E17 Window Manager

[PackRat]

Been checking out the latest release of E17 from the Sid repos - there are build scripts available that will get the latest release from git, but I couldn't get them to work; they are possibly obsolete.

E17 has always marketed itself as a low resource window manager that allows for a lot of bling - and although that was pretty much accurate, in the past it was plagued by instability - it would regularly seg fault on my desktop single core AMD-64. Because of the instability, I never really used it as a main window manager; I would tinker with it because it is modular - like Fvwm - and you load the modules you choose which allowed for a lot of customization.

The current build in the repos seems pretty stable. No crashes yet, but I'm using my HP I3 laptop this time. Lowrider over at #! has been running stable E17 on his #! and Arch systems so it looks like the stable release is indeed stable.

Some shots showing resource usage - fluxbox with compton, Xfce with compositing, E17 with compositing, two terminals and conky. For fluxbox and E17 the terminal is urxvt with transparency, for Xfce it's the xfce4-terminal:



The available themes for E17 have improved a lot (more variety) - use to be they were almost all of the glassy/glossy aesthetic or OSX mimics; there are plenty more modern and gray scale color palettes now. Downside to customizing E17 is that it is a major pain to make your own - E17 uses it's own internal theme elements, but non-e17 apps use available gtk themes which is a nice improvement. As with earlier versions of E17, the E17 themes can be mixed and matched to your liking - i.e the clock module from theme X can be used in theme Y. Most of the buggy modules have been dropped from the base install, as the E17 devs seem to be focusing on improving what works.

E17 loads the compositing module by default, so I used the internal argb settings in conky for a transparent conky window.

All in all a big improvement for the E17 developers, but IMO they are a day late and a dollar (euro if you prefer) short. The improvements made to recent versions of Xfce - particularly the compositor - have pretty much made E17 irrelevant as far as having a WM/DE that combines low resources with as much bling as you want. Unless you're really concerned about the additional resources Xfce uses, it's the better choice, But if you want something different to tinker with, by all means give it a spin - or maybe load Bodhi or Elive into VM's - both are debian/ubuntu based; I liked elive when I had it installed, but E17 at that time just wasn't stable enough to keep it around. Never tried Bodhi, but have read good reviews.

[PackRat]

Bit of an update.

E18 has been out for a while but has yet to show up in the Sid repos. There may be a couple of options (other than compiling everything from source) though -

The easy_e17 has been updated - apparently - and is now called the easy_ELF.sh script; same author; get it here - http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/#easy_efl_sh
I tried it but got hung up getting some of the new dependencies for e18 (can't locate one called gstvideo) so I don't know if it will go to completion.

The other possibility is to use a Sparky Linux (based on Debian Testing) repo - http://sparkylinux.org/sparky-repository/#.
I added their repo for e18 only (obviously don't want the Debian Testing repos) and enlightenment now shows up in synaptic (as well as e17 from sid) - and apt-get seems to work and get the necessary deps:





I have yet to actually install e18 - need to back up all the essentials first - but may give it a go if I'm feeling ambitious next week. That vlc-data dependency may be the one necessary for gstvideo; I'll have to take a closer look at the e18 release notes, there seems to be some other multimedia-type dependencies which seems odd for a window manager (odd to me anyway).

If you're running Arch, e18 is in their AUR.

The few post from users that I have read really like it and claim it's stable now (congrat's to the e18 devs) - some nice looking screenshots on the Bodhi Linux site if you need a quick look.

[VastOne]

Great intel Rat Man... 

Any ideas based on past history of when one would see E18 in the SID repos?

[jeffreyC]

I suspect that at least part of the multimedia dependencies is from the E17/18 terminal emulator:

http://vsido.org/index.php?topic=536.0

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

[PackRat]

^ that's good to know; users of that terminal like it.

@vastone - I don't know when/if it will ever get to Sid. Maintaining e17 was a bit of a pain on the occasions I had it installed - the easy_e17 script builds from source - but not the dependencies like gentoo's emerge - combined with the continual development of e17 there was routine breakage during upgrades. It would not surprise me if there is no real packaging of e17/e18 going on at debian right now. I didn't see enlightenment 16 in  synaptic, so the whole enlightenment project may be falling by the wayside as far as debian packaging is concerned. Part of the reason I was looking for an e18 repo.

Edit - the e18 terminal has a lot of dependencies including vlc so pass on that for now.

e18 installed just fine (so far) from the Sparky repo. See it in the screenshot thread.

[VastOne]

Thanks... Wow.. A terminal that depends on vlc, interesting

[PackRat]

No kidding - bringing up images and video from the terminal; like a terminal-file manager hybrid. May have to go over to the Bodhi and Arch forums to read some user posts about it. All I have ever seen done with it is the usual terminal apps like moc and vi.

terminology 0.4 terminal emulator running on elementary / ubuntu

Be interesting if you could get terminology working in a tiling wm like i3 or dwm.

Been messing with configuration of e18; pretty good. The tiling is working well now so something new to mess with. The systemtray is still nonfunctional. Prettty good user experience so far.

[PackRat]

Went ahead and installed the e18 terminal - terminology. It's in the repos.



Interesting. Supports image backgrounds, tabs (but not in the traditional sense where there is a visible tab bar), clickable url links, split screen horiz/vertical, and real transparency - although, I can't figure out how to set an alpha value for it yet. Not really sure it's worth all the dependencies. Stable though.

[PackRat]

Enlightenment 20 is now available in the Sid repos (don't know when it showed up); package is named enlightenment; e17 is still available.

Enlightenment use to be the package name for the older e16 window manager, I think. I couldn't find e16 listed in the repos so maybe it was dropped.

[paxmark1]

May serendipity happen to all 

For reasons unknown to me, I just tried another kick at the can at Enlightenment.  I used the guide at

https://www.enlightenment.org/distros/debian-start

The compile fails as it is missing libpoppler-cpp0v5 which I got via installing libpoppler-cpp-dev.  I recompiled.

It was compiled (slowly) on an Asus aspire atom (i386) with 1Gb of ram in testing (stripped down sparky with lxqt) and it compiled without too many error messages.  I did get some wicked error messages when it shifted to the compile of terminology.  Trying various "startx blah" did not work, but mousing over to Session in sddm and selecting Enlightenment started it up and terminology is no slower than when I did apt-get install e17 maybe a year ago. on this machine.  If the howto is focused on a debian stable environment, well that is a pretty good script they have. 

It says E21 0.21.99.21536 - I believe I got it pretty much as E21 arrived.  Terminology is 0.9.99 versus 0.7.0-1 in Debian. No, it needs different compile flags than in the how to for wayland and weston. Of course since it is in /usr/local without .deb's apt-cache will not show the correct version numbers.   What am I going to do with it.  Probably nothing.  I am an old dog who does not want to learn new keystrokes.  It has too much overhead for an atom and I do not wish to install on anything else.  But for people who want to kick the tires of Wayland, well, maybe it is a bit easier now.  Still looks like a bit of work and a bit of reading.  Peace out.

[PackRat]

You can use this repo for current versions - e23 now, i think - and terminology. They are built with wayland support. Worked with Sid, I assume they will work with Testing. Probably bork Stable.

Debian repo E and with wayland support.

There is also a nice HowTo on the Bodhi linux site for compiling enlightenment on debian/ubuntu and setting up their DE.