Enlightenment 0.16.8 (now known simply as ‘E16’) has been released. This new release comes with a built-in composite manager, a systray, simplified configuration files, and session scripting. E16.8 is incompatible with configuration settings and custom menu configuration files from earlier versions, and as such they will have to be changed in order to work with E16.8.
I recall E being around for what..a decade or so? And they still haven’t reached 1.0? What’s up ith the version scheem? Seriously, I want to know. 🙂
This comes from the FAQ, not so much about your question but about the development process in general:
Why hasn’t Enlightenment had a new major release in 3 years!?!
Extensive work has been done creating a set of foundation libraries for the next Enlightenment release for more information see the EFL FAQ.
We know it has been a long frustrating wait for users and we appreciate everyone’s patience. Enlightenment has a long proud history of producing the best ahead-of-it’s-time eye-candy on the planet that is emulated for years to come, and we have no desire to release a half arsed product just to make people happy for 2 or 3 days until they start complaining. The results will be well worth the wait.
If you’ve played around with their CVS it’s already worth the wait. I’m waiting for them to finish up the nice touches and fix the last memory leaks.
Considering as how the main site says this:
“Enlightenment, as of DR0.17 (which hasn’t been released yet. latest developent snapshots are 0.16.999)”
I’m thinking 0.17 is coming soon.
I know I’m excited for it. The builds I played with 6 months ago were close to usable for day to day. One of my biggest problems was actually finding a theme that didn’t give me a headache!
It was a bit difficult to figure out how to make the files it uses for application icons, but once I figured that out it was a breeze to configure. Also, once I figured out the CLI program to config things.
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-00.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-01.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-02.avi
http://www.rasterman.com/files/e17_movie-03.avi
I remember when Enlightenment was new and cool and I really wanted to play with it. Then 1996 or 1997 hit and it started to look dated and the project looked dead. I just sorta moved on and stopped caring about it.
And now that I have moved onto OSX, I just look at the screenshots
Sure, E16 (at least, the version I can use on my school’s computers) is rather dated-looking. It’s feature set is prime though. I love its implementation of virtual/multiple desktops.
And if you want pretty, check out E17 <http://www.enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/DR17/>, it looks amazing, better and less candy-like than OS X (I my opinion), and it’s fairly stable. I’ve only used it from the live CD, and it was about as responsive as Gnome from a live CD, even with all the animations etc. If I could get it installed reliably on my laptop with full support, I’d love to dual boot into it rather than KDE (my laptop tends not to like Linux installs: Debian/Ubuntu’s installer hangs due to USB support, and while SuSE installed, only about half the time I boot into it does it even power my USB ports).
I like Enlightenment just for the fact that on my old 200mhz laptop with 96megs of RAM it works pretty well and most of the eye candy is usable. I haven’t been able to do that with some of the other window managers or desktop environments.
E17 is the answer to the question people stopped wanting answered about 5 years ago. Before Gnome 2.x and KDE 3.x E17 looked ahead of it’s time. Now its right on time…unfortunately by the time its done it will be years behind.
The only reason I switched from WinXP to Linux this time last year was because I wanted to use Enlightenment. Enlightenment 17 specifically. I had linux on an old Pentium 166Mhz which ran E16 pretty well, so that had impressed me before, but E17 is what made me switch. Not the latest GNOME or KDE releases, but an Enlightenment development release. That’s how much I like it.
So from my own perspective as an actual user, I don’t think what you are saying has much validity.
Other things e17 has going for it:
– doesn’t need expensive high end hardware to be enjoyed
– nor special X extensions
With regards to an e17 release – my money says that it’ll be out by the end of the year (and I think that’s a pessimistic estimate). Why? Check out the logs for the TODO list for e17. The list is continual getting shorter and shorter. Feature requests are not being accepted unless it’s for obviously necessary stuff, otherwise you have to hack it in yourself. That said, for people who want to use it – go ahead. Sure it’s in development, but it’s generally quite solid.
The thing is that many hardcore Unix hackers still want a minimalist desktop environment. With E17 they’ll get that, but with some extra eye candy to boot.
From what I’ve seen, Rasterman has put a lot of effort into making sure the API is very clean.
e17 is awesome, whats missing is the whole accessability thing. and workflow. yeh If I could get to a terminal, a filesystem browser, and amorok I’d be happy. But so far two weeks with it has kinda givin me a headach as all of the above escape me for some reason…..
The default to get to a terminal is <ctrl><alt><insert>, but if you don’t like that, you can change it.
You can define additional keybindings to get you your filesystem browser and amorok as well.
Until a day or so ago, to configure key-bindings you had to know how to use the enlightenment_remote command line tool to set things up, which is probably more than your average new user can be bothered to learn, but a new key-binding configuration GUI dialog has just been added so you can do all of your key-binding configuration graphically. It’s pretty nice, but will likely get a little easier to use yet.
A few years ago I got an old Sun Ultra 1 workstation, that only had 8bit graphics for its gorgeuos hi-res screen. After having tired of banging my head against Solaris I went ahead and installed Debian on it. Everything worked like a charm, but I couldn’t ge X to work properly with only 256 colors.
I tried a slew of window managers, and the only one with a usable color scheme avaliable was TWM… All the rest of them was totally f–ked up. But then, in a desperate attempt, I tried the most eye-candy focused, high-tech of them all, the one that never ever crossed my mind… And it worked like a charm. As fast the the different *box, as clean as TWM and a feature set that could compare to anyones.
I like everyones nostalgic comments so let me add mine: 5-6 years ago (!) when I was fresh into linux I played around with almost all windowmanagers available (at that time). Before I get stuck to windowmaker (anyone remember this?) I had a long relatioship with enlightement …
Basically I think that the times where people would be impressed by a plain window manager have passed. Users expect more sophisticated desktop environments that can do more that move the windows around or respond to a couple of keyboard shortcuts. E17 seems to go in an interesting direction. What bothers me is that even if it gets released after 10 years, it will still be the most innovative and easy to use desktop ever (I am not very optimistic about the rest).
There is a lot to be said for WindowMaker on old hardware. Very fast, and surprisingly accessible to naive users. At a poor charity I put it on an old K6 machine that wouldn’t run anything else, and a lady with a real phobia about computers said after a quick demo, well of course I could use that.
The problem with many DTEs is that they are marketing designed, and their purpose is for sale rather than use. You will never go into a room full of screens running OSX and XP and KDE and Gnome and pick out the one running WindowMaker after a two minute tour. It is totally unspectacular. After a couple of weeks of use, however, its a different matter, especially for people who just want to get to and use two or three apps and are prepared to use the file manager as a desktop. I put in xfe, which some find sacreligious.
Enlightenment is equally fast, but probably not for the naive user. I would agree with the other poster about E-Live. That’s a wonderful effort by the little team, a painless way to try it, and very nicely done. Really deserves support.
You can also get E17 prepackaged on one of the premium edition of Vector for a modest fee. Will make it a lot easier to install.
Enlightenment may just be ready for a comeback!
Running E w/ the “Hand of God” theme. Anytime anybody walked behind me and saw my workstation, I could hear the resounding sound of their jaw hitting the floor.
That day is gone, I’ve also since migrated to OSX, but boy – those were the days. Then all this do-all-everything-etc “Desktop Environment” crap came out, and I just got tired of it all and ran for the hills (OSX).
It used to be, you had a WM that allowed you to be productive and get work done. (I.E. Right click contextual menu of only the programs you use, grouped however you wanted to.) This is what E did, and it tossed (non-intrusive) eye-candy on top. I have no idea what E17 will be like, but I hope it stays true to the roots of E. I left E because there was a pause in development where there wasn’t really a maintained version anymore. Maybe some day I can go back.
Edited 2006-02-10 01:14
I haven’t seen this “Hand of God” theme, I googled and browsed through few E17-theme sites but I can’ find anything about this theme except it was mentioned on Slashdot by someone 2 years ago. Could you give me some hints about fining it? :p
http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/handofgod2/
http://members.at.infoseek.co.jp/semishigure/images/hog_desk.jpg
It was never on E17 AFAIK. I ran it waaaay back when, I don’t even think E was at 16 at that point. That’s a port of the theme to E16. It’s been so many years, but from what I remember there were some clay/putty looking tombstone shaped almost OSX dock looking icons. This was pre-OSX, mind you. I don’t think I have any screenshots still from back then – well – somewhere on a cd, but I don’t know where it’s at. It might not look very impressive to you now (from the freshmeat screenshot) but keep in mind this was years and years ago. Back then, it was amazing.
Keep in mind, back then, anything done in Bryce was amazing, hehe. That’s where the background came from, it was rendered in Bryce. Remembering Bryce back then ( I used to use Vistapro) it’s just absolutely amazing the talent whoever made that background had. I wish I could find that guy and thank him for the year or two of absolute bliss I had using my workstation, and the hundreds of gawking passerbys!
Edited 2006-02-10 06:46
Could you please post a link to a screenshot of your desktop? I love looking at people’s setup, and I’d love to see your “Hand of God” theme.
Yeah, those were the days. (Sniff. Sniff.)
I haven’t moved on to OS X yet (still a hippy GNOME user), but Enlightenment was a big part of me not even venturing out to try KDE. I recall the backgrounds from digital blasphemy, the ripple effects on my desktop, the translucent E-terms, the slick menu structure… like it were yesterday.
Every single person who walked past was drooling, and many even thought I was playing a game at times.
Oh what fun it was to be a kid.
To the other two curious people, here is what he’s talking about:
http://www.theporch.house.cx/~nemo/gallery/wallpapers/god2
(the wallpaper)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/handofgod2/
(the theme)
Just a few short minutes of googling brought back so many memories. Today I use RedHat “Enterprise” Linux 4 with a sanitised GNOME. It’s not un-pretty, but it’s just so… business-like.
I recall a time when moving the mouse too fast would kill my X. The glorious days.
http://www.elivecd.org/
It’s quite impressive how well e17 runs off the cd. Elive 0.4 is supposed to be released next week.
The development of E17 has lasted for years, where is the end?
Edited 2006-02-10 09:45
Why, when it’s ready of course
If you want to try it anytime soon your best bet is probably cvs. Currently cvs is mostly stable and quite impressive. There are various areas where it needs and likely will get improvements before it has an official release, though.
And with the coming of E17 you can officially call it a desktop environment. And considering all the eyecandy that comes with it, it really is nice on your cpu.
I would like to extend my deepest gratitude and heartfelt thanks to the entire enlightenment crew and all the faithful for all their effort and politely answering the when question about a brazilian times.
It’s what the world is waiting for.
I had installed enlightenment earlier on my linux machine and after some use, I felt uncomfortable with the whole interface and switched back to gnome. I guess it could be just me or rather the UI needs some getting used to.