Enlightenment Introduction Thread

[Dan]

I've talked about it in enough posts, that it only seemed right to give a bit of an introduction to Enlightenment for those who haven't heard of it yet, or those who have, but hadn't seen it in operation on fedora. (I suppose You can thank John The Train for poking me ribs to finally get off my lazy aft-end and get this done. <....> )

So ... I herewith offer an illustrated look at Enlightenment running on fedora. See below.

[Dan]

First ... the 411:

Conventions:

• I'll be working here with a combination of F16 and F17 operating systems. For all intents and purposes, they are interchangeable for this thread.
• Enlightenment is a GUI. Therefore, given the choice, I will illustrate and recommend GUI tools in preference to CLI tools and instructions.
• Some CLI operations will be required.
• This thread will be heavily illustrated, and therefore you must be logged in as a member in good standing to view the illustrations. Therefore, load times on slow connections may be a bit slow.
• I will be using a Gnome base install, but a Cinnamon install should be equally compatible.
• Enlightenment is installed along side Gnome here, therefore some assumptions may reflect that without further comment.

What is Enlightenment?

Enlightenment is a desktop manager similar to Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE etc. It comes in two flavors.

• e16 - Available in the standard fedora repos
• e17 - Available through the FMD repos, or also available to build from source.

Where do I get it?

That depends on the version you want. Each has its own strengths, and limitations. For the purposes of this mess, I am going to assume you are working from a basic Gnome install, and are familiar with both command line tools (bash, yum, etc.) and the normal GUI tools that come with Gnome. (packagekit)

To get e16:

Open the Add/Remove Software tool. (PackageKit) In the search box, type in, "e16" and make the indicated selections.

figure 1:



The description listed there in PackageKit is accurate. From my experience, I'd say E16 is extremely fast, very light on resources, and serves the basic purposes of everyday computing quite well. However, it is also necessarily limited in some respects. Unless you choose from a few given themes, it can mean rolling up your sleeves and getting a little dirty to get it exactly how you want it. It is actually extremely flexible, but just different enough that if you are used to (read: spoiled by) Gnome or KDE etc,, it may require some quality time with the help files to get your head wrapped around the differences. Once that's done, however, the limits of the thing are more confined by the limits of your imagination than anything else.


To get e17:

The first thing you have to do to fetch e17, is install the fmd repos. This can be done in a two part sequence involving the command line, and then a GUI, but for the sake of simplicity, once we're in the terminal, we might as well do it all in a single step.

In a terminal:

su
rpm -Uvh  http://repo.fedora.md/fmd/fedora/fedoramd-release-17.rpm
yum install enlightenment

That should have done the deed. To check repo accessibility, just start PackageKit, and search for, "enlightenment."

figure 2:


You should now be the happy recipient of at least two forms of Enlightenment. <....>

[Dan]

Now what?:

Some free advice at this point. DON'T try to ditch Gnome! If you try to remove Gnome, it can and will rip integral parts of your system out by the roots, leaving little but shredded debris and a smoking hole on your HDD! You will not have an operational system when yum gets done. For now, just leave Gnome 3 alone to stew in its own juices while you go explore your new options.

Which means ...

Log out. No reason to reboot, just log out of Gnome, and when you get back to the GDM screen, click your username, expand the "session" arrow, and have a look at your new options. They should look a lot like this.

figure 3: (Sorry about the photo. Getting a screenshot of GDM is a right proper pain in the hind pockets! <....> )



E16 is just that --E16. Enlightenment is E17. The other entries produce hybrid results that I've never messed with too much. I like my coffee black, my sarsaparilla straight up and my enlightenment served without a lot of excessive Gnome footprints in it. Your mileage may vary. If you have tried these other options and found some particular benefit to them, you are welcome to share that below.


I am only going to lightly touch on e16 here. Other than a basic look around the initial screen ... e16 will be covered later in a different tutorial. Suffice it to say, when it starts (after selecting it and providing GDM with your password), a pair of horizontal shutters will almost instantly open up on one of the starkest eye-bleedingly plain desktops you've ever seen. That's the initial e16 theme "Winter."

figure 4: (your screen will not include the little toolbox in the upper left corner. That's the screenshot applet I used to fetch the screen.)



figure 5: (Second pager screen, with moved applet tool and help bubble.)


Don't let this first impression of e16 scare you. Partly due to the strength of all that blankness, it can be turned into a stunning array of customized goodness.

figure 6:


Now let's move on to the real meat of the matter ... logging out so we can try e17. <....> First, before you get yourself worked up into a world class snit hunting for the exits, a few important things to know.

• Left clicking and right clicking the e16 desktop produce different results.
• A left click (anywhere on the open desktop) fetches your user menus. You will build those up yourself to suit your own needs.
• A right click (anywhere on the open desktop) fetches the settings menu.
• The restart/logout items are on the left click/user menu. Restart here means restarting e16, not the system. Go ahead. Try it. Notice the speed at which it was accomplished.
• Logout quits e16 and takes you back to GDM.

Good to go? Awright! On to e17. Log out.

[Dan]

Now let's try e17. From the GDM screen, hit your username, select "Enlightenment" from the list, provide your password and stab the login button, or the enter key. Either one will work. The next thing you see should look a lot like this: (in the middle of a black screen)

figure 7: Login splash


Those five little white balls should bounce up and down a bit, and there will be a few messages flash above the logo. I think there are three of them. They go by so fast here, I've never gotten them all fully read.

[Dan]

First things first

Before I go any further, I need to make it clear that I am by no means an Enlightenment expert. I only use it. I can also say without a doubt that I have only begun to scratch the surface of this DE's true potential. <....>

Like any Linux project, there seems to be some kind of visceral aversion to consistent naming schemes across distros and desktops. Enlightenment is no different. Therefore, first we examine ...

The nomenclature:

• Modules - Bits and pieces of the system itself. Selectable/loadable/unloadable to customize as much or as little as you want or need.
• Shelves- In a word? Panels -- on steroids.
• Gadgets- Handy things to park in Shelves, or on the desktop.
• Pagers- Surprisingly common usage here. A means of selecting your workspace.
• Everything- The one-stop-shop for launching stuff! Think Gnome Shell Applications mode crossed with Cinnamon's menus. Add QC and strong coffee.
• iBar- Think panel shortcuts. Quick/favorite application icons go here. Launchers are directly editable.
• iBox- Think Taskbar -- made useful. Minimized windows go here.
• Systray- Think Systray <....>
• Tasks- You'll just have to try this one. Think task manager crossed with a system tray. Here you can switch between tasks/applications.
• Compositing- While not strictly necessary, it's the Platform supporting a lot of the optional Eye Candy
• Transitions- Eye candy. Enlightenment can be real long on eye candy, and still light on resources. <....>
  

A few interesting features:

• Each desktop/workspace can have its own wallpaper.
• Each Shelf (Yes. You may have more than one.) may enjoy it's own theme.
• You may have the same gadget in as many Shelves as you like. (Or ... on the desktop in stand-alone fashion.)
• Shelves may be placed along any screen edge you choose.
• Shelves may be individually sized to suit your desires.
• Shelves may be limited to any particular desktop you wish, or displayed on them all.
• Shelves may be hidden, or non-hidden individually.
• Shelves may be used in either vertical or horizontal configuration.
• The entire desktop is your oyster/menu. A single left click on the desktop opens your menu. No more bouncing into corners to get at your files and applicaions. <...>
• Icons are allowed on the desktop <....> If you so choose.
• Shoving your mouse up against a screen edge, invites the adjacent screen to come aboard for duty. Or not. You get to decide.
• If needed, restarting Enlightenment is trivial and fast, and does not come with an automatic "Uh, oh!" Gnome Frowny-Face Of Death.
• Themes! There is not only one! There are many, and you can assign different elements different themes and fonts to your heart's delight. However, there is one drawback here. Creating a new theme is not trivial. It can be done, and you are welcome to do so, but it's gonna get really technical before you're done ... and then you get to compile it. <....>
• Wallpaper, on the other hand, is quite easy to set from just about any source directory you wish, and can be cached in a lower resolution version locally just for that purpose.
  

Some drawbacks:

• Enlightenment's default file manager has some really neat stuff going for it, but it still doesn't have the polish or functionality that Nautilus used to have. (I say used to have because as I understand it, the Gnome crowd is in the process of breaking Nautilus, too. <....> ) One hopes Nemo will soon provide an answer to that issue.
• Enlightenment is still under heavy development. It's come a long way recently, but it still isn't in full golden release. That being said, in my experience, Enlightenment's beta tests have been more stable and consistent than Gnome 3's golden releases. Take risks accordingly.
• Some Gnome-centric applications will require you to do some editing of files to get authentication to work properly. I expect more of the old stand-by applications to succumb to Gnome 3-centrism as time goes by. Much like the recent misadventures of Yumex. <....> The lazy man's way is ... in order to get yumex to work. execute the following in a terminal once per boot.
  

   /usr/libexec/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 &

  Or you could just as easily park that in your start-up programs file. Your choice.
• Sadly, the beauty of Dynamic Workspaces is a joy hidden in and limited to ... Gnome Shell. <....>
• One of the inherent drawbacks of having so much adjust-ability, is the possibility of setting something, or seeing a place to set something, and then not being able to go back and find it again to adjust it. <....> (In particular, one setting specific to removing the Home, Root and Temp desktop config files, but still allowing other files, folders and device icons to dwell there. I got it set up in one machine, and for the life of me, I can't get it done in the other one. <....>

Enough reading! On to the pictures.

[Dan]

This is my daily driver desktop. It's already customized to some extent. The obvious elements in this screenshot are a small fraction of the extensive preferences dialogues, a mid-screen menu activated, two Shelves, one on the top (middle) and one bottom (left). Each has it's own contents, gadgets, theme and is sized differently.

figure 8:



This should give an idea of the extent of the preferences dialogues. Each section has a subsection, which has as many subsections as needed. <....>

figure 9:




This is the Enlightenment file manager in action. The pop-up here is an automatic thumbnail of the file which is currently being moused over.

figure 10:



A right click on the end (handle) of a shelf brings up the shelf menu, from which you can insert whatever you want in/on that shelf ...

figure 11:



... Then put it where you dang well want it!


figure 12:




Individual elements (gadgets, modules etc.) are individually themeable.

figure 13:




Applications will happily accept your old GTK2 themes.

figure 14:
Resulting in ... >>>=----=>

figure 15:




And, to wrap up this brief lookey-loo tour through Enlightenment, I suspect you've noticed that the background/wallpaper under those illustrations above doesn't seem real consistent. That's not surprising. They aren't. During the writing and illustrating of this, I utilized all of my existing workspaces ... and each of them is allowed and assigned its own wallpaper.


So ... with that ... Questions are welcome below. But in the meantime ...


figure 16: Log out options are all displayed ... by default.




<....>

[Dan]

Finally finished! Thread moved from batcave to general population.

(ie. space holder post)

[StephenH]

Thanks Dan. I have been wanting to try Enlightenment e17 on Fedora. Your post was just what I needed. It is installing as I type, and I will be testing it shortly.

I had tried E16, but was not happy with it. I also had tried Bodhi Linux. I liked the interface, but did not care for the Ubuntu-flavored underpinnings.

[John the train]

As I was the one who prodded Dan to produce this ' how to ' it's a bit embarrassing to report that I've followed Dan's instructions to install E17 - except that I'm running 32-bit - and Enlightenment appears in the GDM screen as per Dan's screenshot, but logging in with that selected sends me straight back to the log-in screen. I can log into E16 satisfactorily by the way.

[Dan]

Yikes! <....>

Uhm, yeah. Methinks an uninstall/reinstall of the 32 bit version is in order.

I've only got one 32 bit machine around here these days, and it's running Bodhi, I didn't think to specify the instructions were for 64 bit. <....> At first glance, it looks like there's a 32 bit version in the repo, so you may end up grabbing one element and letting yum fetch the rest.

i686 repo - http://repo.fedora.md/fmd/fedora/17/i386/

[Dan]

Post above edited. Check that repo, John.

[John the train]

I tried installing that repo., and although things seemed to install normally there was an error message when installing the repo.< /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.F725MU: not an rpm package ( or package manifest )>..
It appears that the i686 repo has a bug of some kind?

EDIT: I've checked and the i686 repo is shown as enabled, but I get the same result if I download the main enlightenment package from your link Dan, and then install it. One point I did notice, in Add/remove software the main package was ticked as installed, but the icon was the same as the ' Files ' icon in Gnome, as opposed to the usual open box.

[Dan]

Hmmmm.

Finalzone gave me a link straight to enlightenment's repos. It might be worth plugging straight into yum.repos.d and trying.

EDIT: Never mind. Didn't work.

[PatMcLJr]

Thanks for posting that up Dan.
I've tried E16 before but I couldn't find any hand holding to get me over the rough spots and at that time it crashed a lot.

I've kinda settled into openbox, it aint got want I don't want. But it would be nice to stray into a full featured DE some times.

I have to ask if you've shown Enlightenment to any of your Mac or Windows friends?

[glennzo]

On a 64 bit install Dan, I've experienced the same thing as John The Train. Log out, select my user, enter password and select Enlightenment only to be brought right back to the log in screen. I actually tried a second time after a reboot. Same thing.

Looking around, specifically at .xsession-errors.old, I see this:

ESTART: 0.00450 [0.00005] - Environment Variables Done
ESTART: 0.00451 [0.00001] - Parse Arguments
ESTART: 0.00453 [0.00002] - Parse Arguments Done
ESTART: 0.00454 [0.00001] - Eet Init
ESTART: 0.00809 [0.00354] - Eet Init Done
ESTART: 0.00813 [0.00005] - Ecore Init
ESTART: 0.00840 [0.00027] - Ecore Init Done
ESTART: 0.00842 [0.00002] - EIO Init
<<<< Enlightenment Error >>>>
Enlightenment cannot initialize EIO!

E17: Begin Shutdown Procedure!