Submitted by “The performance of desktop computers increases year by year. This gives the programmers great opportunities to further improve the desktop experience of the users. However, what should you do when you have an old computer that is not capable of running the latest and hottest software? How can you benefit from the great software that is X.org when you can’t run a desktop that takes advantage of its best features? No need for upgrading your PC, when you can have a usable alternative with the current one. Let me introduce you to Enlightenment E17 – the window manager with minimal hardware requirements that may amaze you.”
… but I can’t find the license for e17.
That sudden paragraph devoted to attacking ten-year-old Windows releases is a surprise, though… and the article seems a bit fannish, without much hard information. It sure looks nice, though.
I think what he was meaning by that was E17 although classed as alpha grade, is just as stable as Windows 98 or ME. And they have had 10 years of development behind them.
I personally disagree, Win98 was very stable for me, but E17 is as unstable as WinME.
Things are looking good for this desktop though.
Seems like E17 has been in development for 10 years too :/
not a single line on the underlying technology, not a line on EFM (e17 file manager), not a line on some great tools Enlightenment has brought (eterm, esd, the amiga’s screen implementation (different from virtual desktop), not a line on problem one would expect running e17 in conjuction of nautilus or kfm (I did with e16 ran my desktop with gnome and enlightnement), not a line on windows maker docklet support (it works fine with e16 so does it with e17), not a line of the cpu time consummed by the panel (it zooms all the screen and displayed little icons of windows, which you can move directly on the pnael in order to make them swith to anotehr screen or virtual screen)
it would have been cool to compare the eyecandy of e17 with the one from a genuine ubuntu +xgl+compiz
just tell us if you can make e17 use openGL or if Rasterman still manages to be faster with regular x11 system call (remember this thread on slashdot ? amazing
I start to be fed up with all these “COol I managed to install something on my distro” articles, man I want real news, real debate, real information.
Osnews used to be really cool and no matter how hard eugenia has been bashed she was great for in depth reviewing…
Djamé
Well since you seem to have a line on exactly what would make a “great” e17 article, at least in your opinion, we can expect your article real soon now right?
I’m not the biggest fan of these kinds of rants either but your reply isn’t any better. I really hate this “if you know what’s wrong with X, you’ll have to be able to make a better X” fallacy.
I can point out dozens of flaws in Vista without being able to write a better OS.
I can review games and movies without being either a game designer or a producer.
I can tell you whether a football player (soccer, whatever) is crap without being able to play in the Premier League.
Did I say anything about the OP reqriting e17? I don’t remember saying that and it sure as heck isn’t what I’m reading. Now if he wants to bitch about the article then yes, I think we should expect him to write one of his own or silently ignore this one.
Okay, Enlightenment is released under the BSD license, not a copyleft license.
So while they have released the sources, with all the attendant issues, they’re at least being (dare I say it?) enlightened about it.
The BSD-license _is_ a copyleft license. A “weak” one, but none the less still copyleft. I prefer the MIT-license, since it’s even more permissive and best of all – it’s even shorter
“A “weak” one, but none the less still copyleft”
Or “strong”, depending on your point of view
Yes, of course. That’s why I used these -> “”
Personally I think it depends on your intentions with a given software solution whether or not it’s a strong or weak copyleft. Of course – such a pragmatique view is booring, but I’m boring anyway
Great software and x.org in the same sentence?
he must be joking…
I used to run e-0.17 pretty exclusively all over on my machines.
But last fall I started to notice problems with “rot”, ie desktop switching would become more and more painfully slow with visible redraws the longer the desktop was running.
I switched my primary desktop back to windowmaker (after a year or two haitus) and the desktop redraws were blazing fast again. I got a hold of another 256M ram and switched my wife over to using xfce4 which now feels amazingly complete (again compared to 2 years ago) and seems to integrate very nicely with AIGLX.
I guess one of these days I might try enlightenment again to see how far it’s gone. It’s resource usage is pretty amazingly low.
Raster just needs to sometimes shoot for a release sometimes. It’s not a bad idea to shift gears between development and “get something released” mode. Sometimes better progress can be made doing that.
Raster just needs to sometimes shoot for a release sometimes. It’s not a bad idea to shift gears between development and “get something released” mode. Sometimes better progress can be made doing that.
Rasterman is a wizard. He’s been single-handedly producing accelerated canvas code on top of X11 that has been blowing away competing solutions for years. But now we have the GLX texture from pixmap and composite extensions that add acceleration and canvases directly into X11. His failure to release his code and collaborate with other desktop environments to produce a de-facto standard drawing engine has prompted more collaborative efforts to step up. They might not consist of true wizards like Rasterman, but one David Reveman and some other pretty damn good coders will eventually rise to his lofty level and make desktop acceleration a reality for a much broader audience.
The fatal flaw of the EFL is that they were never meant to be integrated into KDE or GNOME. If Rasterman had made it his goal to develop a next-generation drawing engine for these desktop environments, then perhaps we would have arrived at our present state-of-the-art a couple years ago. But Compiz has become that drawing engine. It’s cross-environment, it pushes code down into X11 where appropriate, and it leverages whatever native acceleration your hardware (and driver) supports. It will make the EFL irrelevant unless you happen to be running E17.
In September 2005, before Composite was usably stable and before Compiz existed, I wrote the following on these very forums:
E17 is going to give the big DE’s a run for their money. Rasterman is outcoding the two biggest DEs. There’s no way you could convince me otherwise. 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.
Well, I guess I didn’t fully appreciate that fact that KDE and GNOME were getting out-coded mostly because they weren’t really trying. EFL was ahead of its time, and Compiz got going just a little bit late IMHO. And I dare say that Qt4 has put a stake through my argument about the elegance of the EFL.
Edited 2007-03-05 03:34
You are SOO right. When looking through E17 a few years ago, I had the same idea you had – this might be the future. But they didn’t have the manpower to pull it really off, got stuck in this ‘preview’ state – and by not cooperating with one of the other DE’s, they lost….
I was looking at the Enlightenment specs. and thinking that this is not that different from XFCE4’s desktop with its emphasis on being ‘lightweight’.
There is an issue with this lightweight approach to desktops. Take my current XFCE4 setup for example. I am running Open Office, Rythmbox, XFCE Terminal, Thunar file manager, and Mozilla’s Seamonkey browser. I am using 360 MB of RAM to run my desktop on a system of 750 MB’s.
The whole lightweight approach is limited by what you need to be running in terms of applications. The GUI programs are RAM hogs and are mostly not lightweight applications. I recently logged into Gnome and my memory use went up 50 MB. Eh, so it uses slightly more memory than XFCE4. There is the simple reality that running today’s modern GUI intensive desktop applications will take a lot of memory and a decent CPU. I get by with 750 MB RAM on an older Athlon 1.3 Gig Hz chip. I just think it is funny how the screenshots for all the alternative lightweight desktops show Firefox and GTK applications running. There is nothing lightweight about these applications at all. The irony is that if you are not a GUI based person and are running just a server you wouldn’t need a desktop to begin with. So you save 50 MB’s while Firefox bloats from 75 MB at startup to 200 MB by the end of the day. See what I mean?
Even though I’m sympathetic to Enlightenment and to all the effort they put on making it fatless, I have to agree with you, looks like all the amazing job they do is thrown away by the big memory hog some browsers became. I think it is time to go back to links or lynx CLI browsers. 😉
I agree… although sometimes, running a light desktop shell like e17 is the only way to free system resources enough on a old machine so you CAN run firefox, or even openoffice.
there is another way: running vmware + win98, IE & MS-office
also… after seeing this video presentation by rater (http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/101), I can’t see why the philosophy of E can’t be applied to other types of applications like web browser and office suite. BTW, E has a file manager already, which comes with no extra ram or cpu requirement.
and for todays use, E + Opera makes a great combination on a low spec pc, assuming that you don’t use a bunch of web 2.0 apps which will raise your browser RAM usage to the roof!
My thoughts exactly. One of the reasons for my switch to Linux was (aside from being free, of course) E17. It looked so nice, I just had to try it
But then I did, and as much as I liked it, I just couldn’t see where it was heading, or rather, WHEN it will arrive there.
And as for “lightweight environment”: I found that it does not really matter THAT much. Every application uses either Qt or GTK anyway, so there goes any attempt at being lightweight on the Linux desktop… Of course, I would never use Gnome with Nautilus handling the desktop on my laptop, but aside from that, it’s really all the same.
Even GNOME with Nautilus is pretty cheap nowadays. The big DEs have mostly figured out where they hog memory and have begun to address these issues. Nautilus takes 13MB on my system, just barely edging out the weather applet.
If you really like your “lightweight” desktop, then go for it. But if your reasoning is that you want a lightweight desktop, then either you’re trying to make do with 256MB of RAM, or you’re kidding yourself.
Even GNOME with Nautilus is pretty cheap nowadays. The big DEs have mostly figured out where they hog memory and have begun to address these issues. Nautilus takes 13MB on my system, just barely edging out the weather applet.
If you really like your “lightweight” desktop, then go for it. But if your reasoning is that you want a lightweight desktop, then either you’re trying to make do with 256MB of RAM, or you’re kidding yourself.
I am not talking about just RAM. I am talking about speed. I am talking about quick redraw. I am talking about seeing the borders of the window I am dragging only once, and not twenty times.
I can have 768MB in my Celeron (not M) laptop, and I do, but it won’t make the thing fast. None of the problems above did I experience under Windows, at least not to the extent I saw when I was using Gnome. That’s why I changed to KDE (and tried Enlightenment and XFCE before), and it’s much better now, but I still believe that the main problem is the slowness of GUI toolkits, and that does not seem to go away soon.
P.S. I know there is FLTK, but I have yet to see a serious application that uses it.
Edited 2007-03-05 08:37
it’s not just the gui toolkits, it’s also X, and the video drivers…
http://shots.linuxquestions.org/?linux_distribution_sm=Elive%20…
Some of those pictures reminded me of QNX. It looks very promising to me (from the pictures).
Ahh, that looks great!
I’ve really liked E17 ever since I heard about it.
Thanks.
I find it funny that e17 is now advertised as the lightweight window manager. In the days before KDE and Gnome, Enlightenment was considered the resource-wasting window manager, where fvwm, icewm or Blackbox were considered lightweights. KDE 1 was a big bloated monster that required 24MB to run, where fwm was usable with 8MB already.
Is a bit funny that the best looking distros out there, I least in my opinion, are based on lightweight DEs. I mean, DreamLinux, based on Xfce4, and Elive based on Enlightenment, have both outstanding looking without user tweaks.
Hey Eugenia, it probably would be a good poll to have here (i.e., if people can vote putting aside politics or “fanboyisms”).
Edited 2007-03-04 16:40
I tried last week KateOS with XFCE and Elive with e16 and e17 and found that Enlightenment it is a lot heavier than XFCE.
With an AMD K6-2 @ 450 Mhz with KateOS was quite light and responsive, but with Elive was unusable.
I really like Enlightenment… BUT: There seems very little progress. With KDE and Gnome you can really feel how they progress quite rapidly (Gnome releases every 6 months, KDE is almost at 4.0). With E17 et al it is different. Now it’s _almost_ at 0.17 – how long have they been with 0.16? Years and years.
In their defense, the article does mention that E17 was rewritten completely from scratch. This would probably explain both the long development time and the significant differences in performance compared to E16.
“””In their defense, the article does mention that E17 was rewritten completely from scratch.”””
If that’s “in their defense” I’d shudder to hear your criticisms.
Yet another confirmation of the valuable truth outlined in this article:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
In their defense, the article does mention that E17 was rewritten completely from scratch.
Why? I really shudder when people think it’s just OK to rewrite something from scratch to achieve some totally false sense of purity.
Additionally, the person writing this article just doesn’t understand the differences between a window manager like shell and a full desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. If you look in Enlightenment you will find no development infrastructure and nothing like kdelibs or slaves. That’s what makes a real desktop environment, and you can’t just take a window manager like Enlightenment with some cool looking effects and claim it’s better than anything else.
Actually that’s the very reason for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. The EFL is an entire development infrastructure like the kdelibs. This is one of the primary reasons that the development effort has taken so long. They have gone for a new approach of building an entire set of libraries and toolkits and then building the window manager on top of that. This set of libraries and toolkits (EFL) can also be used to build applications designed to seamlessly integrate with Enlightenment window manager.
http://www.enlightenment.org/Libraries/Overview/
Hmm. If so, then the Enlightenment project would seem to be heading down the path of creating their own OS…
Another thing to keep in mind they don’t have that many developers, and those that do work on it aren’t necessarily paid for what they do. They have other obligations. I think if they were to be sponsored more would come of it.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like e17 will be released any time soon.
I have been following the e17 development for about two years and I have grown tired of trying to guess where the development team is going and when will they try to come out with a stable release.
In the beginning I was very excited at the idea of a very minimal but customizable desktop environment (they call it a desktop shell) but after waiting so long for a stable release (and no, cvs snapshot are not stable enough on my pc, I tried).
I’m not sure what’s going on with the dev team but they seam to never converge on a set of feature to implement or a list of bug to squash. Sometimes you’d think they are throwing features in or moving the code around just for fun (for the humor impaired, this is an hyperbole).
And do not even mention eem (enlightenment for embedded system). One of the most interesting and promising thing I’ve ever seen, but it looks like it’s going nowhere.
If raster (the enlightenment project [less than benevolent] dictator) has a roadmap in his mind, I really can’t tell what it is, and how will it take to get there.
In the end I think that e17 is still a very interesting piece of software and I hope to see a beta release somewhere in the future, but I’ve stopped waiting for it.
I have the feeling that e17 is more of playground, and that it’ll never have an actual release.
If a project doesn’t release a stable release at least once a year then it’s simply not viable.
“””If a project doesn’t release a stable release at least once a year then it’s simply not viable.”””
You’ve just classified RHEL, SLES, SLED, and Debian as “not viable”.
Hope you have your asbestos underwear on. 😉
Wow. Microsoft Windows, the world’s most successfull OS to date has never been viable? You obviously make a valid point.
I don’t know why, but it usually crashes with an hour or so on my Ubuntu edgy install. I have no idea why.. but i always found the fonts muddy.. any way.. it got to the point that i just uninstalled it. If I want light, I run rox or wmaker
Ugly fonts is more likely a problem with your X server than your window manager.
i dunno, the fonts look great with the other sessions I use.. mind you , I wasn’t trying to flame E17.. I think it looks great, and I guess I am a fan.. it just won’t run stably on my box..
Works great on workstations with massive amounts of horsepower too. Use it daily, never crashes, not sure what ubuntu is shipping but the gentoo build out of cvs is just amazing, simple, to the point, very light and very, very fast.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how can a complete rewrite of basically everything that’s been under development for several years be called version 0.17? Personally, I would regard this as a major release, e.g. 2.0.
More generally, a 0.x release communicates “alpha quality” and “not really useful yet”. Is that the message Enlightenment want to send to their users? If version 0.17 can be this feature complete, one may wonder how 1.0 will look like. I guess we’ll find out in 2045.
> More generally, a 0.x release communicates “alpha quality” and “not really useful yet”. Is that the message Enlightenment want to send to their users?
Frankly, yes. The Rasterman (lead developer of E) is notorious for being extremely cautious with his releases. This is one of the many reasons why it seems like E17 development is taking forever, even though it’s actually progressing at a fairly respectable pace. I dare say that any other developer may have called E17 “finished” a long time ago, despite there being some known bugs. The Rasterman, for better or worse, refuses to.
Most people just refer to Enlightenment .17 as “E 17”, ignoring the decimal. This is not uncommon in the software development world. For instance, Java 1.5 was renamed 5.0 in the interest of aesthetics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history). Slackware had a similar event in its history.
“I guess we’ll find out in 2045.
”
In Battlefield 2142 there are some terminal screens running E17 rc1 and Duke Nukem Forever.
Edited 2007-03-04 21:57
How ironic. I remember a time when everybody complained that Enlightenment is the slowest and most bloated window manager ever.
How ironic. I remember a time when everybody complained that Enlightenment is the slowest and most bloated window manager ever.
Hardware has progressed, Enlightenment hasn’t.
I remember seeing Enlightenment running in an X client in Windows 3.1. Providing fullscreen ripple effects on the desktop in real-time. At a time when Word 6 was having difficulty managing to display 4-bit graphics.
It may have been a bloated window-manager by Unix standards, but compared to the MS flagship producys at the time, the difference was huge.
Which version of Enlightenment runs on the PlayStation 3, and how well does it run?
E17
I find it a bit disheartening to see all those disparaging comments about e17. I run it everyday, update from CVS once a week and am very pleased with it. It must simply be a matter of different tastes or obsessions with release numbers instead of actual results.
As far as coming to a release, for those interested, there is a TODO list which outlines exactly what the authors are aiming for in terms of features, bugs, optimizations and nice to have features. Similarly, this list exists for some of the associated tools (ewl, etk).
People should realize that it is not just a window manager any more. In my view it is a very ambitious project. They have two toolkits under development (ewl, etk) and some applications under development as well. This is with far less resources than gnome, kde or xfce (which rides on the coat tails of gtk).
The themes are amazing with some effects that are only available in other desktops using accelerated GL (and the associated blobs that may be necessary). For that matter, composting is available using a loadable module anyways (without some of the bling of beryl admittedly).
Pssst… I read somewhere that E17 Final will be ready around the same time as Duke Nuken Forever.
That should be anytime now.
about mem comsumption, see http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News
(news Sunday, 29 May 2005)
The current theme eats some memory and cpu cycles, but with a lighter one, (winter, detour), e17 is faster and takes less ram
We also plan to use XCB in e17. No rewrite is needed, just some functions to add, mainly, in order to take into account the features of XCB.These ones can make a window manager more responsive.
A guy has written a module for e17, that mimics the scale plugin of compiz/beryl. Of course, that module (and e17) uses opengl backend.
right now, evas (on which e17 is based) can use software, opengl or xrender backends (and many more, too, but less useful). The fastest is opengl, and xrender when used with graphic cards supported hardaware acceleration through EXA (radeon with r200 chipset for example). Software backend is quite faster that xrender one without acceleration.
the develoment of e17 is slow because the number of active developpers is really low (2 or 3). If some of you want to joins us, you are greatly welcome
e17 will be released when the todo list (http://e.kevb.net/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/e17/apps/e/TODO?revision=1.532…) will be empty (if I remember correctly)
Well the article was nice, but not good enogh for me. i’m using Elive distro & i just see the main problem of e.17 is just number of active developers. & it’s strange because it is veery nice desktop & if would like to somehow show that i can do some nice things i would like to work on such project (that i can later show how nice is it & say – look, i was working on this too). Very useful & really nice desktop for me (especially with Night theme).
Well, polishlinux.org seems to have had it speaking bandwithwise.
Any known mirrors available? mirrordot.org etc don’t seem to have this article, too bad. Suppose anyone knows of one, might be worth putting it in the article summary?
Sorry for this down town… I messed around with .htaccess in the development version of the portal and then suddently noticed that I was modifying the live version instead
So, I gave the E17 a try, because I have some speed problems with KDE, and it seems that E starts applications faster than KDE, at least for ME, so Im happy:)
I have one question tho…
Do I have to go through all this CVS download, and recompile, every library in order to update E in the future, what I understand it is very fast development, so once a week would be a good frequency to update? Or is there any scripts that makes it less repeteditive to download and recompile E?
there are some deb files, iirc. I don’t know where they are, though.
Raster uses its own script (http://www.rasterman.com/files/get_e.sh) to update, compile and install e and its dependancies. Look at the comments in that script before launching it.
thank you for that:) im on slackware so i guess im gonna give that script a try when i feel like updating:)
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