E17 Available From CVS 308
Lisandro writes "As stated by Rasterman on his site, Enlightenment 0.17's window manager is now available on CVS, which means you can build e17 completely from it, as it is, and give it a try. Of course, it's still work in progress, and lacking in several areas, but it is usable, and looks as gorgeous as ever. Also, in related news, the XFCE team, one of the best 'light' desktop environments for *NIX, has released the first release candidate for XFCE 4.2, with a lot of long due improvements." About e17, Rasterman's note says "It's limited in its support for ICCCM, no NETWM support and it has no iconification, virtual desktops, shading, keybindings or button bindings, but it does WORK (just). it's also fast and beautiful."
In case of slashdotting (Score:3, Informative)
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Welcome to The Enlightenment Project.
We are dedicated to providing advanced graphical libraries, tools, and environments. Currently, the project is made up of three different components: Enlightenment DR16, The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and Enlightenment DR17. While we are best known for the Enlightenment Window Manager itself there is a long history of providing advanced libraries and tools to support the window manager and other applications, such as Imlib, FNLib, and Imlib2, which extend far beyond the window manager itself in scope. Today, in development toward the DR17 Desktop Shell we have created an entirely new set of libraries and tools that provide more power and flexibility than any other group of graphical libraries available, which we refer to collectively as The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.
Enlightenment DR16
The Enlightenment DR16 window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.6 was release on Nov 2nd, 2003, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more.
Imlib has lived a long life, still in heavy usage today, as one of the most popular image manipulation and rendering libs available. Its development was taken over by the GNOME project and used as GNOMEs rendering engine until it was replaced with GdkPixbuf in GNOME 2.0. It's popularity surpasses just development in C thanks to bindings for several scripting languages including PERL, Python, and Ruby.
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
In developing DR17 it was made clear that we needed an entirely new set of libraries and tools. Raster had a bold vision of what was possible and where he wanted the next release to go, starting with Imlib2 and EVAS, and eventually growing into new libraries largely based on or around EVAS. It became clear that the usefulness of these libraries and tools went far beyond the DR17 release itself, just as Imlib did in DR16. Thus the collective library back-end of DR17 was given the independent title: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, or EFL for short.
The EFL contains solutions for almost any graphical interface task, far beyond just rendering images. EVAS provides a highly optimized canvas library. Ecore provides a simple and modular abstraction interface and advanced event management including timers. Etox provides a complex text layout library complete with theme-able text stylization capabilities (previously Estyle). EDB provides a compact database format for intuitive and easy configuration management, including the storing of binaries. EET provides an integrated and flexible container that ends the traditions of providing themes in tarballs. Edje provides a revolutionary library and tool set for completely abstracting application interfaces from their code, including a complex and flexible method of designing interfaces. EWL provides a complete widget library built on all the other components of the EFL. And more!
Enlightenment DR17
Development Release 17 of the Enlightenment window manager represents an evolution into the next generation of desktop environments: the desktop shell. DR17 will provide integration between files and your environment in a seamless manner while encompassing a graphically rich and flexible architecture. It will not compete with GNOME or KDE, but be a completely new way of visualizing your desktop, based around the EFL which was built from the ground up for this task.
Still in
Re:OK (Score:5, Informative)
I *believe* e17 was a total rewrite, which is why those features are missing...simply because the rewrite hasn't been completed yet.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Fortunately, reality is much better :) (Score:3, Informative)
The window manager mentioned here is the very start of the "2 lines of code" (a long runnign in-joke) that builds a window manager out of these libraries. If you want a fully featured window manager, e16 is quite mature already.
Re:fluxbox (Score:2, Informative)
Re:fluxbox (Score:5, Informative)
Fluxbox has a menu, minimal taskbar like support, tabbed windows, and a place for windowmaker dockapps.
Xfce is a complete and highly modular desktop environment. Unlike Gnome, components are loosely coupled, so you can easily run part of the environment without much overhead.
Xfce includes: A window manager, a taskbar program, a panel with plugins (launchers, menus, workplace switchers), a file manager, a desktop menu with a backdrop system, a session manager, a plugin capable settings manager, and a small application development environment.
There are some other micellaneous toys - calendar, a gtk theme engine, a nice resolution switcher, an iconbox. And the third party apps are growing - a couple of terminal programs, a fine media player, a growing number of panel plugins.
Making fluxbox and it's kin usable winds up requireing I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.
Click a button (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OK (Score:3, Informative)
things I would like to see
1) reorginize the configuration menus(a little on the confusing side)
2) have e16 keyconfig and menuconfig come built in
IMO enlightenment is sort of like debian, it goes a little slow, but damn when the thing finally comes out, it is impressive.
Re:Not to rain on the parade, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Where do you see that on the site? That most likely needs to be changed.
And besides, that's refering to e16, not e17.
Re:Always been in CVS (Score:4, Informative)
Allow me to explain. They had started development a long while ago on E17 which they had put in CVS (this is what you are thinking of). Since then raster has decided to start over. They have been concentrating on the EFL(Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) since then. Today's "release" exciting beause this is our first look at the real E17
Re:Always been in CVS (Score:3, Informative)
Now please don't go rushing to check it out yet. It is still barely functional and is not usable as a day-to-day wm yet - this is pre-alpha code essentially. We need more people who are interested in actually helping to contribute code than excited users especially at this stage.
Re:OK (Score:3, Informative)
With componets like evas which now has a media player built into it is going to be the best window manager out there.
If they have built it the way they were saying, it can be a fairly lean window manager if you build your theme correctly, without the builtin dvd player.
DR 17 Movie (Score:5, Informative)
Let's get some things straight here (Score:5, Informative)
First of all I use E16.7.1 as my WM of choice. I've been using E since I first found it several years ago.
A lot of people don't understand that, why would I use E when there's Gnome or KDE? Well, personally I can't understand why people use Gnome or KDE when there's E, but that's just personal preference.
I'm one of those people who like minimal functionality, uber-flexibility, combined with easy of use, and demands aesthetics above all. E is for me, but I can see why it's not for everyone.
People are scoffing at the poster who said E17 is beautiful and fast by suggesting that without functionality of course it's going to be fast.
Some people are laughing at Enlightenment for being around for 5 years and still not having virtual desktops, pagers, etc.
E16.7.1, the latest stable release, has everything you could ever want from a WM. It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time! The virtual desktop support is second to none. You can even have different layers of virtual screen accessed by using the scroll wheel on the desktop.
E also has the best Xinerama support I've ever seen in a WM, for those of you who are into dual monitors like me.
Now let me address some of things people have been saying about E17. Apparently the poster forgot that this is slashdot and most of the posts will come from people who have never actually used Enlightenment, or who don't know anything about it.
Like many others have said, E17 is a complete re-write, and it's not anywhere near finished. The post is simply an acknowledgment that the window manager code for E17 has finally been put back into the CVS repo. So if you're wondering why it has such limited functionality, it's because it hasn't even been available to be worked on by anyone other than Raster yet!
Some people said that this is not news because it has always been in the repo. Not true. It was in the repo a while back before major rewrites to the foundation libraries, but it got taken out because the changes were too great. Raster had to start again on the WM code.
And finally... why should we care about E17? It is going to be cool... seriously cool. Raster and his team are excellent coders. The reason why it's taking so long is because they're doing it right this time.
The supporting libraries have an OpenGL rendering back-end. Think about that. A WM finally rendered in OpenGL. And think about the possibilities it will bring.
E17 will be worth waiting for. It will be feature-packed. It will be beautiful. And it will be fast.
Interview with Rasterman (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and he can drink like a fish-- Enjoy!
Re:some random screenshots (Score:1, Informative)
http://xcomputerman.com/gallery/screenshots?pag
now nobody gets nuffink!
Re:Stupid question (Score:4, Informative)
That said, your mouse should be a three button mouse to best utilize e. And as another person posted, you can play around with it by right clicking the desktop, middle clicking, etc. to see all of the menus and functions.
I haven't kept up with DR17 development, but am I right to assume that the developers are trying to not only map mouse buttons, but also button and mouse movement combinations?
Re:fluxbox (Score:4, Informative)
Your very close. Obviously Fluxbox and KDE are desktops in the way most people think of them, drawing windows and providing a workspace, but what KDE is that Fluxbox is not is a Desktop environment.
A window manager in their most basic form just draws windows on the screen, thats it. Thats not very usable since simply doing that does not give a method to actually run applications, so a menu is added. So thats all it does.
Now look at everything KDE does and is. kwin draws windows, kdelibs provides IO slaves to handle background IO, kdenetwork provides access to protocols for every KDE app, and provides the kparts that come together for mail (kmail), news (knode), IM (kopete) and whatnot, all of which then also show up (along with others) in KDE's PIM, kontact. The khtml kpart is available to all apps, along with the file browser component, and so with those and the other kdenetwork kparts, konqueror becomes usable as a browser, file manager, ftp client, or whatnot depending on how its used. There are integrated apps for managing sound, X settings, your kernel config and virtual desktops, and that's just the beginning.
So often with a simple window manager you may have a bunch of apps that do many or all of these functions, but they are separate apps and if they all talk to each other, well your quite lucky. A full desktop environment has all the parts needed for a completely usable system to handle all those parts, and often more then you need, in a very integrated manner that all work together by design.
Re:Click a button (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let's get some things straight here (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, the Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.3 is just that, an OpenGL rendered WM.
Enlightenment and Evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let's get some things straight here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very Innovative (Score:3, Informative)