[Debian] Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Yeah.. not much to it. You need to head on over here and add my repository to get the latest (experimental) e17 binaries. Then it's just a simple matter of:
That grabs everything you need for a functional setup. No need to modify any login manager files or anything because unlike KDE or Gnome.. Enlightenment don't need/care/want/have one.

Meh. This is all just my opinion of course but it was OK at best. It ran a little better than KDE4 .. but still slower than KDE3 and Gnome. On the up side the desktop looks very snazzy, and even has transparent task bars and all kinds of animated graphical goodies. So it's really impressive; but again - there's that speed cost. I was using iceweasel with it for a while and it was just downright cruel.. so I eventually gave up on using it for much lol.. but you could look at it for a while and just smile at your tablet :). Yay for options.

You'll have to give it a try and see if you like it or not. It's not too bad... but I think I'll be going back to Gnome personally. The really nice thing about enlightenment is there are only maybe a handful of libraries, and e17 and e17-data packages you need to remove to get rid of it (or install it for that matter)... so it's small and easy to control. Unlike KDE and Gnome where it's just easier to trash your deblet and start over then try and remove 160 packages you no longer need.

Obligatory Screenshot:

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

nice! thanks! works better than i expected!

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

You can also test enlightenment e16 which is in debian repos.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Yeah.. but I was focused on e17 because:
A) It wasn't yet available
B) here,here, and here.

Everyone seemed to be asking about e17. e16 is equally easy to install you just don't need any special Repo's for it.. since Debian has already ported it themselves.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

I know at present this requires deblet to run, but is there any major reasons why?
I was under the impression e17 sat ontop of x11 - which we have directly on our maemo devices without needing deblet.

I am sure there will be a good reason, but I don't know enough about deblet or linux in general to know the differences.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

The answer would be dependencies and libraries... Penguinbait has ported KDE, Window Maker, XFCE (i think) over to maemo .. you might request e17 from him as he seems pretty good at that. All these require different versions and builds of X libraries (I believe) which would prevent them from running directly over Maemo..

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Deblet is just the Debian libraries, I'm sure you could compile E17 for Maemo, it just might mean some more tinkering to get all the libraries in place. The beauty of compiling stuff for deblet is that you can use all the same libraries in your tablet that the app expects in the desktop environment. So often, when compiling stuff for Maemo, I hear developers complain about having to compile a dozen libraries or mess with the app because it won't work with the (old) Maemo versions of the libraries...

EDIT: I started typing my post, got distracted, and when I finally posted it, fatalsaint had beat me to it :D

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Aren't there part of the libs already made available (though probably in other packages) by Openbossa?

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Yes, on Mamona!

QEdje is available in extras-devel IIRC. Several parts of EWL are available here on Openbossa.

Here is the general wiki start page about QEdje. Includes a presentation from 2 weeks ago at aKedemy. Please note the 6,4 MB .7z file extracts to almost 100 MB.

I wonder is dynamic background theming will work well on the NIT. The Enlightenment rendering software engine is ultra fast according to the allnames marketing dept!:o

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

So, why is everyone raving about E17 when fatalsaint says that it runs slower than Gnome!? I've been using Minimal Gnome as my benchmark for "upper limit WM on the tablet", and if anything is slower than Gnome, it ain't no good.

Is it possible, fatalsaint, that your version is just too pretty? Maybe if you scaled back on the transparency and animations and all of that, it would be more usable? I mean, even XFCE4 has transparency, you know.

Or maybe if you based E17 on the Mamona libs, things would be more optimized for the tablets? But if that's the case, why not push those optimizations upstream? I'm sure everyone could use faster rendering, no?

But if you take out all the pretty bits, what's E17 got that you can't get from E16, which is easily available in the Debian repos?

I don't get it; It's a real head-scratcher.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

The fancy effects might have something to do with it. It is pretty amazing that the IT is able to achieve these affects at any speed.

I've not used either in a while so, I might be wrong...but the UI in E17 is far more intuitive than the E16 one (more configurable, easier to use).

I'd imagine that some tweaking might make it more usable. Most people seem to agree that E17 runs at least as fast XFCE on X86 processors...so something must be going on. Possibly, the graphical effects are too much for this little guy.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Both of the above are very plausible options... I have not gone through any of the configuration pages to see if I can speed this up.. haven't had time.

I suppose I'll work on that before I do the Keblet packages.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

OK, well I'll confirm that messing with some of these settings do seem to give a slight speed boost.. But I am unfamiliar with Enlightenment and there are tons of configuration settings and modules and all kinds of stuff one could change/remove/disable/whatever.

Someone who wants e17 should install it and try and come up with "the perfect" tablet configuration and come tell us how to do it.. because Im flying blind here and without a benchmark tool or any real way to do legitimate testing it's a bit of a waste for me.. I don't particularly like the interface. (I still prefer the 'plainness' of the older desktops).

But anyway... In theory one could make this probably as fast, or faster, than Gnome... which makes it a viable alternative for a WM. (As for the benefit of e17 over e16.. no idea)

ETA: And as has already been said it's really quite impressive all the stuff you can turn ON in enlightenment on this tablet.. and that's not really tooting Nokia's horn so much as tooting the horn of the Enlightenment devel team.. the fact that they have produced a WM that could compete with today's "3d fancy" oogly eyed crap like KDE4/Vista/OSX on hardware that you are likely to find in random joe's neighborhood dumpster is extremely impressive.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

:) well, raster (core E17 developer) is now working for openMoko, and EWL got ported to the Neo Freerunner. The Freerunner runs on partly identical hardware as the N8x0, so at least ARM ports should work well, if they didn't before. Probably did given Debian ARM port. But maybe more specific hardware problems are solved too. Besides, goal and performance are similar. Maybe can look at the performance on E17 on Freerunner but be aware the Freerunner has hardware rendering engine enabled.

My comment about E17 rendering being fast also refers to compare with XRender. Check out enlightenment.org news archives. The difference is astonishing. And, really, it is, especially compared to XRender (might have since then even imrpoved tho), although this isn't used now either, e.g. there is no compiz... but... I somehow doubt these performance tests were done on a OMAP2! :D

E17 was long time on radar for embedded devices, years ago really. It has even so much improved since then... :)

Easy live cd to test out Enlightenment is Elive, www.elivecd.org you can download the stable 1.0 version if you donate (its now a bit older already) or just grab a development version. This allows you to fully run E w/o borking/touching your current system, while still on relatively fast hardware... ie. your desktop. Recommended to learn more about E... I'll see if i can find some time later on to play with latest versions... *excited*

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

I'll definitly give it a go in a few days (I'm still waiting on my new card...arghhh!)

Thanks for all your work, fatalsaint.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

The other day I wanted to try E17 on my laptop. There is a very easy script for this called easy_e17.sh

You can find it by using Google.

Its sortof like Gargnome or Klolforgotthename. It just grabs all the EFL and E applications from SVN and compiles them for you. Now, the interesting bit would be to adapt it to maemo.

You can also use Elive, an Enlightenment Live CD. This gives you at least an impression of what E is capable capable of.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

It seems that the e17 base library packages aren't in the repository mentioned in the first post anymore. Also, as someone mentioned that it might be worth trying, I gave the mamona repository a shot using "deb http://dev.openbossa.org/mamona/0.2/nokia810 mamona main" but it didn't work. The problem seems to be that deblet looks for a binary-armel folder, but the directory uses binary-arm instead. If there is a way around this, let me know and I'll give it another shot.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Mamona is an alternative OS ('ROM') for the NIT. In other words, you would need to install Mamona seperate on your SD card and use dual-boot, or erase Maemo OS. Ofcourse, you can also run Mamona is a VM first, or run E17 live CD or easy_e17.sh on a supported platform (e.g. Linux/x86 or Linux/amd64).

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Yeah, I installed Mamona in the past and found it to be too incomplete to be very useful for anything other than test compiling packages.

I tried using the repository for deblet because someone mentioned that it might be possible to use the packages already compiled into ARM for E17 by the mamona project on deblet, so I tried it just to see if it could be done.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

e17 should still be in my repository???

http://packages.linuxniche.net/deblet/pool/main/e/

I haven't removed them nor changed it in quite some time. Maybe you tried during an outage on my host?

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Hmm, interesting. It said that the E17 packages were there, but not the libecore, etc. I'd love to check again, but my deblet got hosed last since my last endeavors and I've yet to reinstall it. I'll probably take another shot in a day or two...for now my wife is mad at me for wasting so much time playing with computers.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

same problem here, has there been any progress? here is the output from apt-get install e17 if it helps:

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
e17: Depends: libecore-con0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-evas0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-fb0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-file0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-imf0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-ipc0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-job0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-txt0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore-x0 but it is not installable
Depends: libecore0 but it is not installable
Depends: libedbus0 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libedje0 but it is not installable
Depends: libefreet0 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libembryo0 but it is not installable
Depends: libevas0 but it is not installable
Depends: libevas-engines but it is not installable

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Looks like those packages are in the experimental debian repository..

They do appear to be missing from my repo and the tspre repo. Try adding the following to your sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main

And then apt-get update, and apt-get install e17. You may want to remove experimental after that.. since it is, well, experimental.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Experimental is not by default included in sources.list of a Debian OS. The reason for this is that they're... very experimental, and might really screw the OS up (or even device).

You were warned...

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

E17 packages from experimental cause a crash after the splash screen with this error:

"This is very bad. Enlightenment SEGV'd.

This is not meant to happen and is likely a sign of a bug in Enlightenment or the libraries it relies on. You can gdb attach to this process now to try debug it or you could exit, or just hit restart to try and get your desktop back the way it was."

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

I'll have to re-look at these when I can get caught up with MER again. Since deblet has more or less been shelved to get Mer operational I've removed my deblet install and have an older copy of the Mer image. Once I get caught up with that I'll see about getting enlightenment to work on it. (maybe Ubuntu's repo's have it already, I'll take a look.)

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

Thanks. Don't worry about it on deblet. I just wanted to see if there was an easy way to get it going on it. I was really hoping for the newer subversions of it anyway.

Ubuntu doesn't have e17 in the repos. I tried compiling it using the easy_e17 script but I ended up with an error saying that the drive was out of space (which I seriously doubt considering the install was the only thing on my 8GB drive). But, anyway...it didn't work.

Thanks for your help with this.

Re: Enlightenment (e17) for Deblet
 

$ cd ~; du -ms e* /opt/e*
658 e17_cvs
1113 e17_src
1 easy_e17.sh
100 /opt/e17