E17 Enlightenment - svn 062

Thursday, 13 August 2009 10:52

E17 Enlightenment - svn 062 per Mandriva 2009.1

E17 è la versione in sviluppo del window manager Enlightenment

Le sue caratteristiche principali, che lo rendono unico in tutto il panorama dei DE e WM, sono la sua estrema leggerezza e velocità coniugata ad un look & feel di estrema qualità: supporto per sfondi animati, struttura modulare, trybar moderna, icone sul desktop, file manager, ecc.

 

 

 

 

 

Per questo infatti viene considerato un ibrido tra un Windows Manager ed un Desktop Enviroment, che in gergo si chiama Desktop Shell (nome coniato dagli stessi sviluppatori di E17)

Sul lato prettamente tecnico questo DE è apprezzabile per le sue librerie per lo sviluppo grafico che sono un must per gli appassionati.


Il MIB ne ha fatto un porting aggiornato e completo costituito da ben 58 RPM e con ben 24 moduli attivi, rendendolo di fatto funzionante.

(Non si conosce il motivo ma E17 di mandriva era poco aggiornato ed addirittura su molte distro aveva dei pacchetti non funzionanti)

Il Desktop è stato in testing per qualche settimana, e non avendo riscontrato problemi da parte dei nostri tester, abbiamo finalmente deciso di renderlo pubblico.

 

How to Install - Per installare
From a root terminal/konsole

urpmi task-e17-mib

 

 


Sito web:
http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=index&l=en

Changelog:

New snapshot 062, with many bugs fixed, all parts are improved, etc
062 release is the last pre-alpha
In september they are going to release E17 alpha 1

Mandriva contrib port:
Mandriva's version of E17 in 2009.1 is very old, and really outdated:
Most likely old build doesn't have many important modules included...

MIB optimized port:
- MIB port consists of 58 rpms with all plugins modules enabled:
Some of these packages are build with extra patches from E17 mailing list.

- MIB 64bit (x86_64) version is full 100% native 64bit, and with all libs

- MIB 32bit (i686) version is full 100% i686 optimized

- As for modules, this Spring E17 finally got system tray module and in addition, we included some modules from OpenGeu:
edgar, extramenu, trash

- And our Eterm supports unicode

- All packages are built with special patches to enable all features:
Composite, 3D effects, all working

What is Enlightenment?

Enlightenment is a window manager. Enlightenment is a desktop shell. Enlightenment is the building blocks to create beautiful applications. Enlightenment, or simply e, is a group of people trying to make a new generation of software.

If you want to learn more about the history behind the Enlightenment Project check out the about pages. For the casual user there are various support resources available. For anyone looking to help out with the project the contributing pages should give you a good idea where to start looking.

Enlightenment 0.17 is the next generation of UNIX graphical environments. It is not just a window manager, but it is also a desktop shell. A desktop shell means, a window manager plus a file manager, plus configuration utilitys all in one. They are not separated as usual. Now, let’s take a closer look at all E17 features.

Enlightenment is fast. No, really. It’s fast. It is known to run on very slow machines (like 100 Mhz CPU, 64 MB of RAM) well. So you really don’t need a modern desktop to see some eye-candy and to use a modern graphical environment. Even more – you can control how fast you want it by using it’s Performance configuration panel to change the cache settings and more.

The high performance does not mean that there is no eye candy. There is eye candy that you have never seen before. Starting from the animated boot screen, to continue with the all animations and effects that themes could provide, to end up with fancy animated backgrounds. But not some huge .GIF files, but really nice animations. Every virtual desktop (at the moment you can have 24) can have it’s own background (animated or not), so you can put different wallpapers on the different virtual desktops. There are a number of effects that can be shown when you switch from the different virtual desktops. The menus, the borders and all other usual parts of a normal window manager are animated as well as some of the widgets (the sliders, for example). Remember that those effects are provided by the theme, so every theme makes E to look different, with different effects, look and feel and animations.

As we already mentioned, E17 provides a file manager as well. Of the time of writing, it is not completed and is in active development (as E17 as a whole itself), but after it is finished it will be a very nice, configurable and eye candy. Even right now, you can do the basic things with it – browse, copy, move, delete files. It will provide thumbnails for your pictures and will be able to open your files with the coresponding application of your choice.

E17 is highly configurable. Currently it has a nice configuration panel with dialogs for all kinds of things. You can change your wallpaper or your theme, your fonts, your screen resolution, your screen’s power settings, your keyboard and mouse settings, the language that Enlightenment talks to you, and so on. You can contol almost every apsect of what E is doing and how. It will do what you want it to do.

At this moment, E17 is localized in 20 languages, including latin languages like English and French, cyrillic languages like Russian and Bulgarian and even Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. Note that you can change the language on the fly without restarting E or your X server.

As you already know, Enlightenment 0.17 has lots of features, but one of the most important is, that you can add and remove functionality by using modules. Modules are small applications that extend E17. There can be modules tho show you the weather outside, or calendar modules, or modules to control your volume or whatever you may think. Developing a module is not that hard, so, if you have programming skills, you are more than welcome to develop and maintain some modules for the community.

 

 



 

Screenshots:

 

 

altri screenshots qui:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3582/3320478836_dce53b9a1e_o_d.png





Availability - Disponibilita’
Mandriva Linux 2009.1 - arch 32bit (i686) e per la prima volta in 64bit (x86_64) nativo al 100%

 

 

How to Install - Per installare
From a root terminal/konsole

urpmi task-e17-mib



Grazie al nostro packager Pulfer, a SymbianFlo, a odites e a tutti i nostri tester.

 

 




 

Dal nostro utente Massimiliano, che ringraziamo per la segnalazione, apprendiamo che:

Il team di Enlightenment ha cominciato a definire dei periodi (di solito di un we, nel dettaglio quello in corso è il primo) di FEATURE-FREEZE, durante i quali non è possibile aggiungere nuove funzionalità al svn tree, ma sono permessi solo commit per risolvere bug, o miglioramenti (non troppo massicci) in modo da permettere ai vari packagers di poter sfruttare una base di codice stabile.
Per ulteriori dettagli si consiglia di dare una occhiata ai thread relativi nella ml sviluppo/users (archivio devel -> http://tinyurl.com/dan3sw , archivio users -> http://tinyurl.com/cljlt7).
Si ricorda inoltre i canali IRC, molto utilizzati:

#edevelop (sviluppo)
#e (utenti)
#e-it (utenti it)
#e.fr (utenti fr)
#e.de (utenti de)

tutti su freenode.

Qui (http://tinyurl.com/dmqy87) si trova la pagina del wiki relativa a ReleaseSchedule, e il wiki contiene altre pagine interessanti per chi vuole contribuire al progetto: non solo codice, ma bug hunting, wiki, etc.