Elive is a Live CD featuring Enlightenment as the only window manager (and desktop shell too). Its version 0.1 was mostly an alpha release, and while E16 ran fine, E17 was severely broken in many aspects. Elive 0.3 fixes most of those problems and presents E17 at a point where it's perfectly usable for the day-to-day desktop. Read the review here. Update: screenshots.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
Enlightenment 0.17 will become the most advanced DE of this time; performance-wise, KDE and Gnome and even XFCE are biting to dust-- and that's without all the eye-candy that E17 is delivering.
I've tested E17 a few months back when I compiled it from source, and I was amazed at how all the eye-candy did not slow my system down at all (and the specs of my x86 are anything but royal, an AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 512 MBRAM and a Ati Radeon 9000 w/ 128MB RAM).
A few days ago I tried the livecd on Qemu, and even though it was a lot slower, I was still amazed at the performance; seeing the virtual machine of Qemu was set to 128MBRAM.
Astonoshing work by Rasterman & Co. Outcoding the two biggest DEs in the UNIX world (KDE / Gnome), not a small feat.
Member since:2005-07-22
Member since:2005-07-08
I can't imagine how you run anything in 128MB of RAM. I just rebooted for the first time in a couple months because all of my memory (256MB) and all of my swap (512MB) were entirely consumed. Now let's take a look at my RSS numbers. The top 3 are Firefox, X, and Thunderbird in that order, taking up 108 MB in total. Comparitively, GNOME is not memory intensive. The only major problem I notice is about 56 MB used by my modest array of panel applets (weather, battery, system monitor, clock, and volume). Gnome-terminal is pretty heavy, but not too bad.
The problem isn't the desktop environments: it's Firefox, Thunderbird, and X. Evolution is way more memory hungry than Thunderbird. Epiphany consumes about 25% less than Firefox.
Linux systems are developing a bulging memory problem, albeit not as bad as MacOSX or Windows Vista. I remember when Phoenix really was a fast, memory efficient browser. What happened?
Member since:2005-07-06
I am not saying that E17 does not look cool but to say that they are "outcoding the two biggest DE's" is saying a bit much. E17 is NOT a DE and it does not have nearly the features of KDE/Gnome. The way I see E17 is that it is a functioning proof of concept but not necessarily going to give KDE and/or Gnome a run for their money.
Member since:2005-07-08
"The way I see E17 is that it is a functioning proof of concept but not necessarily going to give KDE and/or Gnome a run for their money."
If you had said "...doesn't necessarily give...," I might agree. But it IS "going to give" the big DE's a run for their money. They ARE "outcoding the two biggest DE's." There's no way you could convince me otherwise.
I say this all this all the time, and I feel like a broken record: It's not about what you see in the screenshots. It's about the raw power and elegance of the EFL. Qt can't match this and GTK+ certainly can't.
Member since:2005-06-30
Having "raw power and elegance" doesn't matter if nobody uses it. Without applications and integration, E17 is going to stay an interesting tool for nerds, far from giving the big DEs a run for their money. I just gave it a try. The design is not my cup of tea, but it's still visually appealing. There are some interesting concepts, but nothing to start up a revolution. Right now, the lack of programs designed for E17 makes you use apps relying on QT or GTK+. There goes a big part of the optimisations.
Note that I am not saying they are wasting their times. I would definitely like to see more developers that really cares about details like performance and memory consumption like Rasterman. Yet, I don't expect it will make an huge impact, judging by all the stuff done by fd.o that was already implemented a while ago by the E-team...
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Yeah right !!! First Enlightenment is not a DE. Secondly Enlightenment has nowhere near the feartures and integration that Gnome or KDE have. Thirdly the eyecandy of enlightenment is really not that impressive (fake shadows anyone ?), I have installed it and really don't understand what all the fuss was about. Fourthly your specs ... well any Linux DE feels snappy on that. I am running Gnome 2.10 very happily on a PIII 800 Mhz, 256 MB Ram and 8MB Graphics.
Within a year KDE and Gnome will outshine Enlightenment in terms of eyecandy anyway (Cairo /Arthur/Luminocity), whilst at the same time improving overall performance.
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You're right but Gnome and KDE still need some code tuning.
If I'm not wrong, the simple battery applet in Gnome (Ubuntu) is using as much as 20MB of RAM.
This is a little less than the total amount of memory used by OS4 on the Amiga after boot.
E17 is going to what is really needed for desktop on Linux : a nice and light desktop environment.
Anyway, choice is synonym of freedom and initiator of evolution.
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I didn't mean to sound too critical of enlightenment at all ... sorry if i did. Sure E is great as a lighteight Windowmanager and choice is good. It just winds me up if people make comments like "E totally outcoding Gnome/KDE" and that "E is the best DE for Linux", especially when it comes from one of the editors of OSNews. Not only is is factually wrong, it is also very immature and does not reflect very well on the quality of editors.
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2005-07-09
and i like it alot the E17 desktop really is nice, and works there are a few niggles but hey this is 0.3 not 1.3 and little teething troubles are bound to be there. i hope Thanamantis and crew keep up the good work, this is a beautiful desktop.
i'll keep my eyes on this release as I think it may go far
just my 2c worth
Member since:
2005-06-29
Yes, it's a nice, fast working DE. Hope they will release it someday. It still won't be as succesful as KDE from the start, because it lack applications that uses it's framework. I wonder how the future desktops would handle thier engines. I mean, we have KDE4.0, Gnome 3 and now E17, all 3D enabled.
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Member since:2005-06-29
I've followed E17 for a while but wasn't daring enough to build it from source myself. (I'll wait for the FreeBSD port)
It exists in FreeBSD port, check here http://www.freshports.org/x11-wm/enlightenment-devel/ .. Although, it doesn't has everything as what it's in the Elive but it still should give you good enough to startup in E17 and play around with it.
Member since:2005-07-06
And that loud 
Member since:
2005-07-06
its good to see e17 getting more attention. i used it for 3 months everyday and i loved it. but personally i got tired of recompiling every week. i setup e17 with opengl rendering enabled and xgl. it was ok a little laggy on my hardware sony vaio vgn-u70 but i didn't mind. i am happily using xfce4 again but i have gotten used to focus following the mouse d;-}
Member since:2005-07-06
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The enlightenment_remote command can be used to tweak a large amount of the E17 settings, such as shade speed, key bindings, edge resistance, background, etc. Just run the command without any args to get a listing of what it can do. I have also found it very helpful to have a shell script that runs enlightenment_remote and sets up my E17 environment to my liking. Because sometimes after an update and rebuild all those settings get lost and its nice to get them all back by running the one script.
Member since:2005-07-06
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It's not that those options are command line only. There just hasn't been a complete GUI written for all the optoins. There are a few GUI configuration programs but most of the options are changed at the command line for now. Give it some time and you will be able to configure the enviroment from a GUI(s), they just have to be written first.
Member since:2005-06-29
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2005-07-06
E17 gonna rock the house, true. But is that only me, or others also think the current E logo sucks really? I absolutely loved the "can opener" E logo used until 2000 or so. On the other side, the current E logo really makes me shiver 
As the release date is nowhere on the horizon for E17, I hope it gets a chance for a change..
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2005-07-06
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Most of them were taken from NeXT... Things like applications not bound to windows... Icons that suck in the whole application.
The bottom bar is just a launcher by default I think. But I think you can configure it to keep track of running apps? I've used an e app, I think engage, as a OS X like dock before (it was the most stable one I'd ever used too).
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
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Looks very good the desktop.As a matter of fact i'm writing this on elive from within qemu.Allthough a bit slow because i simply issued:"qemu -cdrom elive.iso",without the accelerator module,(i wonder how elive will run inside vmware).Nevertheless i kind of like the E17 desktop,clean and beautifull.I think i'm going to keep it besides fluxbox.
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I've been using E-17 on my gentoo system now for a couple of months. I'd tried it before then, but it wasn't stable enough. This last time it's been great, it'll run for a couple of weeks stably. I had been using windowmaker.
Some comments:
- I really like the way it handles dual heads.
- I wish I had a hot key to throw the mouse over to the other head. (at least there's decent hotkey support now)
- I wish there was the ability to save current workspace.
I am a tad perplexed about why they decided to use a binary format for the files. It's not like reading & parsing off of disk is slow...
Member since:
2005-06-29
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Thanks for elive. It's a Desktop Linux that includes the programs I use most often . Even a Deb distro with Mplayer! I ended up building a 2.6.13 kernel to get ndiswrapper working with my SMC USB wireless device. Have no Idea how to make larger desktop fonts the defaults are too small.
On the other side : With the recent conversation on X ,fragmention etc ---Is E17 a window manager or more?
Member since:2005-07-08
"On the other side : With the recent conversation on X ,fragmention etc ---Is E17 a window manager or more?"
That's a good question. EVAS is designed to render to anything, be it a framebuffer in main or video memory, Cairo (and any of its backends), GL, and Qtopia. Possibly more. E17 cannot probe the video hardware, though, so it needs something. This is where the issues Jon Smirl raised come into play. There is massive confusion about what (if any) hardware drivers should be implemented in userspace by the X server. This derives from X being cross-platform and running on systems that don't have the same level of kernel support that Linux provides.
E17 does not confuse the issues surrounding X. However, it was designed making no assumptions about the future viability of X or what sorts of capabilities it might provide. A lot of people are frustrated with X right now. It isn't necessarily that Xorg or freedesktop.org aren't moving in the right direction, it's that the process of coming out of the dark ages of XFree86 doesn't necessarily make for rapid strides in development. With X11R7, we are approaching the rennaissance of the free software desktop. The modular tree is like the moveable-type printing press in this analogy.
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2005-07-06
I ran this via live cd on my P2 300 mhz celeron and holy crap.... it was fast, I am impressed. I can run a KDE and Gnome from a hd install ok but they are sloooooow via live cd, e17 was even fast via live cd, I think I may very well install this on my P2 just because it looks so nice, is easy to use, and runs fast.
with Qt and GTK so prominent I don't know how fast this will saturate the *nix market but e17 is very impressive and I with all this innovation I really hope they take up a decent portion of the *nix market share..... e17 can easily compete with MS and Mac.
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I use OS X every day, but Elive doesn't really strike me as a clone at all.
Similarities? It has a dock. Of couse, so did Afterstep. The dock isn't unique to Mac.
Damn, these fonts look nice. I'm typing this from the live CD. Normally, I'm not a big eye candy fan. But this runs quite snappily. Nice job.
Member since:
2005-08-28
Ok, so I'm typing this in Firefox on Elive now. I notice that it's not like SLAX or Knoppix or any of the other dedicated LiveCDs I've tried (which have been mostly Knoppix derivatives). The bootscreen brings back old memories of the first liveCD I ever tried, a SuSE 8.0 Live CD... or maybe, the Gentoo install CDs. It's got a progress bar, and a bootscreen with an actual menu of presets to make it easier on you.
It is FAST. Faster than KDE on Gentoo. Faster than XFCE on Gentoo. Faster than Windows XP. Firefox feels like Opera, (I'd just today been admiring how the free copy of Opera I picked up last week was really fast compared to Firefox) Somehow Firefox is also rendering Flash animations like the one on this page so smoothly I don't notice any sort of lag at all. And I'm now noticing there's less of a delay before the letters I type show up on the screen. I didn't even realize there WAS a lag until now.
There was about one minute of lag during which I didn't think my mouse was clicking and I ended up with 8 elive terminals and 6 instances of Firefox... but since then it's been fast.
Let me try moving this screen around and see what happens....
Ok, I tried Enlightenment a long time ago, and had forgotten how they link the desktops. I ended up on another desktop. Anyway, moving the window around was fast, though there was tearing and it kept trying to dock on the sides.
I should mention that it crashed when I tried to change to the Enlightenment theme, from the Elive theme, and in this one there's more tearing (or it's more noticeable). I like the Elive theme better.
Anyway. My system (Dell Inspiron 8500, 2.5 GhZ Pentium 4-M with 512 MB RAM and nVidia GeForce Ti 4200 Go) has NEVER felt this fast, and this is from a Live CD. With eye candy.
I think I have to see if I can get it to run at 1920x1200 so I can do a real comparison. I also need to figure out how to get Firefox back in the dock, because I accidentally dragged it out during that first minute there...
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Yep, the GTK-theme used for the screenshots is not the finest of all. On gnome-look.org, you'll find some themes for GTK that are more or less optimized for the e-themes.
Also, take a look at these (still not the most beautiful themes, but looking better):
http://kwh.kernow-gb.com/~bvc/theme/screenshots/E17-Smooth_sharp_4_...
http://kwh.kernow-gb.com/~bvc/theme/screenshots/E17-Smooth_blue-eye...
For e-themes:
http://get-e.org/Themes/E17/index.html
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2005-08-28
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2005-07-11
Live CDs are perfect for previewing the latest technology. Evolution 0.17 seems to be heading for the right direction. It actually makes quite an attractive desktop -- something one couldn't say of 0.16.
Still, for daily use I prefer a desktop that stays out of the way. While you're working with applications, you don't want the kind of desktop that keeps screaming: "Hey, look at me! I can do stunts!"
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E17 is really exiting. All the eyecandy they have managed to do with evas/e17, completely without GPU acceleration, is amazing. The xorg guys are struggeling with their acceleration architectures to get render reasonably fast but evas/e17 can do it already. And it doesen't even hog your CPU!
It's still a bit rough around the edges though.
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Haha I'm posting this from my te2000 toshy laptop right now, running off the Elive Cd, It rocks!
BTW it's not like OSX it's very diffrent animal, it has BeOS like speed and it does not feel like BeOS.
It has it's own feel.
This is what Linux should be.
Try it, it is worth the download.
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Quoting Wrawrat>
"Without applications and integration, E17 is going to stay an interesting tool for nerds"
I beg to differ, I'm no nerd, and I'm no geek.
Gimp and Audio tools work fine I don't get your point.
I don't see Windows users porting the whole Gnome and KDE UI over just to run Gimp on windows, only the libraries are needed. Less is more!
With E16/E17 the programs they feel FASTER. Stuff the theory on integration it doesn’t work for raw speed.
Quoting Wrawrat>
"Right now, the lack of programs designed for E17 makes you use apps relying on QT or GTK+"
Oh Der! it's a Desktop environment to run applications,
Just because Gnome and KDE jump off a cliff and kill themselves it doesn't mean they are models to follow. We are talking users here and raw speed and to hell with Gnome and KDE theory desktop politics. That's what I get when using Elive.
