E17 (Enlightenment) enters alpha after 12 years | Hacker News Reader

E17 (Enlightenment) enters alpha after 12 years

enlightenment.org

151 pointsstock_toaster75 comments

Yeah, I also remember E16.. Seems like Rasterman was the first one who made icons, that represent the content of file, and those transparent window titles and other decorations. And pseudo-transparent ETerm. Now we have all that in Gnome, but back then it was a feeling of going into the right direction.

Nowadays it must be a great product, because it was made with vision, for themselves, re-implementing cleanly and consistently all the layers from the very foundation, with attention to every detail. These are landmarks of a remarkable opensource product.

Someday I will replace my Gnome.)

Heck from what I remember, half of the compsiting stuff that's done now with compiz/kwin in modern desktops was pioneered with E17 development, they used Xgl before the accelerated compositing was possible with GLX_texture_from_pixmap and the like.

Rasterman is kinda rushing into this, no? Seems like just last millenium I was installing DR16.

I would love for it to catch on again, but I wonder if/how it can build an audience after such a long hiatus (notwithstanding EFL etc.).

Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3, it still has a pretty good chance. It does seem to be ok on the BSDs and the libraries are quite nice to use elsewhere so that is a bonus

I think for the most part, the people that are unhappy with Gnome 3 aren't looking for something new: they just want Gnome 2.

I sure don't. Various areas like the GNOME panel were visibly crutchy and full of historical assumptions/design. This was fixed with GNOME 3 but other areas were/are suffering various levels of undue abuse. If I were looking for GNOME 2 I'd be using XFCE instead (as many people around me are). In place I use OSX — both a more solid foundation and more configurable than GNOME3 — and Awesome/Arch — striving to drop all/most GTK and QT dependencies.

I don't think so. There are a lot of problems with Gnome 3, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of problems with Gnome 2 as well.

>Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3,

Nah, that flag has flown. The time has passed where I would've moved to E17. I've since gone past that on to XMonad.

At one point, my favorite desktop by far. As it happens, a few weeks ago I decided to take E16 for a spin after many many years of neglect. It still felt great and snappy. I'll be trying this latest alpha for sure.

That's not really impressive, considering it was designed for computers from 15 years ago. I'd be pretty surprised if it weren't snappy.

Still a nice environment though, and ridiculously customizable.

Wow! I still have "rasterman.com" memorized because I'd check in once every year or two for the past decade it feels like, to see how it was going. Something about E17 always seemed cool, but I've never used Linux as my primary desktop so I haven't played around with it much. Congrats to the team!

Some years ago (in 2005 or 2006) I always ran the latest E17 builds as my primary desktop environment. I really liked it! Some things about it were awesome, but OTOH it always was a little bit incomplete. It just took too long, because in 2006 I bought a mac and moved away from Linux.

On my current laptop I had Linux installed for a couple of months, but I didn't try E17 anymore. It just was too late, I didn't want to go through the checkout/build/install stuff again. And now I have removed Linux completely (again), because an Ubuntu update took four days, and after that my mouse didn't work anymore.

Anyway, congrats to the E17 team! I still think you have a great piece of software there.

It is too bad that you gave up on Linux and Enlightenment. e17 has been in Debian for a while now, you do not have to manually build it anymore. Why did the update take you 4 days? Are you bandwidth limited? Dialup?

Does anyone have a good guide, or set of packages, to get this going in Ubuntu?

I have tried a couple of guides and packages already, so please only suggest something if you know it works, I know how to google!

You can install it from this ppa https://launchpad.net/~hannes-janetzek/+archive/enlightenmen... .

  $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn
  $ sudo apt-get update
  $ sudo apt-get install e17

Logout and choose Enlightenment before login. Have fun!

Also try out terminology, the new E17 terminal. It has an awesome look and feel. Once it supports tabs i'll use it fulltime :)

Thank you. It's on my TODO-list but not on top priority. I'm mostly working on compatibility issues these days. If you found some, please open a bug report or contact me about them.

Oh great, one thing i noticed weeks ago (and apparently it's still behaving that way):

When you maximise the terminal and mark everything with the mouse the CPU goes crazy. efreet_icon_cache is taking up 100% CPU and the laptop becomes very noisy.. I guess it's not supposed to take up all CPU for that good looking marked text thingy :)

I can reproduce your issue. Please don't mark everything with your mouse for the time being :)

I came here from google search for a problem- I missed HN the day this thread came on. I 'discovered' enlightenment last summer and found it to be a wonderful solution for my netbook. I was traveling alot and pretty much have my netbook as a full development 'travel rig.'

The problem is that I want to have gnome installed side-by-side-- which seems to mean that the network manager (EConnMan I think you call it) doesn't work.

I know there was a way to do it but I forgot (that's what brings me to this page).

So, my comment: If this could sit easily and seamlessly next to gnome- that is, whatever hack is needed for EConnMan (and perhaps other 'gotchas') were built in as shortcuts, for example, I think you would win a lot of people over. It's excellent for being an out-of-the way work environment.

I also think it helps show off the linux world when you can quickly and easily switch between work environments. My $0.02.

EDIT: So I'm now logged in on E and obviously remembered the network hack: start nm-applet from the terminal. It will at least connect to a known network.

EDIT #2: The only other issue I've had on the netbook is getting the control-bar-menu gizmo out of the way of the windows so I can use the screen real estate I have for my editors and such. You have to turn this on in settings.

Is there a way to change the TERM variable. It is by default set to xterm, while it should be set to xterm-256color because it supports 256 colors.

It was doing more harm than good, but XTERM_256_COLORS is set to 1. I hope we'll change TERM to xterm-256color soon.

Just tried this out and all I can say is WOW. Extremely fast, responsive and more eye candy than any other terminal emulator I've seen. Could this be the year of the E17 desktop?

I've never understood why Ubuntu takes a couple seconds to open a terminal window. I don't have a fast computer, but... it's a terminal window.

Could it be your .rc files?

.rc files are default. Unless the defaults are what make it slow?

Or your .bash_history might be very large.

Try some lightweight terminal like sakura (my current preference) :)

I just went through

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=download

Grabbed the EFL libs and did a bunch of tar -xzf , ./configure, make, sudo make install

Then did the same for the tarball for the alpha.

I had run various incarnations of e17 in the past which left a bit of odd setup. I removed ~/.e/e so I started with a fresh start on the alpha.

The EFL are amazing! E17 is a compositing WM with great software rendering. The software rendering is so fast that you can mistake it for hardware accelerated.

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/efl

What are the key features? Why should I wanna try use it? Where is it better then other window managers? I cant find these information on the website. Just that it is "lean, fast, modular and very extensible window manager" which tells me nothing. I see that it is also for Mac and Windows. What does it have that these OSes dont have? What would be the benefint of using E17 ond windows 7?

You appear to be have come across a cultural conflict since you are approaching this as if it were a product when in actuality it is an OSS project. There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you, hence the lack of marketing. Marketing is generally a non-term in this culture. Good ideas spread through word of mouth here. Outside of the world of business, the responsibility for learning about new things is placed squarely on the side of the end user (this includes end users promoting projects to each other), not the developers.

But to answer your question, this project is an incredible engineering feat. E17 is built on top of a set of libraries which provide lightening fast rendering even on the CPU. The previous incarnation of Enlightenment, E16, was considered to be one of the most advanced window managers for it's time due to the rich eye candy it provided (and this was back in the days of KDE 1 when everything else looked grey and boring). E17 has been in development for a very long time much to the dismay of many a geek. It is the Duke Nukem Forever of window managers. It's not as impressive in this era of compositing window managers (though it can do that too), but if you ever find yourself wanting to use a slick WM on a Pentium 2 then this will run as smooth as silk.

He's asking valid questions. I'd ask a succint question: what features can make it more productive to me in comparison with, say, Windows 7 desktop?

> There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you,

This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)

This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)

I highly doubt that marketing their coding skills is why the Enlightenment developer(s) started writing OSS.

> This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)

Speaking as someone who has developed and released open source software, I can tell you why: because it's damn cool when other people find your code useful. An added bonus is that they sometimes send patches. I'm certainly not getting rich from it (in the form of job offers or other things).

Plug: I'm a committer on a tiling WM written in python which is also gearing up for release soon: http://qtile.org

These points have already been addressed by others but I'll elaborate further.

This is simply a different culture and perspective. I know that in business we primarily tend to think of things in terms of the value they provide. The motivation behind OSS projects rarely has anything to do with personal profit. They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need and decides to share their solution with the world, or they just want to create something cool for the sake of it or they're trying to learn a new technology and need something to practice on. It's like charity - you don't advertise the fact that you do it, you just help out and hope that it makes a difference. Personally, I think that people only really try to sell things when there is an expectation of exchange - when something is being given away for free, what is the motivation for marketing it? Why would you waste time talking about the result of doing the things you love to do instead of doing them?

I think that this is where the notion of marketing being a force of evil comes from - if something is being sold, it's because someone is trying to convince you to give up something you have. It is inherently selfish. OSS is the opposite - it's selfless - you give without the expectation of getting (yet in real terms you get many orders of magnitude more than you put in - something which just doesn't happen in the business world). It's like a pyramid scheme which actually works.

meh. sometimes people don't know what's best for them. That's why you market.

> They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need

This I understand and do not contend.

> and decides to share their solution with the world

This is marketing, not necessarily for the money. It may be for recognition (yeah, I too know the "high" feeling when somebody comes to you and says you're doing something cool); for the hope that more people will join in so you get to be the leader; for having a non-trivial (hopefully) successful project to put on the CV; to feel yourself useful to the community, etc, etc.

Bottom line: when you make something publicly available, you're marketing it. You're "selling" your product in exchange for some of the immaterial goods (see above) that you can get only from other people.

> It is the Duke Nukem Forever of window managers.

To be fair, though, E17 has been quite usable for years. I was doing daily SVN pulls in college (so, pre-2007) without stability issues. There are occasionally very minor bugs, but I can't remember it ever being as buggy/disrupting to my workflow as Unity currently is.

The key features have to be seen to be believed. Really, it is (actually, in my experience, used to be) astounding and lightning fast (the best desktop by far for a Pentium).

EDIT: for you, urza, there are probably no benefits in using E17 - or any other environment you're not familiar with. That being said, I'm explaining what benefits it gives me.

> I see that it is also for Mac and Windows

Seriously? Don't know about Mac, but do you really consider Windows to be "extensible" or customizable? Out of the box, Enlightenment supports full scripting capabilities (think AutoHotKey - everything you do can be done by sending a command to E17 server from terminal) and theming with which you can make it look as you wish (http://e17-stuff.org/). It's built-in. On Windows you need expensive Stardock Window Blinds (IIRC) and clumsy AutoHotKey to get the same functionality - and then it gets slow, while E17 remains lightning fast.

As for "fast"... Well, take a look at this quote:

"For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs)" (http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en)

Now try and use Windows 7 on a machine with 64MB of RAM :)

I actually use E17 as my only WM at work (on FreeBSD at that). I almost never touch the mouse for WM related tasks; combine with VIM as an editor and Vrome in Chromium and I almost never touch the mouse, period. It's fast (starts up in 3-4 seconds), responsive (changing virtual desktops while CPU is being fully used by gcc is as fast as on standby) and in the past year I didn't encounter even a single bug (I remember in the past when something went wrong and E crashed, it used to display a message in the console: "Bad programmer! Naughty programmer! SPANK, SPANK, SPANK! Now go and fix your code!" - but I didn't have a chance to see if it's still the case). Customizable to ridiculous extent and looks quite a lot better than ratpoison.

The only thing I'd like to see is a smart tiling manager extension. Preferably turned on/off on per virtual desktop basis. It probably will be done in the future. In the meantime E17 remains the only WM that is both fast and pretty, and which goes out of your way without imposing anything on you while providing sane defaults.

Ok, that's just my opinion; fans of XFCE, Black/Busy/etcbox, Xmonad and others can argue. Fans of Gnome and KDE, Windows and Mac - please don't bother :)

I was a huge fan / dedicated user of E16 back in the day. Someone needs to prod Garrett LeSage, tigert, et al and get them to update their old themes (SpiffE17 please Garrett!).

Would love to see screenshots if anyone got it built and running?

Few examples (many, many people got this "built and running"):

    http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/95258-2.jpeg
    http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/100923-2.jpeg
    http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/110281-2.jpeg
    http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/115796-2.jpeg

And I use heavily customized bohdi theme, which originally looked like this: http://e17-stuff.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/119928-2.jpeg

Unfortunately, I'm sick and not going to work this week, so no screenshots of my desktop today :(

Nothing fancy, but freshly built:

http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-509c4a7ebd7ef3.90681957.jp...

That's 'efm' on the left and 'terminology' on the right...

I'm not normally a fan of the dark themes, but I figured I'd stick with the default for a bit to see how it felt. It's pretty nice.

I wanted to see a screenshot. I clicked the image on the home page, it took me to the "About" page. I clicked the image on the about page, it took me to the wiki. I still can't find a single full-size image.

BTW, if you're interested in a modern Linux desktop, you should look at ElementaryOS (http://elementaryos.org/discover). It's built on Ubuntu, so has great hardware support.

The design seems to feel like they were designed by someone with no aesthetic taste but has just made things they think will look bling. I'm sure that it does something very impressive, but I can't see why everyone raves about it.

Well, back 10 years ago when Gentoo worked like Ubuntu does now except it was n^2 slower and came with 3 difficulty modes for installation, e16 was the bee's knees window manager. You could edit your own GUI menus by configuring a text file! everything was infinitely customizable. EVERYTHING. not to mention having transparent eterms with really cool backgrounds. In this context, e17 was the shang-ri-la of desktop environments and also perpetual vaporware. I looked forward to e17 for years but they never seemed to make progress. Just a screenshot here and there, tantalizing us. then Compiz came out and I forgot about it completely. The allure has to do with the fact that it had great potential and it was being made by uncompromising perfectionists. Like the novel that the fans were begging to be released but the Author refused because it wasn't quite perfect yet. Well now, after so many years, the progenitor is ready to reveal the creation. I am ready to see the vision.

Well, you say that, but really it's had rather stable and public development, and it was my main desktop for a long time in 2005 and 6. I think part of the reason it became so drawn out was that it was already more or less a release product without the release numbers.

I wasn't seriously tempted to try it again until I read this post. Poetic nostalgia! Somewhere deep down inside I'm also a-yearning for the Hurd...

Oh man. I remember using e16 for a while way back in the day. The "water effect" desktop thing always turned heads.

aside: Interesting, but brief, interview with the project lead (Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler): http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Seeking-Enlightenment-...

Ran it, wasn't able to get my second monitor to rotate to the proper orientation within 5 minutes, switched back to Gnome2. (I hear the MATE fork is doing well on distros that took away Gnome2.) It didn't seem much prettier than stock Xfce4, but it's good to have competition and congrats on the project for lasting this long.

From the about page [0]:

> Free.fr is shipping millions of set top boxes in France, powered by EFL

Free is a major ISP here (and a major proponent of FOSS and net neutrality) and I was really surprised at that. It's apparently part of a SDK. The box GUI looks like a variant of XBMC[0].

[0]: http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en [1]: http://www.mac4ever.com/images-v3-actu/59410_352_la_freebox_... [2]: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(Freebox)

I took E16, newly installed on my laptop, to a work presentation once. I was really excited to turn the thing on and see everyone's eyes bug out. But I plugged the projector in and it turned out there was some strange compatibility problem. One step forward, two back.

i still remember me hacking through all the configuration files of E16, yeeeeears ago.

If i hadn't shifted from Linux to MacOSX, it would probably still be my window manager of choice.

But boy, this e17 thing is taking a ridiculous long time!

e17 has been pretty darned useful and, from my user's viewpoint, stable for pre-alpha software... and the anti-user, customization is evil attitude of the GNOME 3 developers has pushed me to switch to e17. I seriously recommend Bodhi Linux.

I never understood the allure of enlightenment, I always thought XFCE, Fluxbox/blackbox/openbox was a much more aesthetic minimal de. Everytime I saw an enlightenment desktop I thought I was being sent back in the past

Enlightenment was never supposed to be aesthetically minimal, quite the contrary in fact. When every other WM still had flat menu bars and Windows 95 style start menu's, Enlightenment was full of chrome, graphical effects and elaborate theming facilities. It was really a showcase for making your desktop look good, with minimal hardware requirements.

Indeed.. i remember when i was so proud to have a nice looking desktop manager with really old hardware running, it was awesome.

Nowadays i am not sure.. i will try E17 again and see how it compares today :)

(p.s.: i even did a screencast of my "wunderful" E17 Desktop 5 years ago and it still has effects and a look and feel that is ahead of gnome/unity/xfce with a laptop that was over 5 years old back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOa8o1tgIU )

Oh my, I'd almost forgotten about all the gold. Lot's of excessive shimmering too.

It's clearly a technically very impressive desktop environment, but I always thought they needed better design for the actual themes.

That's why i used the black alternative scheme, that was muuuuch better. :)

As someone who has known Carsten (Raster) for well over a dozen years, and has given him a never-ending stream of invective for being slower than George W. Bush doing calculus...its about bloody time.

I know its yet another useless comment, but back in the day of E16 and beginnings of E17 I was a really big fan. Its great to see it finally being Alpha!

Congratulations to the Enlightenment team!

As a Gnome fan, i used E16 as a replacement for Metacity (i believe?) and it was great.

This one time at a former employer, my boss was touring a visitor around the office while i was flipping the windows just because and it got their attention for a 5m talk ("oh shiny what is that ?") :-)

wish this could be the answer to all the gnome mess that has been going on lately...

Remember BlueSteel?

Remember installing linux for the first time to try it out?

Remember discovering what a winmodem was…

Hey, there was the ridiculously named 'Hand of god' theme with the titlebar on the side !

Good days ... running the ripple effect on the bottom ... bring me bling !

yes yes, the ripple effect. In those days people could hardly believe what they were seeing and all went like 'is THAT linux?'

And that sweet dramatic unveiling of the desktop, swishing across virtual desktops, funky pager, widgets...

Linux was so much fun and personal those days.

That was before we tried to make Linux a mass market OS.

> Remember installing linux for the first time to try it out?

I am starting to think this will happen soon.

Wow, I had forgotten about how disappointed I was when I found out about winmodems. That tempered my fascination with Linux fairly quickly at the time.

Since you start the nostalgia train. I remember recompiling the kernel over and over again with different options and modules.

I remember the ripples and the flames on the logon screen. Downloading the latest source of E almost nightly. Spending time hanging out on #E.

Good times.

Remember BlueSteel? I'm using it right now. Still use the latest Enlightenment DR16 on all my Linux and Solaris boxes. It does everything I need a window manager to do.

Most of my time in E16 was spent sitting patient and inert, waiting for someone to walk by my desk so I could impress them with the awesome window flipping and water animations. Well, that and posting endless screenshots of my setup to various forums. Whenever I'm feeling down I pour myself a drink and browse my "screenshots_2002" folder :)

> Remember discovering what a winmodem was...

I still have my first non-winmodem installed in my machine, though I haven't had an active phone line in my apartment for years... ahhh, nostalgia!

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