Here is a review of E17. “On the whole, I am very happy with the new Enlightenment. On their homepage, the Enlightenment team states “We believe your desktop should not be an eyesore. It should be functional AND beautiful.” They are doing well on both fronts.” Screenshots included.
add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ubuntu.nooms.de/ hoary/
apt-get update
apt-get install e17
enjoy
# grep ^Package /var/lib/apt/lists/ubuntu.nooms.de_hoary_Packages | grep e17
#
There doesn’t seem to be an e17 package, though there is an enlightenment package with an odd version. apt considers 0.16.999.010-0cvs20050813 < 0.16.6-3ubuntu1.
There doesn’t seem to be an e17 package, though there is an enlightenment package with an odd version. apt considers 0.16.999.010-0cvs20050813 < 0.16.6-3ubuntu1.
0.16.999.010-0cvs20050813 this is a recent snapshot from CVS. 0.16.999 is DR17 where DR stands for Development Release – e17 has not been released.
Why hoary? Where is breezy?
ok..this was really wierd but i just got it up and running and freekin WOW. talkin extreme eye candy here.anyway. I found this url:http://gfabio.blog.free.fr/index.php?2005/08/01/69-ubuntu-hoary-ins…
there is also a translation of the page. Basically to get it to work with apt you need to pin the sources in a file you make called /etc/apt/preferences. Anyway if you do it right and mind you cut the lines into the preferences file from the original, NOT the translated page it should work. The one thing you also have to do after installation is run synaptic after an update and install the new enlightenment data file.. after that i just went into a wmaker session and under “others” started an enlightenment session and it worked.. probably more luck than skill.
…but they’ve got to get a release out eventually. The good news is that even weaker machines should get some eyecandy.
I agree. I’d guess they’re waiting for good configuration utilities to be finished so that they don’t get this question 8,000 times: “How do I add an app to a menu?” If there’s a configure program they’ll only get that question 1,000 times
.
Anyway, I think I’ll switch to e17 whenever they polish it up and make a stable release. Until then, man evidence looks cool! The image viewer I already know is cool, although nothing is powerful enough to replace gqview for me.
If anyone wouldve told me years ago that a WM could match some of the big resourcing hogging dms in terms of beauty, functionality, and usability, I wouldve laughed.
Though enlightenment may not be considered a WM anymore by some, I do tip my hat off to the designers.
I believe they do not call it a WM anymore themselves.
I more or less used to keep up with the CVS head branche, but gave it up. I’ll certainly try it again when it gets final. I don’t see where the functional part is, though.
Why do I need flames or snow on my desktop?
How does this improve useability?
This just shows that once again Linux is showing itself to be a toy with no useful functionality…
Hehe, I guess the flames and snowflakes kinda look like they are waiting for a reason for existence, however these guys are just doing it for the love of it and are doing a mighty impressive job at that. I actually met Rasterman/Carsten once by chance at his flat back when he was living in Sydney (was having a little get together with a few friends). I was talking about coding with him and he casually mentioned that he wrote a window manager for Linux. When he mentioned it was Enlightenment, I was immediately interested in a demo of E17
What he showed me was impressive back then, but it’s come a long way since. It’s rare to meet real coders these days, today’s average coder is just really a script dummy. I just hope they don’t decide to recode it all again before a final release happens, as I think it would play a pretty big part in getting more people interested in Linux.
We need flames so we can burn the faggot carcases of idiotic, delusional, arrogant, annoying OSX fan boys from Canada (who are gay ) driving around in their green VW beetles.
No, this is what we call a “cool” hello world program. And you are what we call a troll.
He writes those to show off how efficient his image libraries and display libraries are. It’s a proof of concept sort of thing. I’m not sure why they leave it in the final distribution; probably something for the more geeky to have snorty laughs over.
Actually, the flame and snow modules aren’t in vanilla e17- you need to build a separate module for these and other add-on’s. But it’s cool to try them once 🙂
In order to make linux “a toy” programming has to be added in for added *FUNCTIONALITY* in order to make it work properly.
Besides, many complain about how MacOS is supposedly the “coolest” OS out there. Look at the screens and you’ll see how wrong that is.
I do agree that Enlightenment trumps the MacOS DE. It also nicely compliments MacOS with its engage bar while at the same time provides new and innovative features.
And there is more to enlightenment then having flames or snow falling in he background.
I just hope they stay the course and focus on making the “desktop shell” (as the developers call it) as best as it can be.
I think the desktop shell, being a middle ground between a DE and WM, is the best idea to come to linux and other *nix in a long time.
You sir are dead inside.
How is it that one can have a review of E17 when E17 is still in the alpha stages?
I guess using the cvs build gives a good feel as to what the enlightenment editors are aiming for. I did so for me.
Frankly i can only expect it to be better, because they could release it as is, and I would be happy
Example: Enable desktop editor mode
Then, try to disable it from the same place you enabled it – you can’t – you have to hunt through a bunch of menus
Hmmm, actually no – currently the Turn Edit Mode Off option (or whatever it’s called – I’m using the Japanese version…) is in the same menu as where you turn it on (right click on the module). It’s just at the bottom of the list of menu items, rather than the top.
This sort of stuff is trivial and can easily be changed, but I think the devs have bigger fish to fry at this stage. Rearranging menu items is probably one of the most boring things you could do in your free time – and that’s when the devs are making this, remember!
Two thumbs up for e-17 from me anyway – and two thumbs up for Laurent Laffont who made a beautiful animated background (E17 rising)
http://get-e.org/Themes/Backgrounds/index.html
“This sort of stuff is trivial and can easily be changed, but I think the devs have bigger fish to fry at this stage. Rearranging menu items is probably one of the most boring things you could do in your free time – and that’s when the devs are making this, remember! ”
Not to mention the other thing Anonymous forgot, E17 is still an ALPHA release. You learn this as soon as you start pecking around trying to figure out how to install it. I am a little tired of hearing people deride this software for lacking in features or stability when it isn’t even released yet, not even in beta.
Dead right – and I reckon for alpha software e17 is getting pretty damn good reviews!
“You learn this as soon as you start pecking around trying to figure out how to install it.”
Tell me about it.
http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/
Even with the above, getting it installed onto SuSE 9.1 is a bit of a pain.
looks pretty sweet, think I will get the ebuild and emerge this and play with it a bit.
I’ve been following the whole E17 release since high school, and I’m my third year of college now and I can honestly say that the progress they’ve made is quite astounding. I just can’t wait for them to deem a build stable enough for release. As far as the “unneccesary” eye candy is concerned, from the video I’ve seen of it, they appear to have done a far better job than MS is doing with Vista.
> There doesn’t seem to be an e17 package, though there
> is an enlightenment package with an odd version.
>apt considers 0.16.999.010-0cvs20050813 < 0.16.6-3ubuntu1.
…’cause Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it includes something called pinning (i think
) google apt.preferences for a way to tell at to consider your outside repository more important than the main one…i believe the slashdot article had a comment to this effect, but i am too lazy to look. 
“How is it that one can have a review of E17 when E17 is still in the alpha stages?”
Thank you. This should be more of a preview or an opinion of the current state of the development, but in no way should their be a review of something that has not been released, let alone finished. Then again, I am not surprised since the story was posted on a blog.
It might be very hasty to suggest that “they’ve got to get a release out eventually.” Perhaps it has become the case with projects boasting roadmaps and the like, but the E17 project has always been a project to keep an eye on, but never a project to keep your hopes up in anticipation of a release. The old quote “It will be ready when it is ready…” comes to mind, but the definition for “ready” has never been defined. Rasterman could scrap the majority of this work at any time; he is known to do just that, keep that in mind.
All I can say from the various screenshots is that it looks far from engaging to me. The UI is lacking a lot of polish and the design looks sloppy (incoherent)… It look better than E16 wich was very very ugly.
I agree. I just don’t understand why everyone thinks this is good looking? I looks almost like Swing’s Metal with gold colours added. Not to mention GTK apps (which I use a lot) look entirely out of place… I don’t get it.
I can’t imagine there will be a whole lot of program integration in Enlightenment either.
GTK-apps: simply use switch2 to switch it… Or make gnome-settings-daemon auto-start to use the gnome theme… Or, perhaps easyest, make a symlink from /usr/share/themes/default to /home/user/.MySuperGTK-theme
Myself I absolutely love e17… Thought a graphical edj-editor would be handy, but thats OK, not like I’m adding backgrounds everyday…
maybe you just dont have any taste.
there are room for everyone on the download page
Enlightenment makes gnome and kde look like road apples. Great article, can’t wait to try it.
Interestingly design seems to be, when it comes to desktop environment, dumbed down to eye-candy. Design is both the very subjective notion of aesthetics and the (slightly) less subjective notion of functionality.
E seems to lean much more towards the first category, which is why, I presume, shots of E look fundamentally so much like those of 1997 (yes, transparency works now, etc., etc.)
Throwing things like features from ion3 or quicksilver (for MAC) would make the whole thing much more interesting. But hey, if E coders enjoy it the way it is, why not…
why do I get the feeling of “sour grapes”?
The screen shots look like standard bare basic linux WM shots. BlackBox/FluxBox screens look exactly the same to me.
“We believe your desktop should not be an eyesore. It should be functional AND beautiful.”?
Must be a mistake, propably should’ve been “We believe your desktop should not be usable. It should be blinky AND flashing.”
Tell me how I can fonts on E and I’ll become a believer. Spent weeks asking around, reading the manpages, and trolling the internet. Oh, just to figure out how to change fonts. Now, that’s functional.
Tell me how I can fonts on E and I’ll become a believer. Spent weeks asking around, reading the manpages, and trolling the internet. Oh, just to figure out how to change fonts. Now, that’s functional.
1. Missing a bit of functionality does not make E not functional.
2. This is not yet a complete product, no one should expect the functionality of one.
$ enlightenment_remote -help | grep font
That should give you a clue 🙂
I have a x86_64 architecture. I gave up after it threw the libGL.so error.
its something on your system that is setup incorrectly. I’m running e17 on x86_64 right now, and so are several of the developers.
Ehem
/usr/bin ]$ file enlightenment
enlightenment: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
Works fine for me… libGL.so is from the fglrx-8-16-20 drivers and the distro is LFS-BOOK-7.0-cross-lfs-20050819
anyone use E17 in Freebsd?
today, i installed E17 via enlightenment-devel ports. How can i add new themes? I tried to copy theme files to dir $HOME/.e/e/themes, but doesn’t work.
also, anyone know how to config the tool bar items? I could not find any document in enlightenment’s website.
thx
Go here for themes, background and some docs… http://get-e.org/
About a month ago I changed over from windowmaker to e-17. First at work and then at home.
E-17 works absolutely great with dual head displays. Good hot key settings, the ability to maintain separate sets of virtual desktops on each head, yet still the ability to drag inbetween. And full screening an app only full screens it on the head, not both.
While it’s not perfect, I find it more useable for my use patterns than anything else I’ve tried yet. And it’s not a hog like gnome/kde.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if it’s functional, or if it’s ready for the desktop, or if the default fonts/background/theme isn’t great, or if the eye-candy is distracting. There’s other projects that have a strong focus on appeasing these concerns release cycle after release cycle. But they don’t come close to what E17 is after. It’s all the stuff that you can’t see in the screenshot or read in a blog article that is what really matters. Go to the Enlightenment website and click on those links on the left-hand side. Read what Edje or Emotion or Epeg do, and show me another project on the planet, free or otherwise, that makes the development and delivery of rich multimedia desktop applications so easy and efficient. Read about how EVAS does OpenGL acceleration in software and can render to anything–years ahead of any X.org project.
The snowflakes are just a hint of what’s to come, and it will beat the pants of Luminosity on fast and slow machines alike.
And it looks like the stable release is still a year away anyway, which leaves plenty of time to fix all the complaints from the peanut gallery.
i used enlightenment back in 2k sometime and didn’t really know what to do with it and abandoned it rather quickly. but E17 looks pretty rockin’ i’ll have to try it out when it releases.
so i don’t really keep up with e17 developement (other than the occasionally trial from the Arch’s e-cvs repo).
but on of the nice things about e16 was the dozen odd border styles you could switch to (i tend to have an xterm and an xffm in pager/right pager style on the edges of the screen) and window grouping was cool, as was program screenshots in pager/icon box (well that was more eyecandy then useful to me).
so basically has anyone been following the mailing lists enough to know if any of the e16 stuff will make it’s way to e17 eventually?
In the TODO file for e (the closest thing to a roadmap), there is an item that says something like “go through all the e16 features, and copy / re-implement the most useful ones in e17”.
I also liked the e16 border styles now that you mention it… but got used to living without them. Various border functionality has been added in recent months, but I don’t see anything like this yet.
I don’t know about the window grouping, but as for the screenshots in the pager – you can forget about that, I think I read they weren’t going to do it because of the hacky nature of scanning the screen images…
Anyway – if you want to see certain e16 features in e17 you should drop a line to the e-users mailing list ([email protected]), and let them know.
I can vouch that various border styles will eventually be added. (If no one else does, I’ll get to it when I have some time…)
I’m not sure what the current concensus on doing pager mini-screenies is. I used to like them, but I prefer the current way that shows the application’s icon (which conveys alot more info to me than “hmm, that window is white and has text in it…”
(Although, if we had mini-screenshots, there isn’t any reason we couldn’t overlay the icon also…)
Window grouping (and ‘gluing’) is definitely on the books.
—
rephorm
http://linux-blog.org/uploads/e17sky.png
Wow, very readable terminal!
It is cool to show to your friends, sure, but I hope they do not work for hours with that (I am certain people with eye-candy desktops that actually hurt the eyes do not really work with their computers).
Otherwise, Enlightenment seems to be a cool project with good developers. Too bad they focus on bells and whistles
you sir, are a troll
first, transparent terminals are a hack and not supported on E17, because they use fake transparency
second, no one asks you to use a translucent terminal.
in fact, default e17 ships with pretty much no translucent stuff beside the pager
what theses things allow though, are the nice little watch on your desktop, which is not an ugly square, same goes for any widget in the ui. this is usefull.
Probably E17 won’t ever be a popular desktop, not even on Linux only machines, but god, it clearly shows that all “X is slow” statements are crap, X (and Linux desktop) could be lightening fast if used well. Let’s hope that with QT4 and KDE4 we will get something at least similar, and I will be an happy geek
no, it is fast because evas avoid most X slow paths and reimplement it by using caerfully optimized graphcs lib. X used only for put/get rectangle pixel arrays w/o pixel format change.
last time i used it (a couple of months back) the drop shadows for windows would only display on the desktop, not when windows overlap, kind of pointless really … have they fixed that yet?
Anyway i stick with Gnome, with Cairo (and Luminocity in the future) i think we can expect some really excelent eyecandy at least on par with e17 – and then i will have both, a powerful functional DE with eyecandy.
A few months back I was on IRC, and raster noted that dropshadow as it stands is done as far as is technically possible under the limitations he is placing on e17
That is, he’s not going to make assumptions about e17 users all having special X extensions installed – without which it isn’t possible to do dropshadows on top of windows.
Given that e17 is designed to run even on older hardware, this is a fair decision (and I don’t have any X extensions installed here myself
From what I understand, the performance of those extensions sucks right now anyway, unless you have certain nvidia hardware…
At least, I think this is the situation for e17 anyway – I think he has plans to add support for X extensions as well in e18, once the related hardware and software has proliferated and come up to speed.
So in the meantime, you’ll just have to pretend that your windows are all thinner than paper, stacked right on top of each other, a few millimetres above your desktop background (^_^)
It’s not so bad!
From a usability point of view drop shadows that do not show on overlapping windows are pointless imho (and it looks odd too). I don’t know, maybe it is just me, but it seems that in terms of “bling” Enlightenment, which was always ahead of the game in that area, seems to be overtaken by Gnome and KDE, especially considering that this is still ALPHA and no release date set. KDE4 is only a year and a half away (I know for the more impatient ones that seems ages) and to judge from the various projects and discussions it is seriously going to rock in terms of cleaning up the UI, features and eye candy. Gnome 2.12 will already use Cairo and it will be only a matter of time when we see the first themes utilising that.
That was my whole argument, imo (and i might be wrong) Gnome / KDE will not only outstrip E in terms of integration and functionality, but also in terms of eye-candy and if the Hardware is not really, really old , KDE and Gnome work fine, albeit slow. (I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop, 300 MHz and 128 MB Ram and it worked, although slow)
If you want to test out E17 from CVS on Gentoo, checkout this Howto.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_emerge_e17
Downloadin it now….
from what i have read and looking at the code samples
it looks like they have made it relatively easy to
create applets, little Eapps which have access to common desktop functionality .e.g multimedia,sound,video(xine is the backend)…
KDE ( i am kde user ,started last week 🙂 )
and Gnome are still quite “thick”. I am always intimidated by the different APIs they have to do certain things. E17 looks different, there seems to be thin layer separating the core libraries and desktop functionality being made accessible to developers …
hopefully it makes it easy to customize ( or brand ).
I look forward to E17.
i agree with what you say. i just thought i should say that 🙂
there is something different about the E17 project,
something special that many people seem to be missing.Go to the E17 website and have look at what they are aiming for and how they are approaching it.
so how will firefox-gtk2 look in E? not trying to be a smart ass, seriously asking how other app environments are supported. also, are there apis for building apps in (lang of choice)?
i like what i see, but as with kde and gnome, there is more than just the desktop environment to consider
so how will firefox-gtk2 look in E?
It looks a lot like the gtk2 applications in this.
http://enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/Screenshots/DR17_User_Screen…
not trying to be a smart ass, seriously asking how other app environments are supported. also, are there apis for building apps in (lang of choice)?
Yes you are. If you hadn’t, you had sufed over to enlightenment.org and checked the answears to those questions for yourself.
not trying to be a smart ass, seriously asking how other app environments are supported. also, are there apis for building apps in (lang of choice)?
Yes you are. If you hadn’t, you had sufed over to enlightenment.org and checked the answears to those questions for yourself.
This is a forum you know, where people discuss and ask questions…
Yeah i could go and look it up, but since it might be of interest to someone else than me, please spare me the time if you acctually know the answer to that question and do what this thread is intended for. Enlighten us.