hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0244.txt

Episode: 244
Title: HPR0244: Enlightment
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0244/hpr0244.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:43:23

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Hello everyone, welcome to Half the Public Radio.
My name is Clat 2 and today I'm hijacking deep geeks series on light weight apps and
hopefully I didn't actually coordinate this with them, but hopefully he was not planning
on doing an enlightenment episode because that's the application that I wanted to talk about
enlightenment.
Now most people have heard about enlightenment and maybe a lot of people might have tried
it.
You know it's gotten a lot of praise in the past, but it's also kind of been poked fun
at in the past I guess because E17 has been in development longer than KDE4 was.
I mean it was just like a really long time and still isn't out.
So it's still at like E0.16.999.050 I think was the latest release of E17.
So some people like to kind of make fun of it or whatever, but in fact enlightenment
is a really cool desktop shell and that term is their term, but it's really strangely
appropriate when you kind of start getting into enlightenment.
Number one, if you are, I mean if you're interested in lightweight apps, probably you're
not interested in super fancies, you know gooey environments, one of the things that you're
interested in is either you have a slower computer and want it to respond quicker for
you or you just don't use the gooey features that much and you really only have a gooey
because you know like you need Firefox and that's such a typical thing.
I mean at least me on my my triple EPC for like a whole month I wasn't, I didn't even
bother installing, no that's not true a whole week.
I didn't even bother installing X because so much can be done you know without the gooey
obviously, but it kind of breaks down once you have to go to some weird web 2.0 website
and you know the text browsers just aren't going to cut that.
So you got to have a gooey sometimes and enlightenment makes for really really neat one to use.
So enlightenment, when they say that it's a desktop shell, it's because it is a little
bit more than a window manager.
It is very similar I think in feel to some degree to like flux box, but there's so much
more to it that you can't really just say it's a window manager.
In fact enlightenment is doing a lot of work on something that they call the Enlightenment
Foundation Libraries, EFL and that is, as I understand it, that is basically its own
like widget set and you know graphics rendering and all that other good stuff.
I think it's also its own sound subsystem, but I guess I could be wrong about that but I'm
pretty sure I'm right.
So it's really like an oh it's you know it's a really kind of like nicely self-contained
little environment and it's really really easy to compile.
This is not something you know like KDE where you have to, I mean it's still compiling
something from source and it can be tough, but if you're going to do it, enlightenment
is one of the things that you can compile is really well.
I've been able to compile it on a couple of different distros as well as on OS 10 for
the dreaded X11 environment.
So I use enlightenment every day and it's a very stable platform, I'm talking about
E17 actually, although I do also have E16 on my triple E.
So both of these environments are something that I use literally on an everyday basis.
I find it very stable and very attractive and very flexible.
In terms of flexibility I should probably mention if you remember the GOS PC, which was
the PC that was famously being sold at Wal-Mart and it had all the Google applications
but no official affiliation to Google.
So GOS, they were using for at least their first release of their environment which I believe
they called Rocket or something like that, they were using, they had based all their
stuff on enlightenment from what I understand.
Like it was the whole, the whole GUI was basically like in like E17 code heavily modified
to look you know a certain way, but yeah that was kind of cool, I mean that was a high
profile use of this.
And again in terms of flexibility, if you go to rastraman.com, that's R-A-S-T-E-R-M-A-N.
Rastraman is the lead developer of enlightenment, he's got some, well first of all he's got
some really cool screenshots of you know what he's working on.
But he's also got stuff that he's doing with enlightenment like he's putting it on, he's
got it on the free runner, the phone, he's got it on the N800, he's got it on a trio
and then like I say, I mean I find it very easy to get on to you know any distro and even
onto OS X, which I've had a lot of in terms of their X11, the way that that responds to
you know Unix code sometimes is really quirky, but enlightenment just works really well with it,
deals with everything you know quite admirably.
Okay, so there's E16, there's E17 right, so E16 is I guess the stable version and
it's got a certain look and feel to it, it's got an interesting kind of theory on desktops,
the desktops itself extends beyond your screen, so it's a little bit like just having four
virtual desktops like you know four quadrants, but the way that E16 handles it is that you've
really got only two but they're just really long and so if you just put your mouse cursor
at the edge of the screen you kind of zip over to the other half of your screen. I mean
it's essentially having four desktops, but it's just a little bit different in the way
that they can see it. They also have a little shelf down at the bottom, I think they're called
shelves, a little window down at the bottom where if you minimize something it goes into
that little space and you can bring it back up later just like a traditional panel or
kicker or whatever, but it's kind of an interesting way of implementing it, it looks really neat.
I think the default is really cool, it's kind of an earth tone look, but if you're into
theming at freshmeat.net you've got lots of different themes for E16 available to you. E17 uses
a more traditional sort of an XFCE style dock down at the bottom or top, whatever,
wherever you want it, and it has access to the different desktops, it's got access to
you know, minimized programs and sort of a menu with all your options in it. E17 has
a lot of GUI configuration tools as well, so if you need to go and modify your menu,
it's got a lot of things built in that you, it's pretty hard to miss, you can modify
a lot of stuff just within the GUI. E16, I don't know if someone may have developed GUI
tools for that, I usually just do my configuration in text files for E16, it's a lot like
flux box in that way, and both are like flux box in the sense that if you just, you
single, you write, you left click on the desktop, you get your root menu, and from your
root menu you go into, you know, your applications or your configuration or whatever.
So to modify that in E16, you simply go to the dot E16 folder in your home directory,
and you'll find a dot menu file or a series of dot menu files, and you can modify those in text.
Actually, you know what, I think those dot menu files are actually in slash, like,
var slash lib or something like that, something a little bit odd like that,
but the point is that it's just text configuration files, dig around in the dot E16 directory
in your home directory, and you will, you will see where everything lives, it's pretty simple,
and you just put in, you know, you can start with a root menu and put down where you
wanted to go, and then what applications you want each sub menu to contain, et cetera, et cetera.
But for E17, you just go to your root menu, there's like a configuration sub menu,
and you can change the menu around, you can change the theme, you can do whatever.
A lot of people associate E17 with that, with the old default theme, which was called,
I believe, quote, bling, bling, unquote. It was kind of a brushed metal gold look,
and a lot of people liked to make fun of it, but that's gone now.
They've got a really nice kind of high contrast.
The best way I can, I think of it as like a pencil sketch, it looks really beautiful,
it's a really nice theme on E17, it's like just lots of blacks and whites,
but sort of in a unique kind of looking way.
So if you didn't like the bling bling look, and were too lazy to theme it yourself,
or to go to freshmeat.net and grab a new theme, now you've got a different default theme anyway,
and you don't have to worry about it.
I think it looks really attractive, it's a really slick look,
and you can go to enlightenment.org, also, both rasterman.com and enlightenment.org
will give you an idea of what they're up to lately.
Now the EFL, the Enlightenment Foundation Library,
again, I don't know a whole lot about it because I'm not really a programmer,
but it's a system of, you know, it's a whole bunch of back ins and things like that,
and they're actually developing a couple of different applications
so that they'll have native applications for enlightenment, which is pretty neat,
and they look really nice too, and everything's lightweight.
So it's definitely worth checking out if you need a lightweight environment to work in.
That's pretty much it, really, I mean, that's enlightenment.
I mean, the best way to get a feel for it is to try it out.
It doesn't take a whole lot to install it, usually it's an app to get install away,
or a yum install away, or you can build it from source pretty easily.
It's not that complex.
Yeah, so check it out.
E17 is looking great.
It looks really exciting.
It's still under development, so, you know, it is a development environment,
but it does look really cool.
But in the E16 super stable, it's great.
Check that out if you're looking for something a little bit like fluxbox,
but just a little bit different.
You know, this is definitely something to check out.
It's a really cool environment to use, and you can also,
there's a live CD called E-Live that releases all the latest and greatest enlightenment versions,
but there's also Yellow Dog Linux, which was written,
which is released for PowerPC platforms.
So if you've got a PowerPC Mac or a PlayStation lying around,
you can put Yellow Dog on it, and you will be using Enlightenment 17.
And it looks pretty nice.
It performs really well.
So that's another good way to kind of get a feel for Enlightenment in action.
So check it out.
If you're interested, hopefully this was somewhat informative.
And thanks for listening.
Thank you for listening to Half Republic Radio.
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