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Lee Hanken
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Episode: 1248
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Title: HPR1248: Frank Bell Achieves Enlightenment Adventures with E17 Pt One
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1248/hpr1248.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:20:29
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---
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Hello, this is Frank Bell, and today I would like to talk about Enlightenment 17.
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There was a lot of excitement towards the end of last year when Enlightenment 17, also
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known as E17, was released.
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It was the first major release of Enlightenment since the late 1990s.
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Many people who had used Enlightenment back at that time had memories of Enlightenment's
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visual beauty.
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Enlightenment is a very old desktop.
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It predates both KDE and Genome.
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It's visually attractive, having been designed with visual beauty in mind and highly configurable.
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The way it's configured really reminded me more of FVWM, which I experimented with
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for several months out of curiosity a couple of years ago, than of the more recent environments
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of Genome and KDE, XFCE, and their offshoots.
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The idea for this podcast started with a question on Linux questions from 5150 about how
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to achieve a couple of effects in Enlightenment.
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It piqued my curiosity, so I hopped over to my Linux Mint computer and installed E17.
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And actually quite liked it.
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I was able to answer part of 5150's questions at that point.
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I wasn't able to answer the rest until much later.
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Anyone who's interested can search Linux questions for threads by 5150 and turn it up.
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The interesting thing is that even though in Mint Synaptic Package Manager tells me that
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I have an E17 installed, the actual version that is displayed when I do an about on the
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Enlightenment menu is 16.999.0 something, something, something, something, something.
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So in a spirit of experimenting, I tried installing E17 on my Slackware machine.
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I first installed it from the Slack builds, but the version from the Slack builds gave me
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a segmentation fault when I spent too much time in the configuration menus, and not
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really doing anything complicated either, just messing with clock settings or moving objects
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around in the panel and so on.
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So I posed a question on Linux questions where I do like to hang out.
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It's a nice place to unwind at the end of the day.
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And somebody suggested getting the version of E17 designed for Slackware from the Slack
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E17 page on SourceForge.
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So I uninstalled the Slack build, installed the Slack E17 build, which installed very quickly
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and easily by the way, and it ran without issue.
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I liked it so much that I installed it also on my main computer, my Dell 1545 in laptop,
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also running Slackware current.
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And when I do want about on those two machines, Enlightenment tells me I have version 17.017.1.
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In fact, I think I'll check it right now and go left click to bring up the menu and
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then to Enlightenment and about, and it tells me I have 017.1 on the machine I'm using
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for recording this podcast.
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So this presentation will focus primarily on the Slack E17 build that I'm currently
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using.
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One of the differences between Enlightenment and GNOME or KDE is Enlightenment uses its
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own libraries for rendering the desktop.
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And its libraries enable it only to render the desktop.
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It does not provide the libraries that you would need or the dependencies to run applications.
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It is strictly a desktop environment.
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There are three sets of Enlightenment libraries according to the website, the core set of libraries
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required to compile the Window Manager, an extra which libraries are not required to run
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the Window Manager, but are still as the Enlightenment website, rather confusingly states
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part of the official library ecosystem.
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And there is also a set of experimental libraries which are created when updates are being
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designed and either eventually get discarded or rolled into the existing core libraries.
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This is the first of two podcasts and this one I will give an overview of Enlightenment
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and how it works and in the next one I will dig into some of the how-tos of some of
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the configuration options because they don't work the same way as in the more commonly
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used GNOME, and KDE, and their offshoots and derivatives.
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As I said Enlightenment dates back to the mid-90s and some of the configuration dialogues
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really have a mid-90s feel to them.
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The end result though is quite nice.
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When you run Enlightenment for the first time or you run it as a new or a different user
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from your common user, it will present a series of set up dialogues.
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The first one will ask you to choose a language.
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If you select the system default as opposed to selecting a language off the list, it will
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then display a confirmation to make sure that the system default is indeed the choice
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you want.
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Next it will ask you to choose a profile, a mobile profile or a standard computer profile.
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If you make your choice, it will choose the title bar size for your window, and the
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three times that I have run this dialogue will probably four times actually.
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It picked your six different choices so you could see how they would appear on the
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screen and you would click on the size that you want to make your default.
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Then it will choose what type of mouse focus you want, whether you want windows to come
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into focus on mouse over or by click.
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I choose click.
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I don't want a window to come into focus unless I tell it to.
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I commonly have several windows open and it's navigating back and forth to the menu
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and from one window to the other, I don't want other things popping up in my face.
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Then it will install con man or connection manager.
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I went to the connection manager website and it appears to be the program on which the
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GNOME network manager is based.
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It installs con man on all my computers.
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Even though on one of them I'm using only the wire connection, I have actually never
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used the wireless on this particular machine except to make sure it works.
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On the other two, I was already using Wicked, the two Slackware machines.
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I was already using Wicked as my network manager.
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The oddity is when I looked in the con man on one of the Slackware machines, I clicked
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it and it said, hey, here's my icon but there's nothing there.
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It's not working.
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It seemed to me rather odd and I think the dialogue would be improved if it was since
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whether or not you needed con man or whether you had a different connection manager or at
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least gave you an option as to whether or not to install it.
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That's just me.
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The next screen gives you an opportunity to make some choices about compositing and video
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options, whether you want open GL, composing, I think there's a third choice there.
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It does investigate your installation to see what you have because I noticed on the
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older machine, the choice that I had two choices, the newer machine I had three choices.
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But I can't remember what they were and I was too lazy to go back and check.
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After that, it asks you a yes or no question whether you want enlightenment to check for
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updates.
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I said yes, I learned the purpose of this on an episode of the kernel panic podcast and
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there will be a link to this in the show notes.
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When someone checks yes to this, enlightenment goes out and notifies the enlightenment developers
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that yes, this installation exists.
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It doesn't provide identifying information but it helps the enlightenment people keep
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count of how many installations of enlightenment there are.
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If you check no, they don't know you exist.
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From a marketing standpoint, the higher number they can present when they talk about their usage
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of their application, the better off they are.
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And finally, enlightenment will ask you whether or not you want a taskbar.
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I'll talk about this a little more later.
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The taskbar seems to be a specialized variation on what E17 calls an iBox.
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And I get into describing the desktop in just a moment or so, I'll go into that.
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So now you've started up enlightenment.
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You're looking at the screen, the default theme on E17 is very gray.
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First a little terminology.
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What everybody else refers to as a panel, E17 calls a shelf.
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Just as with panels, you can have multiple shelves, but my preference is always just
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to have one.
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E17 also has gadgets.
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And gadgets are comparable to what other desktops call widgets or applets such as the
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built-in enlightenment clock or the built-in enlightenment CPU monitor.
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By default, on all the enlightenment installations I did, the shelf was in the center bottom
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of the screen and contained the following items.
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A stylized lowercase E, which was the menu icon, you click that, the menu appears.
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A desktop pager for switching from one desktop to another by default, there were four desktops
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pretty standard in the Linux world.
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On iBox, when applications are minimized from the screen, the icons for them or the names
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of them appear in the iBox.
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An iBar, which is an icon bar where you can place icons to launch directly from the shelf,
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must like launch your icons in a GNOME or KDE panel.
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A temperature sensor, which looks like a little thermometer, a CPU frequency sensor, a battery
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level sensor, and the clock.
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On the default installation, left clicking on an empty screen also displays the main menu.
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Much as right click does in the default fluxbox installation.
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And a right click displays your favorites menu if you have one configured.
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And default icons are placed in the upper left hand corner of the screen for your home
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directory, the root directory, the temp, the slash TMP temp directory, and trash.
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Oddly enough, on both my Slackware boxes, two icons for my home directory appear.
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One of them, if I clicked on it, would open up the Enlightenment File Manager, which in
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my opinion looks and behaves in a rather primitive manner.
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And the other one did nothing.
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It appeared to be a zombie.
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This did not happen on my min install.
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I was able in both, so it may have something to do with the Slack E17 build.
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I was able to delete the zombie icon and have complete functionality with no issues whatsoever.
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When you start the menu, whether you start it by left clicking or start it by clicking
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the Enlightenment menu icon on the taskbar, it contains the following categories.
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If you have favorite applications configured, it will display your favorites at the top
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of the menu.
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Display the word favorite, you click on favorite, your list of favorite applications appears.
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This is quite convenient for your most used applications.
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My list of favorites contains GTCam, Opera, a clause mail.
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The applications I use almost every day.
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Some of them every day, multiple times a day.
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Others several times a week.
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The ones I want to get to quickly.
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Then there's an Applications category.
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And it is divided into fairly typical subcategories, as you commonly see in Linux menus, such
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as accessories, development, games, graphics, and so on.
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Underneath that will be files on my Slackware machines that said Navigate.
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And that gave me the list to go directly to my home directory, to the desktop, to root,
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to my favorites, or to mounted USB devices.
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They also appear in there.
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The next item is Run Everything.
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It doesn't really run everything.
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You don't click it and have all your applications start up.
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It's more like the finder or the HUD.
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And it shows the menu contents as if they were arranged in folders.
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You can click a particular folder and select and launch it, as opposed to going up and
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down the menu.
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It's kind of a folder representation of the menu.
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And you can exit it simply by using the Escape button.
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Here's an element on the menu to take a screenshot, which I haven't used all that much because
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I'm a big fan of Case Snapshot.
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That is my go-to screenshot application.
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The next item down on the main menu is the Desktop Item, and that's where, at least
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on the Slackware box, I can change my gadget setup, I can switch workspaces, I can add
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or delete a shelf, I can configure the existing shelf where I can show and hide all the windows.
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The next item down is the Windows item, and if you click on that, it shows all your open
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applications.
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There's also an item to clean up windows and to find lost windows, and since I don't
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have any dirty windows and I haven't misplaced any, I'm not quite sure what that does.
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The next item down is the Enlightenment section, and that's where you see about Enlightenment.
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You can click on the theme item there, it will tell you about your current selected theme.
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You can use it to restart Enlightenment, which will restart the Desktop environment without
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shutting down any of your applications.
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If you've made certain types of configuration changes, you might need to hit Restart so
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that Enlightenment re-reads its configuration files, and it starts again fresh.
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It's similar to the Restart item on the Flux box menu.
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There is an exit or log item Enlightenment button.
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We're almost to the end here.
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Next to the bottom is the Settings panel, as the Settings item, the choices include the
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Settings panel, which is a graphical way of accessing all the Settings dialogs.
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They're arranged by category, and you can click to the left or to the right to get the
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various categories, and then the list appears and you can go to the Settings dialog you want.
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Takes a little getting used to the terminology, and the arrangement is Enlightenment's own
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terminology, and the arrangement.
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Once you get the hang of it, it's a pretty neat way to navigate.
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Then underneath the Settings panel item, there's one for your gadgets.
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If I open the menu and go to Gadgets, it gives me a couple of options about configuring
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the appearance and behavior of desktop gadgets.
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There's one for theme, where you can change your selected theme.
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Several different options come with Enlightenment.
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There are other options available at the website, e17stuff.org, and there'll be a caution
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about that before I line this up today.
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I really like the way the wallpaper works.
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You can very easily have a different wallpaper on each desktop, and with its commitment to
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visual beauty, Enlightenment renders the wallpapers very nicely, and I do like my eye candy.
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I've got over a thousand different wallpapers that I like to switch among.
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Almost all of them are nature scenes, or geographical scenes.
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I'm not real big on the abstract design stuff, but I do like my pretty pictures.
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When I get into the next version of this, I'll go into some detail about how you can
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easily set up to have different wallpapers on each workspace, because there's a couple
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of little tricks to it.
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A couple of miscellaneous things I wanted to mention.
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If you open a menu too close to the right side of the screen for all the menu to display,
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click on say menu, you click on applications, and the applications list is cut off halfway
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through by the side of the screen, simply move your mouse over into the applications list,
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and the menu will slide to the left.
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If you've got additional sub menus, you keep moving to the right, the menu will keep sliding
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to the left, so you can see all the choices.
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The taskbar may be set to show applications from the current desktop or from all desktops.
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By default on the installations I have, it was showing the applications from this desktop
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only.
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I change that.
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I like to show the applications from all desktops.
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I seldom have more than 6 or 7 applications open, and I like to get to them quickly.
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If I've got a destiny here open on desktop 3, and I want to hop over and look at my
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opera on desktop 2, I can simply click the opera icon in the taskbar, and enlightenment
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will go directly to opera on desktop 2.
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Or alternatively I could click the desktop 2 in the pager, and go to that desktop.
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If opera were behind something else, I would then have to click opera, so that fits in
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with my workflow.
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The other way you can change directions is the old traditional way of using alt tab.
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It works quite nicely.
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On the mint machine, because it's a slightly earlier version of enlightenment, if I have
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an application open on the screen, there is no icon in the iBox.
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It doesn't act like this taskbar on my Slackware with version 17.1.
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It acts like an iBox, so the icon is only in the iBox if the application is minimized.
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It seems like a subtle difference, but in hopping back and forth between my machines,
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that's one thing I find mildly irritating.
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You can also change desktops by moving your mouse from side to side.
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I can simply, as I'm sitting here looking at audacity, I move the mouse to the left,
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it takes me to workspace 2, I'm looking at opera, and I'm looking at my workspace 2 wallpaper,
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and I can simply keep doing that, it takes me to 1, and at 1 on this particular machine
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it stops.
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Now here's another thing, you can drag an application from one workspace to the other
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by dragging it with the mouse, and I've just dragged opera from workspace 2 to workspace
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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
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bar and move to and do some other stuff like that, but I can't just drag it around the
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clock.
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There's a little bit of delay when you're doing this and that delay, it kind of pauses
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at the edge, it doesn't smoothly slide over, that is configurable, it's an effect.
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It's not the screen being slow to repaint, it's simply an effect.
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One thing that's really neat, that E17 does, I really, really like this, if you minimize
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an application to the taskbar, the icon on the taskbar gets smaller, so I'm looking at
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my taskbar here, I can see that I have G-CRELUM open fully to the screen, that clause mail
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is minimized, that the terminal is minimized, opera is open to the screen, and audacity is
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open to the screen, simply by looking at the icon.
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Now when I click to go to clause mail, which was minimized, clause mail also comes back
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to the size of the window that I had it set to, so simply clicking on the taskbar to go
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to that application doesn't just take me to the workspace where a clause mail is, it
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brings clause mail into focus on the screen, and I think that's really nice, I like that.
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I have gotten to quite enjoy using Enlightenment, I'm a long time fluxbox, user fluxbox has
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been my go-to desktop environment for, I guess almost five years, I know it, and Enlightenment
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is actually starting to woo me away from it, it doesn't use a significant greater amount
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of resources, it doesn't go into a lot of stuff in the background that I don't need
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done, like KDE, I don't use any of the KDE personal information management modules that
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Akonadi is supposed to make easier to use, so the mere existence of Akonadi running in
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the background is one of the things that has kept me from going back to KDE, although
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when I first started, that was my favorite, it's very easy to set up key bindings and
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mouse bindings, or edit them and change them, Enlightenment, and set windows to remain
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in particular positions or stay on particular desktops, Enlightenment, and those are all things
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I'll go into when I do the next version of this.
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I gave a presentation to my love based on the notes I'd actually been making to do this
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podcast and prepare a handout to use, I will have links to the handout for anyone who
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wants to download it in the show notes, and one final caution I do want to mention this
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because I actually ran into it myself, you can go to the website e17stuff.org, the link
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will be in the show notes, that's e17 hyphen stuff, and find a number of themes you need
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to be careful though, because the theme engine has changed somewhat in Enlightenment 17
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from what it was in the previous versions, and if you install a theme that is not updated
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to work with e17, you're going to find that stuff stops working.
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I did this and I can guarantee stuff will stop working, so be careful with that.
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Other than that, I would say e17 is a lot of fun.
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One final thing I want to say about the show notes, I include the link in there to the
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Colonel Panic Oddcast episode that I mentioned earlier, it begins with a very intensive interview
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of the maintainer of e17, I'm one of the participants of Jonathan Nado who's asking
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him about accessibility items, but if you want to learn about e17 and from the maintainer's
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point of view, and listen to a really good detailed discussion, I recommend that episode
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of Colonel Panic Oddcast very highly, and I'll be back whenever I can get it done and
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King will put it on this schedule with a more detailed look at some of these configuration
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items that I've mentioned here.
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Thank you very much.
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If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net, PineViewFarm is
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all one word, no spaces, no punctuation, and my website is www.PineViewFarm.net.
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You have been listening to HackerPublic Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
|
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If you ever consider recording a podcast, then visit our website to find out how easy
|
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it really is.
|
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HackerPublic Radio was founded by the DigitalDogPound and the Infonomicom Computer Club.
|
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HPR is funded by the Binary Revolution at binref.com, all binref projects are crowd-sponsored
|
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by LUNAR pages.
|
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From shared hosting to custom private clouds, go to LUNAR pages.com for all your hosting
|
||||
needs.
|
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Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution,
|
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share a life, lead us all license.
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