The Elive project has released what will probably become Elive 0.4. “Elive 0.4 will be officially released next week, but you can download and try the PRE release if you want, this PRE release will be just the same as 0.4 Release if there’s no problems with it.” Elive is the live CD which aims to bring the latest and greatest of E16/E17 to your desktop with minimum hassle. The default window manager is Enlightenment 16.8, but of course Enlightenment 17 is also included, as well as the EFL libraries and most of the applications made on top of these libraries.
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-00.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-01.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-02.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-03.avi
[I posted this in the prevoius Enlightenment story as well, but it’s just as applicable here]
Worth mentioning too that those videos are a year old now – the real thing has come quite a lot further than what we see in those videos 🙂
It looks like OSNews has a fixation for the enlightment project. It seems that the editors simply can’t say no to any story that involves the enlightment project, one way or the other.
Its an eye candy! But where does it stands in front of usability in front of KDE, GNome? Having eye candy is not enough anymore specially if you look at the latest KDE & GNome shots you will feel they also have superb look & feel.
If you are look for light weight desktop then icewm,blackbox,WMaker is ment for that!
Yah but it could be blend of lightweigh/eye candy. Anyway nice screenshots!
I’ve been using DR17 on my Arch Linux box for about a week now (just for fun). The eye candy is wonderful and it’s pretty responsive all things considered. As far as functionality goes there are certain things that aren’t working for me (like getting the applications to stay in the dock) but I’m convinced it’s due more to the current build I’m using than a current limitation.
Overall I’m really impressed with DR17. Enough so that I’m willing to download the ISO and see what’s different between my current setup and the one on the eLive CD.
Does it do all that Gnome/KDE do? No. But then again that’s certainly not the E team’s objective.
I think that objective is lost on many. Lots of people may expect a full DE with more features and bloat than you can shake a stick at, rather than trying it for what it is, and using the other DEs for what they may have (since they can run together).
The current graphics are a bit over the top, but I’m sure themes will begin dealing with that soon (after all, they need to release with something eye-catching).
E17 doesn’t have to be run separately from Gnome. In fact, it fits in quite beautifully as a replacement for the horrible Metacity window manager that Gnome uses as its default. See:
http://joekiser.theunixplace.com/20060210.png
So I can have the features of a Gnome desktop with an OpenGL rendered windowmanager that almost rivals OSX in terms of aesthetic beauty. Not bad for a program someone in another thread described as something “people stopped wanting.”
It’s obvious that you have never actually tried E17 and are making assumptions based entirely on appearance alone. It’s not just about the eye candy it’s about an entirely different way of using your dekstop that not even OSX can match. I use E17 daily on 3 workstations and now it’s very difficult to go back to anything that even remotely resembles the tired, old, outdated and entirely unintuitive win32 desktop UI style. You really need to try E17 with an open mind and the only thing you should expect is something different than what you’re accustomed to.
Edited 2006-02-11 15:53
Thanks for bringing us this great project.
I did not manage to get my Wireless LinkSys card
running on it yet but for the rest SuperB!
btw. You can install E-live to your harddrive, i have done it a couple of times without any problems.
Keep up the great work, and thanks to Rasterman for bringing up Eddie, and E-17.
Have to say, these guys are an example of one of the great things about open source. They are real enthusiasts, and its a great piece of work from a very small number of people. I wouldn’t install it for my grandmother, but its a real thing of beauty. Congratulations to them.
I’ve looked through the enlightment and the elive websites but cannot find a list of HW requirements for this wm, only libs listed. It looks like it’d need some sort of 3D card to render some of that, so I’m assuming it needs one. Will this thing run ok on my ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra based box? or is this something better suited for my Matrox g400 and nVidia FX5700 based boxes?
My Ati Radeon 9000 128MB DDR-RAM (on a 1400Mhz Athlon/512MBRAM) runs it more than fine. It’s that my PII-400 only has 64MBRAM at the moment, else I’d try it there too (it has a really old Matrox Millenium II with a whopping 8 MB of RAM).
It runs fine on my Celeron 700 with 184MB of RAM. Although, changing module configurations in this build pretty consistently segfaults it; which it handles impeccably (just reloads, much like Windows explorer does).
It really is quite efficient for a pretty thing. I think the default gold theme is pretty tasking though, but that’s not default in elive. Their default is a lot easier on the eyes.
It runs acceptably (in my book) on a Pentium II-333 Mhz machine, with 128 MB RAM and a Cirrus Logic video card with who knows how little memory…
And I’d like to quote them here: http://www.enlightenment.org/Main/FAQs/
Why is there so much bloat in E?
…These days, E could be considered one of the lighter environments out there, and will happily run on old pentium, or pre-G3 PPC class hardware. One of our developers does performance testing on a 100MHz pentium to make sure that E is light and fast.
As for KDE and Gnome…
Why are you redoing a lot of work being done in freedesktop.org?
We’re not. The freedesktop.org group was formed to specify ways that applications and libraries can communicate through X. We are making use of these standards where ever it is technically reasonable. In fact, our abstractions may help the freedesktop.org group, as standards groups often require at least 2 separate implementations of a proposal before it is accepted as a standard.
Nope, you do not need fancy 3D cards to use e17, I’m running it on a 3.5 year old stock Fujitsu laptop (Celeron 1.06Ghz, 256Mb RAM, basic video card).
Of course, if you want to go crazy and use heavily animated backgrounds etc then you’ll need some better hardware than this to cope.
I’ve been running E17 for 7-8 months on an IBM Thinkpad T21 with a P3-850MHz processor, 384Mb RAM and only 8 — yes 8! — Mb of video RAM. It’s generally far more responsive than KDE or Gnome, a little more responsive than XFCE4.x, and a bit less responsive than the *box window managers. It works fine, perfectly usable.
I beg to not differ…
That is to say, I concur.
I had it running on a 700mhz T20… Way more responsive than GNOME. Way more. It even ran better than may mac…
hold up!
I am definitely pulling that old 20-gig out and installing e17 on it (on my mac). I needed to lean to code using EVAS anyway…
Elive will make it easy for people to try out Enlightment. I tried it just a few days ago.
E16 is nice, but E17 is just awesome. A functional, uncluttered desktop, fast WM, uses a desktop right-click menu for accessing apps, and you can use another DE behind it. Oh yeah, and it doesn’t require a bar.
Then again, I’m heavily biased against most any bar, because they just get cluttered, and use space ineffectively. An older shot of my Windows desktop, which until recently, has been unmatched in another OS:
http://www.doddstech.com/desktop_05_6_11.jpg
KDE and Gnome have nice apps, but for WM and DE…I’ll stay away.
ELive looks great, the performance is a lot better than I expected. On my eMachines Athlon XP 2800+, 512MB ram, with an S3 Unichrome chipset, there was no slow down with virtually all the eye-candy maxed. The Unichrome lacks any OpenGL support. Have to say though, the drop shadows are a bit strange because they only show on the desktop, there is no shadow on top of any windows in the background. Also, when I click on an icon on the bottom of the screen there is no indication that anything is actually happening.
Excellent work though.
Edited 2006-02-12 03:27
I last tried E17 six months ago on my FreeBSD box. It’s an old machine, a PIII with 896MB of RAM and a GeForce FX5200. I found E17 to be stable enough and fast enough to be used as my main window manager back then. I really liked a combination of KDE and E17.
Here’s a screenshot of my desktop at the time: http://www.deviantart.com/view/22292239/
The great thing about *nix is that you can mix and match everything and customise to your heart’s content. The flip side is that integration isn’t all that great when you do that. Doesn’t matter much if you are a command line junkie though