Elive is a Live CD featuring Enlightenment as the only window manager (and desktop shell too). Its version 0.1 was mostly an alpha release, and while E16 ran fine, E17 was severely broken in many aspects. Elive 0.3 fixes most of those problems and presents E17 at a point where it’s perfectly usable for the day-to-day desktop. Read the review here. Update: screenshots.
Enlightenment 0.17 will become the most advanced DE of this time; performance-wise, KDE and Gnome and even XFCE are biting to dust– and that’s without all the eye-candy that E17 is delivering.
I’ve tested E17 a few months back when I compiled it from source, and I was amazed at how all the eye-candy did not slow my system down at all (and the specs of my x86 are anything but royal, an AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 512 MBRAM and a Ati Radeon 9000 w/ 128MB RAM).
A few days ago I tried the livecd on Qemu, and even though it was a lot slower, I was still amazed at the performance; seeing the virtual machine of Qemu was set to 128MBRAM.
Astonoshing work by Rasterman & Co. Outcoding the two biggest DEs in the UNIX world (KDE / Gnome), not a small feat.
So you think that your specs are not royal? I use a P3 600 Mhz and 128MB ram and my GNOME works fine. I’ve used KDE too and worked fine too.
I would really expect lots of eye candy without problems with E17 or GNOME or KDE in your configuration.
I can’t imagine how you run anything in 128MB of RAM. I just rebooted for the first time in a couple months because all of my memory (256MB) and all of my swap (512MB) were entirely consumed. Now let’s take a look at my RSS numbers. The top 3 are Firefox, X, and Thunderbird in that order, taking up 108 MB in total. Comparitively, GNOME is not memory intensive. The only major problem I notice is about 56 MB used by my modest array of panel applets (weather, battery, system monitor, clock, and volume). Gnome-terminal is pretty heavy, but not too bad.
The problem isn’t the desktop environments: it’s Firefox, Thunderbird, and X. Evolution is way more memory hungry than Thunderbird. Epiphany consumes about 25% less than Firefox.
Linux systems are developing a bulging memory problem, albeit not as bad as MacOSX or Windows Vista. I remember when Phoenix really was a fast, memory efficient browser. What happened?
I am not saying that E17 does not look cool but to say that they are “outcoding the two biggest DE’s” is saying a bit much. E17 is NOT a DE and it does not have nearly the features of KDE/Gnome. The way I see E17 is that it is a functioning proof of concept but not necessarily going to give KDE and/or Gnome a run for their money.
“The way I see E17 is that it is a functioning proof of concept but not necessarily going to give KDE and/or Gnome a run for their money.”
If you had said “…doesn’t necessarily give…,” I might agree. But it IS “going to give” the big DE’s a run for their money. They ARE “outcoding the two biggest DE’s.” There’s no way you could convince me otherwise.
I say this all this all the time, and I feel like a broken record: 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.
Having “raw power and elegance” doesn’t matter if nobody uses it. Without applications and integration, E17 is going to stay an interesting tool for nerds, far from giving the big DEs a run for their money. I just gave it a try. The design is not my cup of tea, but it’s still visually appealing. There are some interesting concepts, but nothing to start up a revolution. Right now, the lack of programs designed for E17 makes you use apps relying on QT or GTK+. There goes a big part of the optimisations.
Note that I am not saying they are wasting their times. I would definitely like to see more developers that really cares about details like performance and memory consumption like Rasterman. Yet, I don’t expect it will make an huge impact, judging by all the stuff done by fd.o that was already implemented a while ago by the E-team…
Yeah right !!! First Enlightenment is not a DE. Secondly Enlightenment has nowhere near the feartures and integration that Gnome or KDE have. Thirdly the eyecandy of enlightenment is really not that impressive (fake shadows anyone ?), I have installed it and really don’t understand what all the fuss was about. Fourthly your specs … well any Linux DE feels snappy on that. I am running Gnome 2.10 very happily on a PIII 800 Mhz, 256 MB Ram and 8MB Graphics.
Within a year KDE and Gnome will outshine Enlightenment in terms of eyecandy anyway (Cairo /Arthur/Luminocity), whilst at the same time improving overall performance.
You’re right but Gnome and KDE still need some code tuning.
If I’m not wrong, the simple battery applet in Gnome (Ubuntu) is using as much as 20MB of RAM.
This is a little less than the total amount of memory used by OS4 on the Amiga after boot.
E17 is going to what is really needed for desktop on Linux : a nice and light desktop environment.
Anyway, choice is synonym of freedom and initiator of evolution.
I didn’t mean to sound too critical of enlightenment at all … sorry if i did. Sure E is great as a lighteight Windowmanager and choice is good. It just winds me up if people make comments like “E totally outcoding Gnome/KDE” and that “E is the best DE for Linux”, especially when it comes from one of the editors of OSNews. Not only is is factually wrong, it is also very immature and does not reflect very well on the quality of editors.
Instead of creating symlinks and stuff it would be more appropriate to just do something like e_util_eapp_edit ~/.e/e/applications/all/oowriter.eap
and i like it alot the E17 desktop really is nice, and works there are a few niggles but hey this is 0.3 not 1.3 and little teething troubles are bound to be there. i hope Thanamantis and crew keep up the good work, this is a beautiful desktop.
i’ll keep my eyes on this release as I think it may go far
just my 2c worth
Yes, it’s a nice, fast working DE. Hope they will release it someday. It still won’t be as succesful as KDE from the start, because it lack applications that uses it’s framework. I wonder how the future desktops would handle thier engines. I mean, we have KDE4.0, Gnome 3 and now E17, all 3D enabled.
Posting from eLive. Nice! I’m not really a linux user but I was able to install elive to HD without any problems. Easy to use. Still needs some refinement, but very, very promising.
I was looking over the review and I really liked how he covered the strengths and weakinesses and provided almost a quick FAQ of ways to adapt to some of the short-comings or bugs of this release.
Very nice.
As an old Amiga use, it is very nice to be able to “iconfy” a running app.
I’ve followed E17 for a while but wasn’t daring enough to build it from source myself. (I’ll wait for the FreeBSD port)
But a liveCD, now I’ll try it for sure. A nice test drive without the pain.
I’ve followed E17 for a while but wasn’t daring enough to build it from source myself. (I’ll wait for the FreeBSD port)
It exists in FreeBSD port, check here http://www.freshports.org/x11-wm/enlightenment-devel/ .. Although, it doesn’t has everything as what it’s in the Elive but it still should give you good enough to startup in E17 and play around with it.
This description made me laugh for about 2 minutes
And that loud 
A very artistic X window manager. Among other attributes, Enlightenment makes for quite impressive screen shots.
FreeBSD guys rule
its good to see e17 getting more attention. i used it for 3 months everyday and i loved it. but personally i got tired of recompiling every week. i setup e17 with opengl rendering enabled and xgl. it was ok a little laggy on my hardware sony vaio vgn-u70 but i didn’t mind. i am happily using xfce4 again but i have gotten used to focus following the mouse d;-}
but i have gotten used to focus following the mouse
That was the one thing I couldn’t stand about E16. Is there a way to turn it off in E17?
to change it to click to focus
enlightenment_remote -focus-policy-set CLICK
MOUSE changes it back
Thank you kindly, good sir. I’m not using Enlightenment at the moment, but I will file that away for future reference.
thanks alot!!!!!!
The enlightenment_remote command can be used to tweak a large amount of the E17 settings, such as shade speed, key bindings, edge resistance, background, etc. Just run the command without any args to get a listing of what it can do. I have also found it very helpful to have a shell script that runs enlightenment_remote and sets up my E17 environment to my liking. Because sometimes after an update and rebuild all those settings get lost and its nice to get them all back by running the one script.
In Enlightenment 16 you could do a lot of that stuff from the right click menu (I think, might have been middle click). Can you still do it there, or are those settings command line only now?
Well, there’s a menu of programs with a right click, a list of windows with a middle click, and a config menu on a left click, that also includes the list of windows…
It’s not that those options are command line only. There just hasn’t been a complete GUI written for all the optoins. There are a few GUI configuration programs but most of the options are changed at the command line for now. Give it some time and you will be able to configure the enviroment from a GUI(s), they just have to be written first.
You could easily turn it off in e16……..
You can turn it on on almost every X11 window manager…
http://distroreviews.com/index.php?view=138
E17 gonna rock the house, true. But is that only me, or others also think the current E logo sucks really? I absolutely loved the “can opener” E logo used until 2000 or so. On the other side, the current E logo really makes me shiver
As the release date is nowhere on the horizon for E17, I hope it gets a chance for a change..
Problems with the Makefile mixing /usr/lib with /usr/lib64, etc.
After the third error, I gave up on fixing the build environment…
Guess I’ll have to wait for someone to build FC4/64 RPMs… :/
Gilboa
E17 looks extremely promising, it performs very well on the low end hardware I tested it on. Very customisable, easy to customise.
I beginning to think that this is going to be my desktop of choice.
Wow, I’ve just checked distrowatch ‘hit ranking’ and elive isn’t ranked in the dfault 6 monts rank, 56°plz. at 3 months ranking, and 33°plz. 1 month. Fast growin-up and very light future!
Does anyone have an md5sum (or other checksum) for the iso. Mine is buggy as hell and I want to know if I downloaded an earlier version
From the screenshots it looks like a OSX desktop.
Is the launcher at the bottmom of the screen also a taskbar like in OSX?
If that’s the case then I’m not very thrilled because I dodn’t like OSX.
I used OSX for a while and found it clumsy and confusing, and slow which led to very reduced productivity.
IF E17 is like that then I find it pathetic that yet another Linux DE is trying to imitate OSX instead of producing something original and inovative.
“IF E17 is like that then I find it pathetic that yet another Linux DE is trying to imitate OSX instead of producing something original and inovative.”
How about you try it before ranting like an idiot?
Many of the ideas for the interface in OSX were taken from the original enlightenment which was around before OSX
Most of them were taken from NeXT… Things like applications not bound to windows… Icons that suck in the whole application.
The bottom bar is just a launcher by default I think. But I think you can configure it to keep track of running apps? I’ve used an e app, I think engage, as a OS X like dock before (it was the most stable one I’d ever used too).
not that i know of. i heard that it is something that the devs like and they consider it a feature , which is why there is not option for turing it off.
it does build on x86-64. i also tested it on athlon64 fx-51 running a custom compiled 64bit archlinux. following the ways of arch, i put all the stuff in /opt/e17 and added that to my ld.so.conf also there is a guide on get-e.org for how to build it. so please read it.
My problem is simple.
The e17 configure script wrongly uses the 32bit nVidia /usr/lib/libGL.so instead of the 64bit one (at /usr/lib64/libGL.so).
I needed to manually fix the ./configure script to get it to build… and even that failed in the end.
Downloading it now and let’s see how it runs on x86_64 under qemu.
Looks very good the desktop.As a matter of fact i’m writing this on elive from within qemu.Allthough a bit slow because i simply issued:”qemu -cdrom elive.iso”,without the accelerator module,(i wonder how elive will run inside vmware).Nevertheless i kind of like the E17 desktop,clean and beautifull.I think i’m going to keep it besides fluxbox.
I’ve been using E-17 on my gentoo system now for a couple of months. I’d tried it before then, but it wasn’t stable enough. This last time it’s been great, it’ll run for a couple of weeks stably. I had been using windowmaker.
Some comments:
– I really like the way it handles dual heads.
– I wish I had a hot key to throw the mouse over to the other head. (at least there’s decent hotkey support now)
– I wish there was the ability to save current workspace.
I am a tad perplexed about why they decided to use a binary format for the files. It’s not like reading & parsing off of disk is slow…
Any repository with E17 packages for Ubuntu Breezy?
Thanks for elive. It’s a Desktop Linux that includes the programs I use most often . Even a Deb distro with Mplayer! I ended up building a 2.6.13 kernel to get ndiswrapper working with my SMC USB wireless device. Have no Idea how to make larger desktop fonts the defaults are too small.
On the other side : With the recent conversation on X ,fragmention etc —Is E17 a window manager or more?
“On the other side : With the recent conversation on X ,fragmention etc —Is E17 a window manager or more?”
That’s a good question. EVAS is designed to render to anything, be it a framebuffer in main or video memory, Cairo (and any of its backends), GL, and Qtopia. Possibly more. E17 cannot probe the video hardware, though, so it needs something. This is where the issues Jon Smirl raised come into play. There is massive confusion about what (if any) hardware drivers should be implemented in userspace by the X server. This derives from X being cross-platform and running on systems that don’t have the same level of kernel support that Linux provides.
E17 does not confuse the issues surrounding X. However, it was designed making no assumptions about the future viability of X or what sorts of capabilities it might provide. A lot of people are frustrated with X right now. It isn’t necessarily that Xorg or freedesktop.org aren’t moving in the right direction, it’s that the process of coming out of the dark ages of XFree86 doesn’t necessarily make for rapid strides in development. With X11R7, we are approaching the rennaissance of the free software desktop. The modular tree is like the moveable-type printing press in this analogy.
I am happy to see Enlightenment getting there. I use it on my desktop and am pleased with it’s quickness. I hope there will be more e apps made such as a dvd player and or im client.
I ran this via live cd on my P2 300 mhz celeron and holy crap…. it was fast, I am impressed. I can run a KDE and Gnome from a hd install ok but they are sloooooow via live cd, e17 was even fast via live cd, I think I may very well install this on my P2 just because it looks so nice, is easy to use, and runs fast.
with Qt and GTK so prominent I don’t know how fast this will saturate the *nix market but e17 is very impressive and I with all this innovation I really hope they take up a decent portion of the *nix market share….. e17 can easily compete with MS and Mac.
does someone have a cache of the review?
Try:
http://flaviostechnotalk.com.nyud.net:8090/wordpress/index.php/2005…
I use OS X every day, but Elive doesn’t really strike me as a clone at all.
Similarities? It has a dock. Of couse, so did Afterstep. The dock isn’t unique to Mac.
Damn, these fonts look nice. I’m typing this from the live CD. Normally, I’m not a big eye candy fan. But this runs quite snappily. Nice job.
Ok, so I’m typing this in Firefox on Elive now. I notice that it’s not like SLAX or Knoppix or any of the other dedicated LiveCDs I’ve tried (which have been mostly Knoppix derivatives). The bootscreen brings back old memories of the first liveCD I ever tried, a SuSE 8.0 Live CD… or maybe, the Gentoo install CDs. It’s got a progress bar, and a bootscreen with an actual menu of presets to make it easier on you.
It is FAST. Faster than KDE on Gentoo. Faster than XFCE on Gentoo. Faster than Windows XP. Firefox feels like Opera, (I’d just today been admiring how the free copy of Opera I picked up last week was really fast compared to Firefox) Somehow Firefox is also rendering Flash animations like the one on this page so smoothly I don’t notice any sort of lag at all. And I’m now noticing there’s less of a delay before the letters I type show up on the screen. I didn’t even realize there WAS a lag until now.
There was about one minute of lag during which I didn’t think my mouse was clicking and I ended up with 8 elive terminals and 6 instances of Firefox… but since then it’s been fast.
Let me try moving this screen around and see what happens….
Ok, I tried Enlightenment a long time ago, and had forgotten how they link the desktops. I ended up on another desktop. Anyway, moving the window around was fast, though there was tearing and it kept trying to dock on the sides.
I should mention that it crashed when I tried to change to the Enlightenment theme, from the Elive theme, and in this one there’s more tearing (or it’s more noticeable). I like the Elive theme better.
Anyway. My system (Dell Inspiron 8500, 2.5 GhZ Pentium 4-M with 512 MB RAM and nVidia GeForce Ti 4200 Go) has NEVER felt this fast, and this is from a Live CD. With eye candy.
I think I have to see if I can get it to run at 1920×1200 so I can do a real comparison. I also need to figure out how to get Firefox back in the dock, because I accidentally dragged it out during that first minute there…
Those Gnome windows really ruin this nice-looking distro. Oh well, they’re getting closer.
Yep, the GTK-theme used for the screenshots is not the finest of all. On gnome-look.org, you’ll find some themes for GTK that are more or less optimized for the e-themes.
Also, take a look at these (still not the most beautiful themes, but looking better):
http://kwh.kernow-gb.com/~bvc/theme/screenshots/E17-Smooth_sharp_4_…
http://kwh.kernow-gb.com/~bvc/theme/screenshots/E17-Smooth_blue-eye…
For e-themes:
http://get-e.org/Themes/E17/index.html
Things seem to take a lot of time to start up the first time.
Also, it’s kinda hard to figure out (initially) what icon on the dock goes to what program; they don’t seem to have text tooltips.
And xconf doesn’t exist? so I can’t change the resolution or anything.
it’s under /etc/X11/XF86Config, not xorg.conf
Good to see screenshots of an actual E17 install, the last ones where only of E16+engage. I see they are also using the Clean theme, very good choice.
Live CDs are perfect for previewing the latest technology. Evolution 0.17 seems to be heading for the right direction. It actually makes quite an attractive desktop — something one couldn’t say of 0.16.
Still, for daily use I prefer a desktop that stays out of the way. While you’re working with applications, you don’t want the kind of desktop that keeps screaming: “Hey, look at me! I can do stunts!”
I know it isn’t the point of a technology preview liveCD to have everything perfect, but is it just me or do they not have dmix enabled by default?
I thought Linux distros were over with the sound issue?
E17 is really exiting. All the eyecandy they have managed to do with evas/e17, completely without GPU acceleration, is amazing. The xorg guys are struggeling with their acceleration architectures to get render reasonably fast but evas/e17 can do it already. And it doesen’t even hog your CPU!
It’s still a bit rough around the edges though.
E17 looked nice from within qemu so i decided to install it from cvs on gentoo.I don’t regret it a bit,very responsive and good looking.
just tried out elive.. its interesting.. nothing to rant over. i dont care much for “eye-candy”.. bubbly garbage.
its the fastest, and for the amount of eyecandy best wm de for my 450mhz, not even xfce or fluxbox can touch it
Haha I’m posting this from my te2000 toshy laptop right now, running off the Elive Cd, It rocks!
BTW it’s not like OSX it’s very diffrent animal, it has BeOS like speed and it does not feel like BeOS.
It has it’s own feel.
This is what Linux should be.
Try it, it is worth the download.
Quoting Wrawrat>
“Without applications and integration, E17 is going to stay an interesting tool for nerds”
I beg to differ, I’m no nerd, and I’m no geek.
Gimp and Audio tools work fine I don’t get your point.
I don’t see Windows users porting the whole Gnome and KDE UI over just to run Gimp on windows, only the libraries are needed. Less is more!
With E16/E17 the programs they feel FASTER. Stuff the theory on integration it doesn’t work for raw speed.
Quoting Wrawrat>
“Right now, the lack of programs designed for E17 makes you use apps relying on QT or GTK+”
Oh Der! it’s a Desktop environment to run applications,
Just because Gnome and KDE jump off a cliff and kill themselves it doesn’t mean they are models to follow. We are talking users here and raw speed and to hell with Gnome and KDE theory desktop politics. That’s what I get when using Elive.