) to stop loading the root window manager, sound server and other unneeded stuff. (Mine just loads kfm, kcontrol -init, kpanel and kwm.)

    Also, remember that KDE comes with its own web browser (integrated into the file manager in a very Redmondian kind of way), so you might not need Netscape.

    Finally, to improve performance in general, try using a 2.2 kernel and a distribution like Stampede or (IIRC) Mandrake which is Pentium-optimized. (You are using 586es, right?)

  • I'm playing around with the new E, and the one question that comes to mind is: where can I find a wharf like application in e? (Wharf is a bar where you can dock apps in afterstep.)
  • I have to agree. The pre-0.16 versions have all been very stable on Solaris (Ultra 10/320MB/Sol7). However, since the "dynamic" menu-thing (file.menu etc) became default, some themes (especially the lW2 theme, which btw has some problems with the winops-menu being positioned wrong) have caused E to coredump when using menus. I'm using the BlueSteel theme now and it seems fairly stable (0.16 final).

    Another strange thing is that file.menu is not automatically created on my Solaris boxes. On my Linux boxes that works without problems.
  • Sounds to me like a feature of Buddux. Now we only need to invent it.

    --JT

  • "Enlightenment"? (Score:4)

    by ParadoXIII ( 94293 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:07PM (#1624533) Homepage
    Sounds like a feature of Jesux... [geocities.com]

  • Re:Lets hope it doesn't follow the trend... (Score:5)

    by Trick ( 3648 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:08PM (#1624534)
    If it helps any, one thing I've discovered recently is that the theme you use has can have a *huge* impact on how Enlightenment performs. If it's a theme with a lot of large images, E's memory usage can be as much as doubled (or worse, I suppose, depending on the theme -- the worst I've done is double it).

    I've got no problems whatsoever with the way Enlightenment performs on my system, and have found it at least as responsive as Windows. I'd say it's even better, but that's hard to guage accurately (especially not having run Windows on anything for close to a year now).

    On a side note, E 0.16 rocks. I've been grabbing it from CVS since 0.15 came out, and I'm really impressed with the how new features have turned out, and really look forward to the stuff that's planned so far for 0.17. I highly recommend giving this release a shot.

    Thanks to Mandrake, Raster, and the whole rest of the AUTHORS file for one hell of a kick-ass desktop!


    ---
    Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
  • Anyone else find it interesting how much linux software is still pre 1.0? Enlightenment is much more stable than any windows software i've ever used, i never even touched any beta windows code. Wonder how all this software is gonna look once it's 1.0...

    Patrick Barrett
    Yebyen@adelphia.net

  • Enlightnment is a great example of open source at its best...a great improvement over the last version, but we could possibly help it along some more to achieve the attention and success it needs.

  • cool (Score:1)

    by Kyobu ( 12511 )
    I've been playing with the pre-16 releases for a few weeks now, and I like 'em. The iconbox is pretty nifty (especially after the bugs in devel 6 or so got worked out), and I like the pager, too. There are a couple things I don't like, like the button-1 mouse menu on the background, but there are a bunch of cool features. More FX thingies (Raindrops and Waves), and individual control panels, f'rinstance, plus a new BrushedMetal theme.
  • Why is it that a 16 MB machine can run Win95, IE, and Word97 at the same time, while a 24 MB Linux box bogs down with KDE, Netscape, and kedit!? I'd like to wipe an entire lab (this is a school setting) or Windows boxen and stick in 30 kickstart disks, but I just can't get as much performance out of them as I should be able to.

    What am I doing wrong? (More interestingly, what should I be doing?) How do I squeeze usability out of old hardware, when most of the users barely can use Win32?

  • Recent quality issues? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anyone else noticed a distinct change in Enlightenment since Mandrake signed off to Raster? Certainly, the tone of development has changed (less participatory, more BSD-like, perhaps more arrogant) but it seems that, lately, the focus of Enlightenment development is purely oriented towards cool graphical hacks. Performance, memory usage, and a general polished appearance have all seemed to go by the wayside.

    Thoughts?

  • It doesn't, TX. The new default theme (BrushedMetal, created by the ubiquitous TigerT) is VERY toned down from previous releases.

    It's still cool, though. :)


    ---
    Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
  • I'm running E16 right now.. Very smooth.. This version is a lot cleaner of 15.5. Lots of REALLY cool features. I really enjoy the minimizing task bar.. definately worth a look. To bad e.themes.org's image server is down right now so I can't download themes. ChiefArcher
  • I think Enlightenment is good for Linux because it gives Linux (or UNIX/X-Server based systems) a distictive look. Look at Mac, you can recognize it from a screenshot. Same with Windows, OS/2, commercial UNIX running CDE, probably BeOS and Job's NeXTStep system.

    The problem with most windowmanagers, like WindowMaker, AfterStep, and desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, are that they try too much to *look* like Windows or NextStep or whatever, which is wrong, I think.

    Yes, it's important to give the user the choice to make their environment to look like they want it, whether it is WIndows, Mac, OS/2 or NextStep.
    And yes, if I were to set up a Linux box for my admin, I would probably give her a Windows look for the GUI. But the default Linux GUI look should be distinct from those other boxes.

    That said, I haven't been using Enlightenment since 0.14, mostly because all the configuration changed between 0.14 and 0.15, and I just had better things to do than learning how to setup Enlightenment.

    That's one of the things that bugs me about OS software, I guess. Weak documentation, and hard to configure (although forgivable for Enlightenment since it's still in alpha, but unforgivable in GNOME since it went 1.0 months ago).

    Well, enough of my rants...
  • It's simple, CmdrTaco is actually #e's bitch, and he posts whatever we tell him to do. We are in fact the shadowy team behind slashdot, and Taco is just our puppet.

    Muhahahah. No, seriously, Taco was a regular member of #e before he got too busy with slashdot, so I guess it's an old time thing.
  • One poster mentioned that they used Enlightenment on their notebook computer to impress Windoze users. Heck, try MacOS 8.5 window tabs... that usually gets Win98 users drooling in a matter of seconds.

    Also, looking at the screenshots on their site... I notice that check boxes and radio buttons look the exact same when un-checked. Possibly confusing for the user.

    - James Schend
  • Hehe, you don't have to be so politically correct here dude. If Enlightenment for you is much more stable that any win soft, then you should probably finally ditch that Windows 2.0 or whatever you are using and move to something more up to date ( NT ?? )

    Seriously, this is obviously complete bullshit you are trying ro inflict on /. On the other hand, considering usual /. audience, your post most likely won't be considered as such.
    Sad.
  • Dockapps should work without WMaker, they just dont get pulled into the dock.

    I used some dockapps with wm2 ;)
  • I'm sure the Usual Places(tm) will have the important files mirrored soon, but if there is a crunch to get them, I have placed them on a (gasp) NT machine (excellent uptime, however ;~) with a fast connection.

    Mirrored are the tarball, the RPM, and the source RPM.

    anon FTP-> 152.2.174.242 port 29
  • I've been running E on Solaris for about 8 months now with any problems at all.

    As was noted by another poster, the file_menu stuff doesn't work currently under solaris...but that was a recent change in one of the 0.16 pre releases.

    If I can ever connect to ftp.enlightenment.org, I'll download 0.16 and try it out. (Using 0.16.pre5 right now).

  • AGHH BUG :( (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For starters, I don't run GNOME with E, I just run plain ole E (it's faster), so this isn't a problem for the rest of the world.

    I start it up, and everything looks beautiful.
    I click around.

    hey, that's funny. where is the program menu?

    "right click on the background for the user menu" they say.
    Hmm doesn't work

    so I had to edit my .Xclients and add in a exec term, just to do anything

    How can you miss not being able to do anything in X? Does anyone else use E without GNOME?
  • Not really, I use Linux and Windows both at home and at work. I prefer windows for java and windows development. And I don't think there's any way in hell e016 is more stable than all windows software you've tried unless all you've tried is netscape.
  • This is a problem admitted by Sun. It is not E that won't run Java, but Java doesn't conform to some of the specs for X ICCCM (enough C's?) window manager compliance. They are supposed to be fixing that soon.

    Except for one early pre 0.16 CVS build I tried, E has run flawlessly for me since 0.15.0. Now the only WM that crashes on me is that weird "explorer.exe" program (in both 95/98 and NT, except NT restarts it cleanly, so except for the icons and toolbar flickering, you never notice)

  • Anti-Aliasing!! (Score:4)

    by X-ViRGE ( 44659 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:15PM (#1624565) Homepage

    E 0.16 has Anti-Aliasing in its titlebars via its built-in truetype font renderer. All that you need is a font which supports Anti-Aliasing and the theme to use E's TTF engine instead of X's.

    Really cool. Hopefully we'll see more anti-aliasing soon enough. E now has support for epplets, which are like dockapps, and as far as I can tell, this version is actually somewhat faster... check it out. Also, this may be the last release before E becomes a desktop environment instead of a window manger. DR17 may have an E file manager... we'll see. For us GNOME users, there is now Sawmill (), which is shaping up nicely and will hopefully remain as fast as it is while getting a few more features... check that out if you want a light window manager for GNOME. br/=; Julianbr/=; [warwick.ac.uk]
  • enlightenment is only _one_ of the many GUIs that are available for linux/x11. enlightenment's stated goal, as far as i can remember, is to be ultimately configurable and have every feature you could ever imagine. i've used it in the past and have found it too complex (and sometimes too slow) to bother with, but there's nothing wrong with one GUI being huge.

    i use window maker, which is quite configurable (in a "feel" sense), though it's not as visually morphing as enlightenment is. if you want something that's lighter, i would suggest window maker wholeheartedly.

    while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.

    but the point is, if enlightment isn't for you, that doesn't mean anything against linux. that's the beauty of linux. just pick a different GUI! (or of course the standard line "write your own!").

  • Re:Recent quality issues? (Score:3)

    by Trick ( 3648 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:16PM (#1624568)
    To be honest, no. I haven't noticed that to be the case at all. While Raster and Mandrake were pretty firm on sticking to the feature freeze leading up to this release (which might have looked like arrogance if you made a suggestion late in the game, but was more likely an attempt to get everything right before this release), I saw a lot of discussion about, and work on, all of the things you mentioned.

    Sure, E's got its "cool graphical hacks" -- that's part of what makes it different, and I suspect they'll be a large part of E's development for the foreseeable future (and I like it that way)... But under the hood, they've done a lot of work to keep it stable, and it shows on my system.


    ---
    Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.

  • Release Notes (Score:3)

    by ryder ( 111 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:19PM (#1624572)
    Release notes are here [enlightenment.org].

    Not much info on what's new & updated though, it's mainly just thanks to various people and organizations.

    There is a list of features, but there's no annotation as to what is new.

  • This is a problem admitted by Sun. It is not E that won't run Java, but Java doesn't conform to some of the specs for X ICCCM (enough C's?) window manager compliance. They are supposed to be fixing that soon.


    If Java *crashes* E because E can't handle a malformed ICCCM hint, then E simply can't run Java, period. I've completely given up on Java development on Linux BTW. I'm tired of waiting for the stable version of the latest Java RSN. My latest kick is JPython (even though I'm not a huge fan of python), but I do all my hacking with it on my Solaris box at work (and play Homeworld on my windoze box at home).

  • ... (Score:2)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 )
    Enlightenment is cool, it's pretty fast.. and I've found that after 2 releases, any feature is debugged well enough to be used in production. On the other hand, I wish gnome would get it's act together - those original 1.0 rpms were 100% eeeeviiill, and the new ones, while fixing ALOT of those bugs still has a ways to go yet. My biggest complaint is a kind of temporary-lockup when resizing a window for the first time after starting gnome. :\

    --

  • Not bad. (Score:3)

    by MichaelH ( 3651 ) <pdxmph+sd.gmail@com> on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:22PM (#1624585) Homepage

    I used to hate Enlightenment. I thought it was way too slow, way too oriented around the eyecandy, and too surrounded by some weird fanboy culture (which wouldn't keep me from using it, but did keep me from admitting to it.)

    During my explorations of Gnome, I warmed to E a little, largely thanks to Red Hat's reasonably conservative defaults, which made it seem less intrusive and reminded me of its underlying configurability.

    Now that they've worked support for KDE into the mix, along with support for Gnome, along with some reasonably functional standalone features, I'm really impressed and pleased. This release marks Enlightenment truly coming into its own.

    A perusal of e.themes.org reveals there's still a general obsession with "industrial" themage, but that's not a real showstopper. There are also some fairly pleasant, non-headache inducing, non-urban decay invoking themes. I can even play my Run Lola Run soundtrack without feeling like a total Sprocket.

    I'll be monkeying around with the menu configs (cursed two button mouse that I never get around to replacing), but I'm pretty sure the versatility alone in regards to Gnome and KDE support will keep me as a user this time.

    Congratulations to the team. You've taken a lot of abuse and derision in the past, but the product is catching up with the vision and it's worth it.
    ------------
    Michael Hall
    mphall@cstone.nospam.net

  • e rocks but... (Score:3)

    by crackhoe ( 15434 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:23PM (#1624587)
    I'm glad to hear it's finally out. I've been using enlightenment for a good while now, being an afterstep convert. I must say though that the 15's hardly ever let me down. Maybe it was my experience of having a kind of new machine, but it seemed faster and usually more stable. I'm not *REALLY* bitching though. E rocks my world, much better than any other w/m out. Ennh, change comes and we adapt. I remember going from straight dos to os/2, I bitched that it wasn't as fast and whatnot when really the reason was that I had been engrained to think command line rocks, I don't need pictures. While I still use console in linux about 20-30 percent of the time, having a gui has kept me more productive and sane. I'll go into E 0.16.0 whining, but when I look back in a few days a little more unbiased to what I am used to, surely it will be the best.
  • Those three programs are some of the best known projects in the Open Source community. If you're looking to find out when other projects are updated, I suggest you check out freshmeat [freshmeat.net]. It's a great page that tracks just about every Open Source project out there. If /. started covering all of them, there'd be no space on the page for anything else.
  • In terms of mass acceptance of Unix in general
    as a desktop, Enlightenment is very important.
    It combines the usability, speed, and flashiness
    that users would generally look for. Best of all,
    it looks far nice than Windows.

    However, in terms of personal use, I ran
    0.15.5 for a while, but I've gone back to
    a very old standby: VTWM. It isn't flasy,
    it isn't very pretty, but it's fast, and I've
    found that I get work done better when I don't
    have all the chrome and glitz.

    Having said that, once the port is updated,
    I'm going to give 0.16 a whirl. Enlightenment
    0.15.5 has always been rock solid on FreeBSD,
    and very easy to build out of ports.

    I salute Mandrake, Rasterman, and anybody else
    working on E's excellent work. A consistent
    GUI across various Unix platforms (I've used E
    on Linux and FreeBSD; I bet it'd run on Solaris
    without any real trouble) is key to keeping
    Unix a serious contender on the desktop.

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