Episode: 1248
Title: HPR1248: Frank Bell Achieves Enlightenment Adventures with E17 Pt One
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1248/hpr1248.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:20:29

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Hello, this is Frank Bell, and today I would like to talk about Enlightenment 17.
There was a lot of excitement towards the end of last year when Enlightenment 17, also
known as E17, was released.
It was the first major release of Enlightenment since the late 1990s.
Many people who had used Enlightenment back at that time had memories of Enlightenment's
visual beauty.
Enlightenment is a very old desktop.
It predates both KDE and Genome.
It's visually attractive, having been designed with visual beauty in mind and highly configurable.
The way it's configured really reminded me more of FVWM, which I experimented with
for several months out of curiosity a couple of years ago, than of the more recent environments
of Genome and KDE, XFCE, and their offshoots.
The idea for this podcast started with a question on Linux questions from 5150 about how
to achieve a couple of effects in Enlightenment.
It piqued my curiosity, so I hopped over to my Linux Mint computer and installed E17.
And actually quite liked it.
I was able to answer part of 5150's questions at that point.
I wasn't able to answer the rest until much later.
Anyone who's interested can search Linux questions for threads by 5150 and turn it up.
The interesting thing is that even though in Mint Synaptic Package Manager tells me that
I have an E17 installed, the actual version that is displayed when I do an about on the
Enlightenment menu is 16.999.0 something, something, something, something, something.
So in a spirit of experimenting, I tried installing E17 on my Slackware machine.
I first installed it from the Slack builds, but the version from the Slack builds gave me
a segmentation fault when I spent too much time in the configuration menus, and not
really doing anything complicated either, just messing with clock settings or moving objects
around in the panel and so on.
So I posed a question on Linux questions where I do like to hang out.
It's a nice place to unwind at the end of the day.
And somebody suggested getting the version of E17 designed for Slackware from the Slack
E17 page on SourceForge.
So I uninstalled the Slack build, installed the Slack E17 build, which installed very quickly
and easily by the way, and it ran without issue.
I liked it so much that I installed it also on my main computer, my Dell 1545 in laptop,
also running Slackware current.
And when I do want about on those two machines, Enlightenment tells me I have version 17.017.1.
In fact, I think I'll check it right now and go left click to bring up the menu and
then to Enlightenment and about, and it tells me I have 017.1 on the machine I'm using
for recording this podcast.
So this presentation will focus primarily on the Slack E17 build that I'm currently
using.
One of the differences between Enlightenment and GNOME or KDE is Enlightenment uses its
own libraries for rendering the desktop.
And its libraries enable it only to render the desktop.
It does not provide the libraries that you would need or the dependencies to run applications.
It is strictly a desktop environment.
There are three sets of Enlightenment libraries according to the website, the core set of libraries
required to compile the Window Manager, an extra which libraries are not required to run
the Window Manager, but are still as the Enlightenment website, rather confusingly states
part of the official library ecosystem.
And there is also a set of experimental libraries which are created when updates are being
designed and either eventually get discarded or rolled into the existing core libraries.
This is the first of two podcasts and this one I will give an overview of Enlightenment
and how it works and in the next one I will dig into some of the how-tos of some of
the configuration options because they don't work the same way as in the more commonly
used GNOME, and KDE, and their offshoots and derivatives.
As I said Enlightenment dates back to the mid-90s and some of the configuration dialogues
really have a mid-90s feel to them.
The end result though is quite nice.
When you run Enlightenment for the first time or you run it as a new or a different user
from your common user, it will present a series of set up dialogues.
The first one will ask you to choose a language.
If you select the system default as opposed to selecting a language off the list, it will
then display a confirmation to make sure that the system default is indeed the choice
you want.
Next it will ask you to choose a profile, a mobile profile or a standard computer profile.
If you make your choice, it will choose the title bar size for your window, and the
three times that I have run this dialogue will probably four times actually.
It picked your six different choices so you could see how they would appear on the
screen and you would click on the size that you want to make your default.
Then it will choose what type of mouse focus you want, whether you want windows to come
into focus on mouse over or by click.
I choose click.
I don't want a window to come into focus unless I tell it to.
I commonly have several windows open and it's navigating back and forth to the menu
and from one window to the other, I don't want other things popping up in my face.
Then it will install con man or connection manager.
I went to the connection manager website and it appears to be the program on which the
GNOME network manager is based.
It installs con man on all my computers.
Even though on one of them I'm using only the wire connection, I have actually never
used the wireless on this particular machine except to make sure it works.
On the other two, I was already using Wicked, the two Slackware machines.
I was already using Wicked as my network manager.
The oddity is when I looked in the con man on one of the Slackware machines, I clicked
it and it said, hey, here's my icon but there's nothing there.
It's not working.
It seemed to me rather odd and I think the dialogue would be improved if it was since
whether or not you needed con man or whether you had a different connection manager or at
least gave you an option as to whether or not to install it.
That's just me.
The next screen gives you an opportunity to make some choices about compositing and video
options, whether you want open GL, composing, I think there's a third choice there.
It does investigate your installation to see what you have because I noticed on the
older machine, the choice that I had two choices, the newer machine I had three choices.
But I can't remember what they were and I was too lazy to go back and check.
After that, it asks you a yes or no question whether you want enlightenment to check for
updates.
I said yes, I learned the purpose of this on an episode of the kernel panic podcast and
there will be a link to this in the show notes.
When someone checks yes to this, enlightenment goes out and notifies the enlightenment developers
that yes, this installation exists.
It doesn't provide identifying information but it helps the enlightenment people keep
count of how many installations of enlightenment there are.
If you check no, they don't know you exist.
From a marketing standpoint, the higher number they can present when they talk about their usage
of their application, the better off they are.
And finally, enlightenment will ask you whether or not you want a taskbar.
I'll talk about this a little more later.
The taskbar seems to be a specialized variation on what E17 calls an iBox.
And I get into describing the desktop in just a moment or so, I'll go into that.
So now you've started up enlightenment.
You're looking at the screen, the default theme on E17 is very gray.
First a little terminology.
What everybody else refers to as a panel, E17 calls a shelf.
Just as with panels, you can have multiple shelves, but my preference is always just
to have one.
E17 also has gadgets.
And gadgets are comparable to what other desktops call widgets or applets such as the
built-in enlightenment clock or the built-in enlightenment CPU monitor.
By default, on all the enlightenment installations I did, the shelf was in the center bottom
of the screen and contained the following items.
A stylized lowercase E, which was the menu icon, you click that, the menu appears.
A desktop pager for switching from one desktop to another by default, there were four desktops
pretty standard in the Linux world.
On iBox, when applications are minimized from the screen, the icons for them or the names
of them appear in the iBox.
An iBar, which is an icon bar where you can place icons to launch directly from the shelf,
must like launch your icons in a GNOME or KDE panel.
A temperature sensor, which looks like a little thermometer, a CPU frequency sensor, a battery
level sensor, and the clock.
On the default installation, left clicking on an empty screen also displays the main menu.
Much as right click does in the default fluxbox installation.
And a right click displays your favorites menu if you have one configured.
And default icons are placed in the upper left hand corner of the screen for your home
directory, the root directory, the temp, the slash TMP temp directory, and trash.
Oddly enough, on both my Slackware boxes, two icons for my home directory appear.
One of them, if I clicked on it, would open up the Enlightenment File Manager, which in
my opinion looks and behaves in a rather primitive manner.
And the other one did nothing.
It appeared to be a zombie.
This did not happen on my min install.
I was able in both, so it may have something to do with the Slack E17 build.
I was able to delete the zombie icon and have complete functionality with no issues whatsoever.
When you start the menu, whether you start it by left clicking or start it by clicking
the Enlightenment menu icon on the taskbar, it contains the following categories.
If you have favorite applications configured, it will display your favorites at the top
of the menu.
Display the word favorite, you click on favorite, your list of favorite applications appears.
This is quite convenient for your most used applications.
My list of favorites contains GTCam, Opera, a clause mail.
The applications I use almost every day.
Some of them every day, multiple times a day.
Others several times a week.
The ones I want to get to quickly.
Then there's an Applications category.
And it is divided into fairly typical subcategories, as you commonly see in Linux menus, such
as accessories, development, games, graphics, and so on.
Underneath that will be files on my Slackware machines that said Navigate.
And that gave me the list to go directly to my home directory, to the desktop, to root,
to my favorites, or to mounted USB devices.
They also appear in there.
The next item is Run Everything.
It doesn't really run everything.
You don't click it and have all your applications start up.
It's more like the finder or the HUD.
And it shows the menu contents as if they were arranged in folders.
You can click a particular folder and select and launch it, as opposed to going up and
down the menu.
It's kind of a folder representation of the menu.
And you can exit it simply by using the Escape button.
Here's an element on the menu to take a screenshot, which I haven't used all that much because
I'm a big fan of Case Snapshot.
That is my go-to screenshot application.
The next item down on the main menu is the Desktop Item, and that's where, at least
on the Slackware box, I can change my gadget setup, I can switch workspaces, I can add
or delete a shelf, I can configure the existing shelf where I can show and hide all the windows.
The next item down is the Windows item, and if you click on that, it shows all your open
applications.
There's also an item to clean up windows and to find lost windows, and since I don't
have any dirty windows and I haven't misplaced any, I'm not quite sure what that does.
The next item down is the Enlightenment section, and that's where you see about Enlightenment.
You can click on the theme item there, it will tell you about your current selected theme.
You can use it to restart Enlightenment, which will restart the Desktop environment without
shutting down any of your applications.
If you've made certain types of configuration changes, you might need to hit Restart so
that Enlightenment re-reads its configuration files, and it starts again fresh.
It's similar to the Restart item on the Flux box menu.
There is an exit or log item Enlightenment button.
We're almost to the end here.
Next to the bottom is the Settings panel, as the Settings item, the choices include the
Settings panel, which is a graphical way of accessing all the Settings dialogs.
They're arranged by category, and you can click to the left or to the right to get the
various categories, and then the list appears and you can go to the Settings dialog you want.
Takes a little getting used to the terminology, and the arrangement is Enlightenment's own
terminology, and the arrangement.
Once you get the hang of it, it's a pretty neat way to navigate.
Then underneath the Settings panel item, there's one for your gadgets.
If I open the menu and go to Gadgets, it gives me a couple of options about configuring
the appearance and behavior of desktop gadgets.
There's one for theme, where you can change your selected theme.
Several different options come with Enlightenment.
There are other options available at the website, e17stuff.org, and there'll be a caution
about that before I line this up today.
I really like the way the wallpaper works.
You can very easily have a different wallpaper on each desktop, and with its commitment to
visual beauty, Enlightenment renders the wallpapers very nicely, and I do like my eye candy.
I've got over a thousand different wallpapers that I like to switch among.
Almost all of them are nature scenes, or geographical scenes.
I'm not real big on the abstract design stuff, but I do like my pretty pictures.
When I get into the next version of this, I'll go into some detail about how you can
easily set up to have different wallpapers on each workspace, because there's a couple
of little tricks to it.
A couple of miscellaneous things I wanted to mention.
If you open a menu too close to the right side of the screen for all the menu to display,
click on say menu, you click on applications, and the applications list is cut off halfway
through by the side of the screen, simply move your mouse over into the applications list,
and the menu will slide to the left.
If you've got additional sub menus, you keep moving to the right, the menu will keep sliding
to the left, so you can see all the choices.
The taskbar may be set to show applications from the current desktop or from all desktops.
By default on the installations I have, it was showing the applications from this desktop
only.
I change that.
I like to show the applications from all desktops.
I seldom have more than 6 or 7 applications open, and I like to get to them quickly.
If I've got a destiny here open on desktop 3, and I want to hop over and look at my
opera on desktop 2, I can simply click the opera icon in the taskbar, and enlightenment
will go directly to opera on desktop 2.
Or alternatively I could click the desktop 2 in the pager, and go to that desktop.
If opera were behind something else, I would then have to click opera, so that fits in
with my workflow.
The other way you can change directions is the old traditional way of using alt tab.
It works quite nicely.
On the mint machine, because it's a slightly earlier version of enlightenment, if I have
an application open on the screen, there is no icon in the iBox.
It doesn't act like this taskbar on my Slackware with version 17.1.
It acts like an iBox, so the icon is only in the iBox if the application is minimized.
It seems like a subtle difference, but in hopping back and forth between my machines,
that's one thing I find mildly irritating.
You can also change desktops by moving your mouse from side to side.
I can simply, as I'm sitting here looking at audacity, I move the mouse to the left,
it takes me to workspace 2, I'm looking at opera, and I'm looking at my workspace 2 wallpaper,
and I can simply keep doing that, it takes me to 1, and at 1 on this particular machine
it stops.
Now here's another thing, you can drag an application from one workspace to the other
by dragging it with the mouse, and I've just dragged opera from workspace 2 to workspace
1, but I can't drag it from 1 to 4, if I want to go to 4, I can right click on the title
bar and move to and do some other stuff like that, but I can't just drag it around the
clock.
There's a little bit of delay when you're doing this and that delay, it kind of pauses
at the edge, it doesn't smoothly slide over, that is configurable, it's an effect.
It's not the screen being slow to repaint, it's simply an effect.
One thing that's really neat, that E17 does, I really, really like this, if you minimize
an application to the taskbar, the icon on the taskbar gets smaller, so I'm looking at
my taskbar here, I can see that I have G-CRELUM open fully to the screen, that clause mail
is minimized, that the terminal is minimized, opera is open to the screen, and audacity is
open to the screen, simply by looking at the icon.
Now when I click to go to clause mail, which was minimized, clause mail also comes back
to the size of the window that I had it set to, so simply clicking on the taskbar to go
to that application doesn't just take me to the workspace where a clause mail is, it
brings clause mail into focus on the screen, and I think that's really nice, I like that.
I have gotten to quite enjoy using Enlightenment, I'm a long time fluxbox, user fluxbox has
been my go-to desktop environment for, I guess almost five years, I know it, and Enlightenment
is actually starting to woo me away from it, it doesn't use a significant greater amount
of resources, it doesn't go into a lot of stuff in the background that I don't need
done, like KDE, I don't use any of the KDE personal information management modules that
Akonadi is supposed to make easier to use, so the mere existence of Akonadi running in
the background is one of the things that has kept me from going back to KDE, although
when I first started, that was my favorite, it's very easy to set up key bindings and
mouse bindings, or edit them and change them, Enlightenment, and set windows to remain
in particular positions or stay on particular desktops, Enlightenment, and those are all things
I'll go into when I do the next version of this.
I gave a presentation to my love based on the notes I'd actually been making to do this
podcast and prepare a handout to use, I will have links to the handout for anyone who
wants to download it in the show notes, and one final caution I do want to mention this
because I actually ran into it myself, you can go to the website e17stuff.org, the link
will be in the show notes, that's e17 hyphen stuff, and find a number of themes you need
to be careful though, because the theme engine has changed somewhat in Enlightenment 17
from what it was in the previous versions, and if you install a theme that is not updated
to work with e17, you're going to find that stuff stops working.
I did this and I can guarantee stuff will stop working, so be careful with that.
Other than that, I would say e17 is a lot of fun.
One final thing I want to say about the show notes, I include the link in there to the
Colonel Panic Oddcast episode that I mentioned earlier, it begins with a very intensive interview
of the maintainer of e17, I'm one of the participants of Jonathan Nado who's asking
him about accessibility items, but if you want to learn about e17 and from the maintainer's
point of view, and listen to a really good detailed discussion, I recommend that episode
of Colonel Panic Oddcast very highly, and I'll be back whenever I can get it done and
King will put it on this schedule with a more detailed look at some of these configuration
items that I've mentioned here.
Thank you very much.
If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net, PineViewFarm is
all one word, no spaces, no punctuation, and my website is www.PineViewFarm.net.
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