Rasterman talks about other’s opinions. As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching. He adds two videos as a proof with animate backgrounds and other things.Perhaps it’s time for the linux desktop world to stop reinventing the wheel and collaborate one with each other. Gnome has things like accesibility and lots of apps, enlightenment has a very powerful rendering engine. It’d be a shame to see people reinventing the wheel.
Don’t expect anything other than NIH in any endeavor regarding Linux!
I’m stunned.
Those were some pretty interesting and amazing video’s– Really. E17 HAS been moving forward indeed!
I’ve always had an interest in enlightenment though.. Some time last year I tried to compile all the developper stuff for E17 and it looked cool.. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this (and I can’t wait to see those videos).
After trying kde3.4 beta2 and the unstable/slow transclucency/shadows/effects, I wonder if E17 stuff will be faster though…
things like this should be implemented at the X level. doing it this way will mean only enlightenment will use it, as gnome/kde will want to adopt standard X technologies.
Arch linux users can add the Rensel repo for e17-cvs packages. Recompiled on the 16th of Feb, I believe.
second thoughts…i’ve just watched the videos. i NEED this!
the theme there is pretty ugly colours, but if all this was tied into gtk/xorg it could slaughter osx’s look.
that + the ease of use of a gnome desktop, and you’ve got everything you’d ever need.
the question is, would raster be willing to work with the gnome team to develop it, with a gnome hig in mind.
ha can be quite stubborn at times(i used to follow e16 development quite closely), so he’d need to change a few things. but for looks, that is amazing. i love the way the desktop background scrolls.
Yes, that’s a significant issue – the other desktops may be re-inventing things, but they’re doing it in collaboration with a much wider community. Gnome isn’t adding transparency and hardware rendering to their desktop – they’re working with the X developers and the kernel developers to get things added at the appropriate layers.
A collegue of mine was raving about this – so I was just about to install it. I had to look pretty hard for Fedora rpm’s though, so if any Fedora users out there want to try this use the apt/yum repository at : http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/news_e17.html
Oh if anyone finds FreeBSD packages – or a source package that compiles without to much work let me know, thanks.
I really hope that other Desktop projects join forces with all this stuff! All the videos are pretty amazing!
Sure that project’s goals could be different, but probably there’s a lot of work that could be used!
I’ve used it, I don’t consider it usable but it’s quite nice and quick. Most of this stuff should just be done at the X level, except for the cool poofs of smoke and such; and I think Rasterman is just saying “hey, use my code, it’s gpl’ed for a reason.” Not, “hey, use my packages, I pwn j00.”
Enlightenment has never been terribly compatible, and I doubt that will change. But’s it’s a very good wm, and it works with every app I’ve used (it doesn’t play nice with other window management tools, like gnome-panel windowlist plugin). And maybe it will be more compatible with e17, after all e16 is a 5 year old base.
Any mirror? Thx, chris
Yeah.. any mirrors?
The link is dead.
I’ll be really impressed if we can get something like Firefox running on E17 and actually integrate right in there. This is what the other guys are talking about. Sure, you can have E17 + Evas, but what good is it if all your user application are not rendered with Evas and use OpenGL accelleration transparantly?? *That’s* the next generation desktop, and it will require modifications to GTK+ and the X server itself. Or, are the Enlightenment guys rewriting all the applications to use Evas??
E17 is like BeOS AAPR2, one fullscreen window over the actual desktop, a hack! (You old BeOS users know what I’m talking about 🙂
-fooks
Sure, you can have E17 + Evas, but what good is it if all your user application are not rendered with Evas and use OpenGL accelleration transparantly??
As I understand it it will (could) be : Evas-Cairo-OpenGL and GTK-Cairo-OpenGL. So it actually does go through the same backend eventually.
E17 is like BeOS AAPR2, one fullscreen window over the actual desktop, a hack! (You old BeOS users know what I’m talking about 🙂
Um wrong. It’s a brilliant concept blatently stolen from Amiga. You old Amigans know what I’m talking about 😉
Wow.
Yes, E17 may have lots of potential with all its advanced technologies. Maybe also other projects could indeed use some of the code and/or ideas and cooperate with the E team? (Also E could try to borrow, for example, the GNOME HIG guidelines, no..?)
Still, I hope that the Enlightenment developers wouldn’t (seem to) be so much into technology for technology’s sake only, and eycandy (moving desktop wallpapers? big deal… I really have better uses for my CPU and RAM) but that they would concentrate especially on things that actually improve usability and productivity.
The point is: people need to actually use their desktops, not just admire how kewl some screenshots look like. I’ve always admired the techy beauty of many E screenshots. However, I never liked using E(16).
And yes, all windows managers, how ever odd, have fans that claim that just that WM is the most usable and productive of them all, but whether that is true or not from an objective usability (testing) point of view is another thing…
There’s a reason why people use GNOME and KDE more than other *nix WMs and desktops – despite KDE and GNOME being a bit resource hogs. Now if E17 could combine its innovative technology with the great GNOME usability guidelines but having much lower resource requirements (than GNOME/KDE), that could be something.
Anyway, I’m sure to give E17 a try when it will get more stable. Best of luck to Rasterman and the rest of the E crew too.
why, if they allready have the tech, why its not on the freedesktop.org site. but then it seems that rasterman have the attitude of my way or no way, not exactly a team player. atleast thats the feel i get from how he is wording the post or article or whatever you want to call it.
i would have liked that post much better if it was not showing of how E was ahead of the game but rather was telling us that they where cooperateing with freedesktop.org to allow for the E stuff to be used with any desktop.
im thinking that some of the performance in E comes from tight integration between the diffrent parts so that ot bring it into X as a whole one would have to recode major sections to generalize it and then risk looseing some performance…
I have to wonder how usable all this would be when all the effects were enabled, and what hardware would be required to run it all. It could definitely lead to something that looked better than OS X, but would it be usable and as slick? Something tells me that wouldn’t be the case.
I loved the movies though some of the effects are wicked and it’s E17 is looking better everytime I hear about it.
The problem with E17 is not eye candy, it’s usability. Usability-wise, E is a disaster. Eye candy-wise, OS X plays catch up to E. E has the most ambitious graphics technology of any desktop platform that has graced the face of the earth. Unfortunately, E just ain’t usable. I also hope people start developing native applications for E too. After watching the video, I’ve taking an interest is the E libraries, amazing stuff these guys have put together.
To my sense, enlightenment has always been ahead of its time when it comes to eye candy stuff. Like nextstep was at its time. This is coded by geeks for geeks IMHO. I mean… I remember I had a window manager’s theme that shaped my windows like dragons flying around the windows… and that was on my 486! sure that thing didn’t move and crashed often… but damn that was cool for the girls… oh wait, I did not have a girl 🙁
To me, enlightenment is to desktop graphics what Nasa’s Dryden Flight Research Center is to aeronautics: an extraordinary test bed for what is going to happen in the future. The only difference is that rasterman is right: he implements and tests things, but the other DE don’t event look at what he is doing. Damn! his code is not GPLed for nothing, no?
Also, eye candies ARE important for Joe users, but not essential. anyone reading osnews should know that now… IMHO. ALL today’s widgets aren’t implementing themeing systems only for the pleasure to code… E had that _long_ before anyother else.
No, I wouldn’t like rasterman concentrating on better UI or better compatibility or even stabilize his thing if he don’t want… I would like him doing what he seems like to do: code incredible graphic things. Up to the others DE to take what’s good and reject what’s not. That should be the power of OSS, we can afford peoples coding for their pleasure… IMHO
Long live to rasterman and E team 🙂
As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching.
The reason Gnome and others are relevant and E17 is not, is because everyone got tired of waiting for E17 years ago. Rasterman needs to get a release out in a reasonable amount of time before he starts lecturing those actually producing stuff people use.
tried it just now, http://www.linuxpackages.net does have the packages for slackware 10.0. installed it on my slackware 10.1
it’s “awful slow” (what it should promises from this text) with a P4/2.4, 1GB-RAM, 160GB Samsung & Nvidia6600GT-AGP (with closed source binary 3D enabled driver)
living happy with xfce4.2/rox2.2/bluecurve-theme/kde-default-blue-background
What I would be interested in are reactions of the fd.o/gnome (well, kde too but i’m a gnome user) people to his post. What i’m wondering about:
– Are they aware about what Rasterman has done with the foundation libraries for e17 ?
– Is there any cooperation going on between the E-team and other people or is their work taking place in total isolation?
– How does Rasters approach compare to the technologies that are being considered by fd.o at the moment?
– Are these libraries of any use as a foundation for the fd.o platform, or are there specific downsides that makes them unsuitable?
Just curious.
Let Rasterman stick a fire under things, E17 will demonstrate the viability of these features and hurry their inclusion in X and the major desktops. I don’t think that a ton of people use E16 on a daily basis, but people do use the features and ge-wiz factor that earlier E versions brought to nix in their various implementations in the main desktops. I hope that E17 is really exciting and proves that Linux can beat OS X in terms of visual effects and with Gnome and their HIG, KDE will be able to take both ideas, improve them, and kick the pants of Longhorn.
Or lets hope so.
I just tried the E17 preview from linuxpackages.net for slackware 10.0.. It’s nice! the shadows actually don’t slow anything down unlike Xorg’s shadow effects.. It’s all glintzy and stuff. I had to turn off the snow and the flames to have normal operating speeds… I like where this is going. Even if it’s never destined to be a popular desktop environment, it exists and it’s cool.
I was wondering when raster would post something like this after some of those gnome/freedesktop.org related blogs. all I can say after installing a cvs snapshot of e17 & the EFL is ‘wow this is going to f***ing rock’ although I’d recommend waiting for a proper release before trying as its not at least polished (yet still impressive to see). Also the whole structure of the efl is very impressive at this stage its definitely worth a look. I do wonder however as I understand why gnome/kde and etc do not have such visual features in their toolkits (as obviously they are older and more mature and alot more stuff that usually goes in) I do understand rasters approach in his blog being the kinda rogue ‘have their fingers been up their ass’s’ kinda approach to the situation as they didn’t even mention e17 implying that they are pushing the boundarys. I hope the other projects can leverage this already powerful set of libraries if they can rather than waste time making something thats already been done and could be used.
If any e17 devs are reading this I must say keep up the fantastic work
I just wanted to point out a few things to all the nay-sayers and uninformed and unqualified mouths hanging around here.
The technology involved in Evas, EFL, and E17 have been thoroughly thought out. If I were to make a judgement based upon the content of their development digests, I would say fanatically thought out.
Evas is designed to be a cross-platform canvas. This means it provides abstractions that allow it to work on top of (not as a replacement for) a generalized graphical subsystem, such as X11, DirectFB, or OpenGL. By streamlining or performing tasks these subsystems do inefficiently, Evas can, most often, boost performance. Evas takes advantage of hardware acceleration, when available. Even with economy graphics adapters, Evas still offers exceptional performance using its quality software rendering engine. Evas can be used on many resource-restricted embedded devices, whether X11 is available or not.
E17 is not a desktop environment and does not intend to be. It is a muse, meant to cater to the desires and ambitions of its developers, and a niche interest community. It is, for all intents and purposes, technology for technology’s sake. It is, also, just a window manager. It manages the windows, not what is inside of them. Most of the HIG being talked about is for the application inside of the window. E17’s window management tools have their own standards of quality and usability, which I suspect will be refactored over time, just as GNOME’s and KDE’s have (though, in E17’s case, to a much more limited extent, obviously).
Comparing E17 to KDE or GNOME is apples and oranges. Line-blurring capabilities touted as part of E17, such as session management, widgets, graphical APIs, etc, are actually seperate technologies used in the demonstration applications (or part of the EFL, on top of which E17 is built).
Much of what Enlightenment Project developers are doing were less than elegant (if even supported) using just the X Protocol, at least without extending it to all levels of proprietary maddness. Don’t think for a minute that these issues weren’t addressed and considered at length during the long development period of the core technologies. E developers are producing quality technology, much of which is first generation. So, expect there to be improvements and issues, but don’t let that take away from marvelling at the quality and forethought put into the software to begin with.
What I think is that they should only compare notes. The last thing they want to do is start delegating tasks. The best thing that any of these DE’s and WM’s can do is compare notes “periodically” so as not to all end up with the same thing but rather they can all stay abreast.
i used e16 exclusively up until switching to gnome/openbox almost 2 years ago. i even testet that old and abandoned e17-code for a while.
therefore i just had to give this a spin, and i must say everything is extremely smooth and good-looking. i think i’ll come back when it reaches some stability (keybindings, menu-editing, compatibility with nautilus++)
now where can i go get that animated eet-background featured in raster’s movies
HMMM….
http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org
HMMM
#freedesktop.org – take a look. I hang out in there.
May I point out – we suffer the same problems GTK+ WILL suffer going via Cairo – and Cairo itself does. We need the X core to improve – drivers. We have no resources to do it. none of us gets paid fulltime to work on it – so we focus our limited resoruces on our primary goals – E itself and its libraries.
raster:
encouraging to hear that you work with fd.org
now if you put up a couple of animated edje-backgrounds, this will spread like fire among people wanting to show off what linux can do
Without quality drivers for graphics hardware, free software will never match the interface capabilities of MS and Apple.
One thing we can do, as advocates of choice in operating systems, is to go to work for nVIDIA, ATI, etc. If anyone out there is studying computer graphics, the free software needs your help. Hardware engineers everywhere: get up from behind your desk and tell your employer that now is the time to start taking free software support seriously.
Great, good to hear! Those video’s were seriously impressive.
I’ve noticed that some build scripts exist on the Net to download and install E17 but they don’t seem to work for me. Is there an easier, more “automated” way to do this for Slackware?
Read past comments and you’ll find someone installed E17 under Slack getting a package from somewhere (clear, eh? 😉
Regards,
chris
Beautiful, wonderful. I was wondering at all the posts comparing E to GNOME/KDE, now wouldn’t it be possible to simply replace metacity/sawfish/kwin with E, being that E is a wm? Thus giving you all the fun features of a DE, as well as a beautiful WM.
long ago (gnome 1.x?) E was the default wm for GNOME.. I’m sure it can still be used with gnome though I read in a comment here it doesn’t play nice with the pagers or something.
as for KDE, it always worked best with kwin and not as good with other wms
go Raster, go! I ‘m eager to see a release of E17. This is the only thing missing to allow distros include E17, like they did with E16.
This way the community would see your achievements and back you up in many ways: development, bug reports, funding.
@chris (IP: —.cisco.com)
I think he’s referring to scripts that build installable packages from CVS. Some people, including myself, prefer this over prebuild packages. Currently, the only ones I know of are these
http://slackpack.tripleg.net.au/slack.9.1.builder/enlightenment.bui…
they’re stale and would need a rewrite though.
And to those who think E17 is GPL’ed – it’s not, it has a BSD-like license.
I tried to install e17 on ubuntu from the soulmachine repo,
but i always get depency errors because ubuntu has e16 in the repos.
Is there a way to force all soulmachine packages instead of the ubuntu ones?
Engage is running under gnome, much better than all the gdesklet starterbars, i just havent realized how to add apps to engage, i only can use it as a window list applet.
you can clearly see where E is moving if you watch this: http://www.rasterman.com/files/evoak.avi
a company needs a good looking gui for fubar consumer-devices things stuff, raster needs a job, we need e17. its all the same if you manage it wisely!
It would be great to see a live CD …
Live CDs are a great way for developers to see what is going on with other projects without having to compile anything.
What’s the point of the blog post? From my understanding of it, rasterman is saying that there are two camps that have agreed on similar approaches to certain things. Kind of like the concept of network filesystems. The concept between NFS, CIFS, AFS, etc. are all similar and many have adopted least common denominators. Which might say it’s a good practice.
Seth and Havoc are referring to what they intend to do to make Gnome better. Is rasterman saying their ideas are wrong? Apparently not since they’re the same ideas he’s already used. Is he saying that because he’s first, the Gnome camp shouldn’t imitate it?
Is he saying that E17 should be adopted by the Gnome camp as their WM-of-choice? Even if they’re using similar techniques for some things, there are other fundamental things where they’re different that makes the adoption of E17 not feasible.
I agree that people shouldn’t re-invent the wheel. They should innovate wherever possible. In this case, the wheel happens to be the concepts behind rendering and not the specific implementation.
Could someone tell me what the constructive part of this post is? I’d hate to think that it was just a bluster post where one person is trying to say I’m so smart without actually using those words.
It wouldn’t be hard to integrate gnome apps. It would simply require either a theme engine that draws widgets using evas, or more likely a gdk backend that draws directly to evas.
As far as the fullscreen window hack business mentioned earlier… what do you think nautilus is doing in order to display nice anti-aliased fonts?
My only concern with all of this is weather or not the evas effects for evas apps are network transparent or not. i.e. if i remote login can i run an evas app on another machine and it display locally in x and the cool stuff work… i’m going to attempt this in the near future, but have no idea about it now.
if you are wanting to start from scratch and create a new desktop based on a new widget set thats geared more toward eye candy… and possibly usability, the two are not mutually exclusive of course… then E17 would definately give you a good start, and as a gui development platform i think it looks pretty nice.
One thing i think gnome and kde and such can pull/learn out of englightenment is how to do quality time based animations that are smooth and perhaps the evas software composition stuff could be pulled out and used for an xrender implementation, its alot faster than current xrender soft-accell.
E is a project that has taken years and years to rewrite. Its nice what its done, but no one here has even mentioned its security vulnurablities.
I asked Pat of Slackware if E 16.7 would be in Slack 11.
“My philosophy is (increasingly) that Slackware shouldn’t bundle as many apps, especially where it’s just a personal preference among various choices. To that end, it’s also becoming likely that Slackware may remove other desktop environments as well in an effort to thin the herd… given that’s the path I’d like to follow with Slackware I’d say that it’s unlikely that Enlightenment will ever be shipped with Slackware again.”
Also on the security of Enlightenment’s “stable” libraries such as Imlib2 (the core of E16.7 and E17)
“I think that’s a real problem. It doesn’t need libast, does it? That’s got a name conflict with a much older library used by ksh93.
Furthermore, Imlib2 is not well enough maintained. There are known security problems with it, but they don’t care enough to issue to new release. Sorry, but I don’t need any more things like that.”
explaining what all these different technologies mean. Like the ones the Redhat guys are talking about, the one NAT was talking about, and now this. Are they all different? What are the differences and what things are the same. It would be very interesting to see someone put this all in perspective.
Those videos looked awesome. Imagine the famous fish aqaurium screensavers converted to 3d and used as wallpaper like this. Seriously, that would be a sight. I really like the out doors look. Sure it’s not practical but it’s still fun. I imagine someone could come up with some intesting ways to make a 3d wallpaper more practical…
And damn, it works pretty fast on my machine – The evas GL backend is enabled on an NVidia card w/Nvidia drivers, and I dont see any slower performance than metacity offers on this machine.
The gold highlighting and nifty effects really are pretty slick.
I am pretty impressed at this point, big thankyou to the E17 team.
Hi,
I’ve been a fan of E since well…Redhat 6.x-ish. I had a funny experience on #e a while ago, where Rasterman basically said to me to be “patience, young one” (I think I was asking on the state of E17).
To all those who think he’s arrogant or blustering, I challenge you to take a look at the code and what he’s done, before writing him off. Raster’s an artist and a perfectionist – he’s not frightened of wiping away everything and spending years rewriting if he’s not 100 percent happy (which is basically what’s he done).
However, I do agree that the themes and window decorations in those videos look seriously ugly…*rolls eyes*…then again, it’s the technology behind it, and E16 has already proven that the enlightenment team has nice artists (personally, I like the more recent Winter by reph0rm the best). Can’t wait till the technology’s done, and the artwork is ready…
http://www.cored.org/
The evoak video is nice, though – in fact, I actually found it easier on the eyes than the e17 previews (background is very cool, in a techy way, but it’s ugly – but it’ll improve when they get the artists on it).
bye,
Victor
i just watched http://www.rasterman.com/files/eem.avi and all i can say is WOW
makes me want to go get a zaurus (or any other pda really) and try getting that going on it
(for those who dont want to click the link, it is a video of what E might be like on a pda)
This is a big chance for Free Graphics Project! There is a team which is developing a 3D capable graphics card, with all nice fetures which are required for OpenGL desktop, and its gonna be relased this summer! And of course, whole architecture will be open, this means drivers, specefications, and everything else. Thats what wee need for future of desktop: totally open drivers.
http://www.kerneltrap.org/node/4622
If they don’t want people to reinvent the wheel they should have made
it part of X in the first place.
But they chose to make it very much depended on their application
and make it sort of useless to any other desktop envrioument.
Not to mention that beside nanana we did it before you I haven’t
seen any contribution from them to the xorg project.
What do they expect that we’ll all move kde and gnome to use englightment libraries?
We were doing this before X.org existed. We were doing this back when Xrender had just appeared. We don’t expect GNOME and KDE to use it – we also don’t think we need ot just shut up and st5op all development and work we have been doing for years just because x.org suddenly appears and GTK+ decides to change development directions. I also suggest you get your FACTS right. It does nto depend on ANY applications. they are SHARED LIBRARIES – separated out and separately buildable with API’s for people to use for any application they want to use it in. I will suggest you learn check out the EFL stuff first before making comments. Check my previous comment. http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org. See where Enlightenment has historically been part of the EWMH hints standardisation process. We CANT contribute to X.org – we have no time or resources to do it. We NEED our stuff to run on ANY Xserver – a primary requirement. We cannot tie it to 1 X server implementation and work on that. We do this in spare time as a hobby. As a result we have no spare resources beyond what is already devoted to the massive codebase we already have.
We see no reason we can’t write our own blogs on “these people talk of doing X – we have already done it – and here it is”. What’s wrong with that? Are all people expected to remain quiet unless they are part of GNOME or KDE? Are alll peolpe expected to not be able to contribute to OSS as they see fit – only via project you deem “OK” to contribute to?
I suggest you read some facts and docs – you will see me mentioned in XRenders credits. A few years ago I wrote an Xrender benchmark comparason tool to help developers improve it and thus have a target to aim for than just a nebulous “make it better” – This was before X.org existed as a “revamped project”. The facts speak for themselves. We have contributed in our own way as best we can – and actually bee implementing all these ideas. I see nothing wrong with publicising our work.
Just to say that I’m using e16 for almost 5 years (first with helix gnome) and now with gnome 2.4, the latest cvs version integrates just fine with the desktop and it’s much ligther and faster than metacity…
what RAsterman is talking is not at all oriented to E17 but to the libraries they developped for years..
why reinvet the wheel ? the foundation libraries of E17 are rock solid and much faster than anything in the linux world…
Djamé
ps : here a screenshot : http://djame.seddah.free.fr/E_16.7.2cvs.png
the theme is shiny blue (dated I know but I really do like it)
Hi,
Raster: Sorry to pester you again dude (I’m hoping you don’t remember me from #e…hehehe) – but I just watched that eem.avi movie. Also, I read a few years back on rasterman.com that you had a zaurus?
Are you still doing any devel on the zaurus platform? And was that eem video real? Hmmm, I would so like to run something like that on my zaurii…the eyecandy…shudder…
?
cya,
Victor
Nobody here has mentionned the configuration hell that e17 is… When a lot a people (including me) loves the Unix text, human-readable configurations files e17 goes the registry base way with ugly crappy binary configuration files that you need to learn some ugly e17 tools just to change something…
the problem with the gnomes is they don’t seem to know about any other environment on Linux than gnome itself. developing apps for linux == developing apps for/in GTK.
they seem to be quite ignorant, and its good someone tells them to look to other projects instead of ignoring them.
they come up with things saying ‘its new’, while many others have done it before (sometimes just plain better). I remember some big american company that does just the same thing…
e17 is a completely different beast to e16. The whole design philosophy is reusablity of subsystems and easy to use APIs.
See
http://enlightenment.org/pages/systems.html
for some details.
Re: the GNOME/playing nicely thing, ISTR Raster did try to get some interest in evas (which is very very fast, portable and lightweight) over gdk-pixbuf (which, er, starts with g) and was shown the door….
Yes it’s real. that avi is real. I just made a new eem avi – it’s a video captured from my digital camera – me using eem on the ipaq 3660 i have it installed on atm. you can see it runing real-time, live, no tricks.
@cycojesus:
If you don’t like it, write better config frontends to access the E-libraries. Hey. You could even write one that uses your beloved text-files and gamin to monitor them and update your ugly crappy binary configuration files.
This is development-code. I guess they will focus on configuring it, when there’s nothing else to do.
Heya,
I was thinking … maybe mythtv/freevo can use E17? I was reading that freevo was using a framework based on mplayer for animated backgrounds, … It seems that mythtv uses QT? Don’t know if they can get convinced.
The video’s (looked at the new ones from rasterman and the embedded one) and they seem nice. Wonder what the specifications for the machines are on which the videos were captured.
Michel
Hi,
OOhhhh, that’s sweet dude =).
I actually recently bought a Zaurus 5500 – is there any way of getting eem to run on that?
thanks,
Victor
that sky-background is so nice, but albeit a “bit” slow on xrender with nvidia. now I just have to grab cvs and build a gl-enabled desktop
We see no reason we can’t write our own blogs on “these people talk of doing X – we have already done it – and here it is”. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing wrong with it. It’s a Free world afterall, but…
It might all be nice and dandy that E 16/17 has had the most innovations in desktop graphics technology for years, the “fact” remains that E is a very small and extremely slow moving niche project. E17 is unfinnished software and it doesn’t do the majority of GNU/Linux desktop users any good. Cool, kickass, innovative doesn’t get the job done. “Butt ugly” KDE and Gnome do.
The accelerated canvas idea might not be new and innovative and E17 might have tinkered with it for years, but atleast the X.org, FD.o, KDE/Gnome people will get a usable implementation out of the door in a year, maybe two. That is where the criticism to your blog comes from, Raster. Having prototype code, moving at glacial speed, is not a reason to be boasting about how “far ahead” you are.
A few years ago I wrote an Xrender benchmark comparason tool to help developers improve it and thus have a target to aim for than just a nebulous “make it better” – This was before X.org existed as a “revamped project”.
Thank you for making X better. I benefit from it every day.
We have contributed in our own way as best we can – and actually bee implementing all these ideas.
Good, keep this up. If it is not the actual code that is used, it could be a reference to propagate ideas.
I see nothing wrong with publicising our work.
No, but reading the blog article, I keep wondering what you are trying to get at. “E has had it for years.” is often used, but I don’t see the point of this. Is it an offer to FD.o/X.org to get E technologies adopted into X.org? We CANT contribute to X.org – we have no time or resources to do it. We NEED our stuff to run on ANY Xserver – a primary requirement. We cannot tie it to 1 X server implementation and work on that. This seems to negate it. (X.org is the reference X-server implementation by the way.)
Is it a vindication for what the E team has been doing all along? Seems rather pointless. E isn’t where it is at anymore. Commitments to X(.org), KDE and Gnome are too large to look at fringe projects. When talks are about Next Gen. Rendering Technologies for the Desktop, they mean for widely usable and widely deployed desktops. E isn’t among those.
>>Is it an offer to FD.o/X.org to get E technologies adopted into X.org? We CANT contribute to X.org – we have no time or resources to do it. We NEED our stuff to run on ANY Xserver – a primary requirement. We cannot tie it to 1 X server implementation and work on that. This seems to negate it. (X.org is the reference X-server implementation by the way.) <<
I don’t see how raster’s comment is negating the possibility of using E technologies in X.org … after all it is free software. He simply stated that his priorities for his project are different and that he and his team haven’t got the time or resources to do this.
It seems more a case that X.org seems to be not really interrested in adopting E technology.
looks like it
Let’s see – http://enlightenment.freedesktop.org – tarballs. code. out. check in august last year we release “asparagus” release of EFL – again – code out. facts.
second – “you may have something in a year or so” – wow. thats my point. we HAVE had something for years. past tense. that’s my point. not vaporware. you dont need to run e17’s wm to use the libraries or take advantage of them – they are independent. e17’s actual release has no effect on them as such beyond helping drive more features.
if you did your work in weekends and evening inbetween everything else in life – as for glaical speeds. i wouldnt consider 500,000+ lines of code in a few years done in this time, glacial. it’s severel atiumes the average daily output of fulltime employed programmers. if we want to talk glacial – xrender. it has not improved in performance since 2000. it has gone about nowehere. i have followed it ever since it appeared. now a usable implementation in a year? see further down. given where cairo is at now… HAHAHAHHAHA. benchmarks still say it all. usable if you like making coffee between screen redraws.
also you seem to think that rendering technology only is applicable within a desktop environemnt – that it isnt code on its own – as if it is useless outside its desktop environment – which is patently not the case.
and yes – i know what x.org is
the fact is x.org has dont very little with x for a long time (xfree86 was basically the driving force) – now in the last year or so x.org has picked up again. i consider it a relevant organisation again as of then.
now what i’m getting at is – all sorts of excitement over “ooh – this is like groundbreaking stuff for the desktop – ooh lets talk about how to make themes that are whiz-bang”. is going on – as if its new and unexplored territory. it’s not – i’m trying to say “hey fellas – look outside your box – we’ve been doing it for years over here – maybe use/steal/adopt – LOOK at it. and dont make the mistakes we have done a lot of work avoiding as i can just see you about to step into a really big one”. thats my point – its not new stuff – been there. done that. we can help and are trying.
Which is a shame … considering E has got sth. that works … what was that about reinventing the wheel ?
Here’s the problem E has and its solution: The E team should first, finally, get a working full E17 release out and then outsiders like other X/DE/WM developers could start to take it and the related technology, as well as Rasterman’s talks, more seriously.
Basically I don’t see why, for example, the GNOME and KDE people wouldn’t see E interesting even now and follow its development with interest. But then again, E is not alone but there’s also dozens of others ambitious X and WM projects (like Waimea & Ion WMs) and that also often seem to develop faster than E.
E has been suffering from a credibility problem. The many problems and the long time of developing E17 have probably made many people to gradually lose faith and interest in the project. Besides fancy looking special effects don’t yet make a good desktop/window manager usability wise.
I think that the only thing that can make more people seriously believe in E and in the related technology is to have a very well working (also usability wise) full WM. After all that (Enlightenment WM or “desktop shell”) is the real E mission, and E isn’t just to produce some advanced X libraries for others to use, not to mention only producing yearly cool looking scifi desktop screenshots?
A project is judged by how it accomplishes its own goals. (Think GNU Hurd, for example.) Some ambitious but very experimental technology is just not (yet) good enough to be taken seriosuly by people like GNOME and KDE teams that aim to produce very stable and usable desktop environments for serious corparate use.
The small resources E team has when compared to bigger DE/WM projects must have been a real problem, but E is no exception to other WM and X projects in that sense either. If you want more than a small niche group of enthusiasts to contribute and use your technology more, you have to provide very well tested technology that has been proven to be very stable and well working. Till then, your ambitious project stays as a niche project only (unless you get some company supporter etc. interested in it enough).
I’m very sure that after E17 is finally released, interest in E and the related sub-technology will get much higher again. If there will be no serious show stoppers (like bugs, poor performance or instability), E17 might very well have the potential to become one of the most popular window managers even just after KDE, GNOME and XFce. But only time will tell.
Metic:
Besides fancy looking special effects don’t yet make a good desktop/window manager usability wise.
I meant that those fancy effect things are only secondary things to any serious dsktop or window manager project. If other window manager / X / desktop environment projects are not as “advanced” as E in that sense, and perhaps not concentrating as much energy and efforts on such things, maybe it is simply due to them having a lot more important things to consider and concentrate on?
Although those others may indeed now experiment with similar things, they may still think that those fancy looking extra things are only of secondary importance and thus, in the end, other more important things may really dictate if and how some fancy extra things will be implemented in an efffective way.
>> If you want more than a small niche group of enthusiasts to contribute and use your technology more, you have to provide very well tested technology that has been proven to be very stable and well working. Till then, your ambitious project stays as a niche project only (unless you get some company supporter etc. interested in it enough). <<
This i don’t get … it seems that E already has all the underlying libaries and technology and as Rasta keeps on saying, some of the things people talk about in terms of the ‘future Desktop’ is already here and usable … why not integrate it into existing projects, building upon the work that has been done, rather then starting all over again.
now what i’m getting at is – all sorts of excitement over “ooh – this is like groundbreaking stuff for the desktop – ooh lets talk about how to make themes that are whiz-bang”. is going on – as if its new and unexplored territory. it’s not – i’m trying to say “hey fellas – look outside your box – we’ve been doing it for years over here – maybe use/steal/adopt – LOOK at it. and dont make the mistakes we have done a lot of work avoiding as i can just see you about to step into a really big one”. thats my point – its not new stuff – been there. done that. we can help and are trying.
E17 is great, but personally I think that E developers have not done enought to “advertise” it…don’t get me wrong, the whole E – the efl, etc – is great, but people seems to have ignorated it. Take a look at cairo for example, evas was already there, works better, and still nobody adopts it. It’s a bit sad, but it doesn’t matter how good is E, if you don’t care about the rest of the world, the rest of the world isn’t going to care about you.
I admit that if I’d have the knowledge, I’d start a desktop based on the efl (not just a window manager, a whole thing just like gnome/kde)
that is realy the question isnt it. why are they going at it again when E have it allready available. thats why i first belived that E didnt have anything to do with freedesktop, but givne the posts by raster here i see that i was wrong.
one wild guess can be that they want to extend on the capabilitys of the underlying X framework rather then stack some library on top of X. this way any desktop or WM useing a X with said tech can access it without much effort. install X, install WM of choice, use the abilitys thats talked about.
but i allso see now with the posts here from raster that he have a way of writeing that is very flameable. this can be a problem as the open source community works best with teamplayers rather then individualists. more then ones we have seen projects that have gone its own into obscurity as the person(s) behind it steal to much spotlight.
i may be wrong tho, but thats the feel im getting so far.
so a clash of personalities basically … but that wouldn’t stop people taking E technology and use it, adapt it, copy it etc. just like raster himself encourages … oh well
A couple of months ago I took E17 for a test drive.
It wasn’t quite ready yet for everyday use, but I definitely was impressed by it.
Looking over what raster & co has done over the past years it looks well thought out. I for one am very glad they thought outside the “X box” and went for bigger and better things for the sake of good design. In fact I use some of the ‘E’ tools to go through my digital photo collection, very impressive.
We can only hope the X.org folks can also become more open minded about how things are done and take a serious look at raster & co’s stuff and decide on how to best move forward WITHOUT closing any doors on anyone.
As always I always will mention that the hardware drivers MUST be decoupled from X, they never really belonged there in the first place, X is a user space program, not an extension of the kernel (how it currently acts).
One excellent use of raster’s work would be as a basis for a HTPC interface. Those do well with lots of eye candy and demand efficient use of resources to go along with the eye candy.
Hammer and nail.
A project is judged by how it accomplishes its own goals.
Exactly. However i don’t think the goal of E17 has been so far to attract ordinary users. Rather, it has been to attract developers, geek users, artists, people who are searching for something very different (but who are smart enough to get hacking or get it working on their own). Like you say, the fact there wasn’t an offocial release of E17 is a double-edged sword.
I think we also have to keep in mind that Raster never had the intention to get this blog news be discussed here on OSNews. What i mean that his wording is not adjusted to the readership here.
In various ways i agree with him. One element i sometimes see is that when i read gnomedesktop.org is that there are sometimes indeed posts which appear to make it show that something is new, or so. Even though it has been there for months or even years. This can be frustrating! Have you seen computer folders lately which contained ‘New, 64 bit computer’? To some, x86-32 is the first (and is the only) 32 bit computer even though the VAX was the first.
One other thing to keep in mind: Keith Packard’s KDrive is also not ‘new’ or anything, but its just that there has been fuss about it in X-land and that the general public now runs X.Org with its features (e.g. composite) included and/or enabled. So it may be ‘new’ to them right now. Besides KDrive, there have been other projects just as well such as Y, Fresco (last year on FOSDEM). I was there onm FOSDEM last year and it was funny to hear all the “oh!” and “ah!” when DirectFB and KDrive/X.Org/FD.o were demonstrated.
do X need special access somehow?
only driver i have seen that needs a kernel part is the nvidia one and that is a problem case as one cant do a nice shotdown X, extract new driver, start X to update said drivers…
and yes, nothing stops anyone from takeing what raster and crew have allready and moveing it on. only that i dont think what raster have is a X extention while what its talked about is exactly that. and how long will it take to convert the E code into a extention? and how long will it take to recode from scratch?
I actually would be tempted to say that that might be going to far… BUT – then again – it could just be the right place to put it. the technology behind edje for example necessitates machine independant design structures to be able to be accessed by a layer just above the canvas for display – technically this woudl work very well server-side, allowing self-contained animatable objects that coudl be shared between widget sets and clients, making it VERY efficient. Sure – with cleaning up, a but of “double check all the security and buffer overflows etc.” work -it’d be usable, if you had a server-side canvas.
i actually would content a server-side canvas would be VERY useful and is an extension of the work already done. (canvas as in stateful rendering engine).
First of all, I’ll join the others to say kudos to the Enlightenment developers for the amazing stuff I’ve seen
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-02.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-03.avi
Second of all:
… “Commitments to X(.org), KDE and Gnome are too large to look at fringe projects.” …
This post is not only annoyingly arrogant, but also flat out dumb.
Quickly reviewing facts: Enlightenment has *today* certain things that the people in the bloa.. *cough* “large” projects wish to have tomorrow.
Refusing to even look at it wouldn’t be very smart. In fact, it would be very silly – and, as developers, very unprofessional.
I hope this pointless attitude changes, because this is simply the “not invented here” syndrome at its worst, and people who want to be taken seriously can’t really act like that.
raster:
i’m trying to say “hey fellas – look outside your box – we’ve been doing it for years over here – maybe use/steal/adopt – LOOK at it. and dont make the mistakes we have done a lot of work avoiding as i can just see you about to step into a really big one”. thats my point – its not new stuff – been there. done that. we can help and are trying.
So THAT’S the point of the article. I apologize for having to ask it because it wasn’t clear in the article itself that that’s what you were trying to say. No, what the x.org guys doing definitely isn’t new. (I very much doubt they would claim it to be.) From what I understand of Seth’s and Havoc’s posts are those “technologies” are new to x.org. That they’re tried and tested concepts which they’re now trying to implement properly in their software.
I’m a software developer so I understand the prudence of checking out past works if only to avoid making “mistakes of the past”. Yes, I do hope that the x.org developers look at the way e implements those concepts. What’s more, I wish e and raster all the best. No, I wouldn’t want them to just shut up and go away. I sincerely do hope that e continues on for years to come and I’ll be browsing every now and then to their blogs to see if they’ve something nifty that might be of use.
Very well put …
Excellent
now we all agree. I sicnerely would like to get some of the things we implement in libraries into core X at some point – that will take time. We use our libs and apps as a testing ground – beat the crap out of it and extend it as far as we can till it breaks – find out what we did wrong in our design, fix and keep going. a chunk of the coure i think could be put into x itself as extensions with lots of implications of possible speedups and resource consolidation for desktops at large.
For now there are other steps that can be done – and it’d be nice if x.org, GNOME and KDE etc. etc. at least avoid stepping in the nasty bogs we’ve found ourselves in and have had to extricate from.
And yup thus the “here guys here. big blinky lights”. Have done it – taker a look. you’re not trying to fully pioneer untrodden soil – take a few tips from those who’ve ploughed this land before”
BTW – we do promise a release of E17… sooner or later.
BTW – we do promise a release of E17… sooner or later.
that might have been funny a few years ago.
I start up my computer to get work done, NOT to watch some animated background!
“After trying kde3.4 beta2 and the unstable/slow transclucency/shadows/effects, I wonder if E17 stuff will be faster though…”
Don’t blame this on KDE. Blame it on your crappy X driver. The translucency and shadows are very smooth and fast on any card with hardware-accelerated RENDER ( read: any NVidia card with the NVidia drivers).
If you want the effects to work better with ATI cards, put some pressure on ATI.
Interesting to see what his old /etc dir looks like.
Some neat files if you have a fast machine and john(1) installed.
I dig the motd and the X11 xdm screen
looks like its all cleared up now.
yes, one should be carefull to make statments like “new”. at the very least, state if one is saying its new to some specific system or other or if its new in general as the latter may very well be wrong. and if its wrong then the other side should make sure that they POLITELY points out the errors in said statement. anything else may start a flamewar and create bad blood that can make future cooperation diffucult or worse.
and they most definetly should take a look at ANY available gpl or bsd code that do similar things and see if it cant be used allready. still, the gnome project was started as an effect of a philosofical problem with the underlying librarys more or less. and we can see what that have gotten us, two nice desktop system
sometimes it can be useful for someone to start on a project from square one as they may well come up with a better solution…
http://hackgrid.gu1.info/e17_movie-02.avi
evas in particular seems like some very crucial software, particularly in its portability and performance. what i dont understand is how existing distro makers and window maker developers can take advantage of evas, particularly when users may end up running GTK+ apps. i dont understand where evas fits in with existing solutions, or does everything have to be rewritten to use evas?
what i’m interested in is hearing more on how to make active use of evas. do we have to run e17 and applications built on evas to take advantage of evas?
you mention evas could run on cairo, and then turn around and slam cairo for being slow. why would one do this then? simply to allow evas applications to exist on a cairo system? what about a wrapper to turn cairo into evas calls? i’m presuming complexity is the limiting factor? cairo is undergoing an api shakeup phase right now, i know becoming a cairo expert is not exactly #1 on your todo list, but perhaps if there’s any crucial serious considerations you should hit them now, while they’re assignedly malleable. evas seems more level with cairo than gpixbuf, best of luck.
also, you mentioned that evas’ opengl render was shaky. how much development effort is being put into opengl evas? is there any performance benefit over the software render? increasing number of mobile systems are coming with opengl; its a target everyone can benefit from.
i’d be interested in a comparison of the compositing engines of cairo and evas. principcally i understand how they both work, but i have little comprehension of how they compare.
one of seth’s big points was that there will have to be interactions amongst widgets. if you want to make it look like a sunset is kissing the upper left of your screen & shade all your widgets accordingly, you might want widgets to talk with each other to describe how much specular glint to apply, for example. does the elp provide anything to permit this? edge explicitly notes sandboxing as a feature, but is there any way to break out ofhte sandboxing?
i’ve been enjoying your posts, hopefully i’ll be enjoying your software soon, please continue to kick ass.
myren
has xrender’s performance increased at all now that PCIe has somewhat balanced the bandwidth equation, whereas before reading from a cards memory across AGP used to be uber horrendous slow?
or are the issues primarily architecutral?
“BTW – we do promise a release of E17… sooner or later.
”
Take your time.
I never understood why gnome didn’t use the libraries developed for enightenmentm I use to use E back at E14 when nothing compared; I’m back with pure gnome now and its a bit drab compared to those days, code from the E libraries should be integrated right into X for the speed it has…
Having just installed the slackware preview release I am very _very_ impressed with the speed on my elderly 700mhz laptop. Quite astounding really.
If nothing else this should put a fire under the arse of the gnome/X boys – no bad thing to be reminded that there are alternate voices in the FOSS desktop world.
J
I consider myself a super-duper kernels’ guru, a crypto sorcerer, AND a network protocols wizard, but I would not dare to talk about rasterman the way some people here are doing.
He’s an exceptionally talented engineer in a field of his choosing, and has done brilliant work, as well as contributed it under the GPL, as well as working with fd.o @ enlightenment.freedesktop.org . What else can we really ask of him ????
Seriously, the nitwits who are attacking him need to consider their own skill sets, their own inventions, and their own contributions (or the lack of them, really!!) in the field of graphics before sniping at rasterman.
I know, I haven’t contributed anything in this field, and hence in all humility, I wouldn’t disparage rasterman without a strong reason AND a strong background.
thanks,
Well said CitizenKane. To Rasterman: I used to love E15, and it’s great to see E17 still going strong. I’m not sure I’ll ever use it now, since this laptop is getting on in years, and I’m pushing it’s memory just to have integrated KDE desktop libs loaded. However, Enlightenment has had, and continues to have lots of cool ideas, and the work you’ve all put into realising them is immense. What’s more, you’ve proven that X is capable of what the future *ix desktops need, and you’ve shown others what they need to live up to. That alone would have been a great achievement, but doing it on a voluntary basis, as a true part of the Free Software community, so that others can use the code if they have the sense, is huge.
So. One more time: thanks, Rasterman, and thanks to all of the EFL/E17 team. I hope you guys don’t take heat for too much longer over this
One thing is for sure…. Rasterman and his team have more fans out there than he realises. The only reason people aren’t saying much at the moment (other than the negative morons on here) is because there hasn’t been much movement on this side of the fence. Once E17 is released you watch and see how many people flock to it and give it the kudo’s it deserves. Sure you will always have some negative feedback and thats only because you can’t ever please everyone. But having said that, my bet is the positives will outweigh the negatives by at least 10 to 1.
Rasterman has been around a long time, and I very much doubt the current negativity will worry him too much. Keep up the fabulous work E team!
First of all: after all the fuzz, I got e17 and I must say it’s amazing, good job.
As I looked in awe the animated buttons etc and my machine load not grinding to a halt, I tought: why not making a GTK-rendering-engine and a KDE-rendering-engine over your libs? This would give e17 one edge: a clean, widely integrated desktop environment, very, very fast… think about it.
it wouldbe technically possible to put gtk on top of evas by replacing its poaint methods with object create/modify code. evas’s strong points arew image handling – its primitive handling isnt amaaazing – but if you for example a button out of 4 line objects and a rectagle object – it is more object level overhead comapred to a single image for example. it is possible – but i somehow don’t see it happening any time soon
as for cairo – the engine is there as part of a discussion i was having over e-mail with one of the cairo developers – their software fallbacks are well… SLOW. and xrender is… well… SLOW (on the vast majority of drivers on the majority of cards in the majority of possible render paths). My point is that cairo relies on back-end renderers like evas does – evas can leverage cairo if it wants – it can also use its own GL renderer like cairo can via glitz – same stuff. nothing new. as for the opengl renderer – unstable. not the renderer itself – opengl drivers. it’s best demonstrated live – but give me 5 minutes, an opengl window and your box and i’ll have it locked solid from userspace – not trying to look for anything other than opengl corner cases/bugs. i have run into them too often testing/coding to trust opengl. they still happen to this very day.
as for widget effects – edje has the means to hook in a shared bus for edje objects to talk to eachother. it already has a universal messaging system for the gfx object to send/recieve messages to/from the caller app. you can put in small hooks to then allow messages to broadcast or proxy to another specific object, class of objects etc. on top with relative ease.
“it could slaughter osx’s look” – Anonymous
Are you kidding? These movies look fun (you want flames and xmas trees? really? 24/7?) but functionality is certainly not matching that of OSX, with Exposé and the way Widgets are being implemented in previews of OSX Tiger. I mean really; Here, you spend a minute moving around the clock, battery and temperature gauge… Only to have them covered by a full-sized window by an app that you need to run? Have you seen how Widgets can come up in a blink, hovering over the greyed-out desktop and windows in the backdrop, then go away when you are done gleaning the information you want? Watch the Steve Jobs Tiger keynote from January and tell me that doesn’t excite you, especially if you say these movies look exciting. I’m not advocating drinking the kool-aid, but be honest: OSX is a major-market product showing incredible innovation.
You can hope for an OSX slaughter, but it ain’t happnin’ for a few years – if ever.
I just re-read my post and I realize it sounds like a massive insult to the entire project – not what I meant – I was addressing a single post about ‘slaughtering OSX’s look’
So take that for what it’s worth – Nice looking project by the way!
absolutely fantastic