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E17, Slimmed Down For Cell Phones
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 16, 2008 04:19 PM
from the durned-amazing-looking dept.
from the durned-amazing-looking dept.
twitter writes "Want to run Enlightenment on your cell phone? The Rasterman's recent efforts bring E17 to Open Moko FreeRunner and Treo 650: 'According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz. To prove it, he is distributing a Linux kernel and E17/Illume/Elementary stack for Palm's Treo650. The stack can be launched from PalmOS without touching the device's flash storage, he says.' While Microsoft fumbles with limited 'instant on,' GNU/Linux rules the embedded world and that's the only thing going in the IT market right now."
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What a guy (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This is because a long time ago, Rasterman refused to sign the NDA*, so the Powers that Be banished him to Japan to lock him out of the limelight.
*No Deodorant Agreement
Re:What a guy (Score:4, Informative)
He did a lot of work on imlib2, which languished for years until better software replaced it (where "better" might mean "less buggy" or "released more frequently" or "appears maintained"). I've never thought that he had much interest in releasing stable versions of his code with any frequency or rhythm. That's not the sole criterion for positive notoriety, but releasing software that people can actually use is important.
(One caveat is that I stopped using Enlightenment a decade ago, around E14, because the new versions weren't stable or releasable.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
He did a lot of work on imlib2, which languished for years until better software replaced it (where "better" might mean "less buggy" or "released more frequently" or "appears maintained").
To which software are you referring? (Honest question, not rhetorical.)
I've never thought that he had much interest in releasing stable versions of his code with any frequency or rhythm. That's not the sole criterion for positive notoriety, but releasing software that people can actually use is important.
The release cycle is painfully slow, or possibly even non-existent. One of the lowest layers in the E17 actually has a release version [enlightenment.org]. And I just now noticed that there is a release snapshot for E17 and EFL. I haven't taken the time to look at the actual bug lists for the whole E17 project, but I am one of the many people saying "E17 has been quite stable for me and I use it every day". So there's some positive hearsay for whateve
Re:What a guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe because other people actually releases stable code that other people can use. That plays a big role in getting fans - people being able to use your software. They don't care too much about you when you don't release anything.
E17 was awesome from the start, it made things that windows and os x didn't do at its time, and it's still very powerful. But, you know, while E is "technically ahead" of other graphic toolkits, some of the things it does have already been implemented, tested, released and perfectioned in other environments.
I no longer have faith in E. They're technically ahead in their development versions, but their stable versions are always behind of other environments. I can use features that E implemented first than anyone in stable environments others than E, but not in E, because, you know, they're too busy making it "perfect"
Parent
Running E17 full time. Wouldn't use anything else. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm running E17 on my desktop right now. Been running it both at home and work for the last few years. It's by far my favourite window manager, for a variety of reasons:
* It's fast. Very fast.
* It feels clean and simple.
* Looks very good.
* Very customisable.
* Keyboard shortcuts for just about anything!
* Just about everything can be controlled or configured from the command prompt.
With E17, I can configure my desktop to be just a background picture. No start menus, strips, clocks, nothing. Then I can add whatever I want, starting with a simple left click on the background to bring up the Enlightenment configuration menu. From there, you can build it to your taste. Sure, it has it's own way of doing things, but it never forces a display feature onto you. It's all your choice to show.
Given, I run the development version, so it's not the easiest to get running. There's a nice script I use to download via CVS, compile up the source, and package it into deb files. I keep a copy of the deb packages for the last version I liked, and revert to that if the latest version is buggy. It's worked well for me so far.
As such, I wouldn't recommend E17 to your average user. For the more technically inclined, though, it beats anything I've ever used. I've tweaked E17 to behave exactly how I want it. Now I feel like I'm working with my computer, instead of struggling against it. Truly, I have been enlightened.
Parent
Re:What a guy (Score:4, Insightful)
What is there to cover. Enlightenment "1" was out a decade ago and since then work has been going on E17 with countless 'restarts' on the core libraries to make it all work.
Others have taken e17 on occasion and tried to make a working desktop out of it all, with some success if you are willing to go without essential tools working consistently, it is a good window manager but only for the hardcore.
It is the Duke Nukem Forever of the Linux world. After a certain amount of time you just have to produce SOMETHING and Raster hasn't.
The problem is now that e17 really has to look for a new home. So what that e17 is lightweight when every PC has a dual core, 4 gigs of ram and a powerful gpu? 10 years ago E17 would have been groundbreaking. 5 years ago it would have ruled the desktop. Today. Who needs it. You can have a PC that can run any hardware accelerated window manager for peanuts, even laptops got GPU's for ages now.
For that matter, this is hardly the first time e17 been shown on a phone.
Raster make some intresting concepts and some of libraries are widely used, but e17 is a pipedream by now outdated by advancing tech. The world has moved on. Don't get me wrong, I got e17 installed and with a lot of tweaking I got it working just as I want it, but I have had to work at it for over half a decade at now to get it working and keep it working with each 'rewrite'. ENOUGH.
Linus is the best known hero of opensource, because he delivers. Stallman has shown real vision and delivered the GNU but gets flack for HERD (or however it is spelled), Raster did E16, then started E17 and not produced anything but core libraries for some future project. Useful they may be to others but some of us are getting tired of waiting.
Parent
Re:What a guy (Score:5, Insightful)
while i can't comment on the technical merits of Enlightenment, i strongly disagree with you that a lightweight window manager or desktop environment is irrelevant these days. if anything, lightweight GUI toolkits are more relevant now than ever before. with the rapid growth of the mobile computing market and rise of smart devices like smartphones, portable media players/entertainment devices, netbooks/sub-laptops, internet tablets, etc., there is an ever-growing need for lightweight software platforms--especially open source ones.
it's easy to see how wireless internet access is poised to change the consumer computing paradigm as public wireless access becomes more and more ubiquitous. increasingly, the internet/web is being integrated into the daily lives of ordinary individuals. people want to keep in touch with their friends/associates via IM or e-mail. web services like google maps, wikipedia, gmail, flickr, etc. are becoming indispensable tools for everyday life. and more and more people are seeing the benefits of having access to the web, and all of the information it contains, at all times via information appliances. such smart devices have essentially become an accessory to life.
this has not only pushed more and more portable devices to include wireless & web browsing capabilities, but it has also made them smarter & more powerful. naturally, more robust software platforms need to be developed to match the advances in portable hardware. just compare the first generation iPod firmware to the iPod Touch's operating system.
obviously Elementary isn't meant to run on conventional computing platforms like desktop PCs or laptops; it's clearly designed for sub-laptop devices like smartphones and information appliances. this is an emerging market that will only grow even faster as wireless internet access becomes a basic public infrastructure, especially as more and more cities roll out municipal WiFi/WiMax networks. and people will not want to run Windows Vista on their portable devices.
Parent
That is why e17 has to look for a new home (Score:5, Insightful)
Enlightment (e16) has been used for a longtime as the actual window manager for Gnome.
But PC's have gotten more powerful, we are now dual core. That means a window manager no longer locks up because the CPU is busy. Even windows (and windows has ALWAYS been terrible as a window manager) runs smoothly now.
E17 doesn't use the GPU, the most powerful component on your PC that is often idle when showing the desktop, by design. That idea was GOOD when GPU's weren't common, but on the PC they are now.
In fact mobile phones are now getting GPU's. Since E17 is far from ready, even if goes to the mobile phones, will it be needed?
I use the Duke Nukem Forever reference for a reason. Part of the reason for its eternal delays is that they took so long that each time the engine they used got outdated. As the industry moved on, DNF got left behind and had to get started again. E17 is running the same risk.
Linux is good, a low powered OS is good, but is anybody waiting for say an 8 bit OS? That is low power, but we moved on.
As said, I use E17 because it is good at something else beside being fast, being minimal. I don't need desktop icons and don't want them. Nor sounds not bells and whistles. I just want the basics to look pretty and E17 does that. But I don't need it anymore, I only still run it because I really do NOT like KDE or Gnome. I do NOT want a coherent desktop where everything works together. I run an app, the app does what I want and the window manager draws the window and THAT is it.
But I am a very small market. Others want transparancy, something e17 doesn't do. Others want hardware accelerated graphics, something e17 doesn't do.
When raster first showed a vid of E17 running on a mobile app (Zaurus if I remember right) it was nice looking. But we got more power now. We got iPhone and Android and Nokia's phones. E17 is out of date before it every launched, just like every build of DNF.
Parent
Ok..... why? (Score:2)
While this might be 'neat', its the applications that really matter.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, there is another piece that matters even more than the apps, and that's the standardization of the user experience. Iron-fisted control of every aspect of GUI, from control placement to responses, relentless paring down to the essentials, usability labs, testing, all those details that make Apple products so popular, that's what Linux needs, and that's what Enlightenment could bring. It's an exciting prospect.
Whether or not it happens is a different question.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, ill give you that, and i agree consistency is a good thing, but an interface alone is sort of useless. The phone has to DO something..
Re: (Score:2)
Consistency is overrated. If there is a program that is better than all the rest, people will learn use even if it doesn't fit the exact mold of other programs.
Re:Ok..... why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Consistency is overrated. If there is a program that is better than all the rest, people will learn use even if it doesn't fit the exact mold of other programs.
x million iPod and iPhone users would strongly suggest otherwise. As a music player, the concepts behind iPods suck -- here's proprietary client software, we sell DRM music, our music doesn't work on any other player, can't replace the battery, higher priced than most other players with similar audio quality -- there's a lot to dislike about the iPod.
So why do so many people buy and use and love them? It's the user interface. It's intuitive, it's consistent across the platforms, it's responsive, and it's not butt-ugly. It's the part that people see and interact with that make them desire the product.
Open Source projects are starting to learn this. Ubuntu is a big success in large part because they're pushing hard for a consistent GUI experience, and making it easy to use. We hackers may think that "being the best on the inside" is enough, but for Joe Sixpack to accept it, for it to be a commercial success, it's far more important that it looks good and is easy to use. To an end user, that is performance.
Parent
Re:Ok..... why? (Score:5, Insightful)
More people play DVDs than use iPods and iPhones, and DVD menus are by no means consistent.
More people drive cars than use iPods and iPhones, and minor things such as light controls, wiper controls, and parking breaks are not consistent between makes or even models.
You're just parroting the industrial designer's version of the geek fallacy that the best technology always wins. People buy iPods and iPhones because that brand is particularly popular and because music players let you carry thousands of songs in your pocket.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I dare you to show me an actual study stating that. It's just as likely that people buy them because they're fashionable or because the media refers to "ipods" rather than "mp3 players" in virtually any article relating to digital music.
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz.
Cool!
Next step: Running E17 and an application! =D
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've got an OpenMoko and I'm very happy with it hardware-wise. However, the software is currently Enlightenment, some Enlightenment ToolKit based apps, some GTK stuff (some of which is left over from the previous OpenMoko GUI) and all of the holes patched up with QTopia/QT Extended tools.
It's not really a case of E17 and an application, its a case of E17 and GTK libraries and daemons, and QT libraries..... and an application.
I'm trying to get started hacking on it to fix this, but I'm having some trouble wi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, I don't think he has a last name of Rasterman. I think that's his internet handle, and thus the connection between his name and 2D graphics is rather deliberate. :P
The Windows API is seeing its end (Score:3, Insightful)
It is clear that the Windows API with all its backward compatibility and all that are completely unsuitable for the variety of computing devices in use and development today. When the push was for bigger and faster, that was not a problem for Microsoft -- their bloat and instability were less noticeable in that environment. But now that things are shifting to smaller, lighter, more efficient devices, the pressure is on Microsoft to answer that need -- and so far, their answer is WindowsXP... which isn't good enough. (Makes me wonder why they don't pull Win98se out of moth balls, hide DOS and work from there.) WindowsCE seems like something they might try to use but it doesn't "look" suitable in all the places I have seen it applied... I could be wrong, but as Microsoft's efforts seem to be focused on putting WindowsXP on everything that a small computer that normally sells with Linux, I would have to say that Microsoft sees WinCE as functionally unsuitable to compete in that arena. (perhaps it is because there are few apps for WinCE and those are typically written by the OEM distributor of the devices that contain WinCE?)
Bottom line? WinXP isn't suitable and Microsoft will have to make something ENTIRELY new if they want to complete with Linux in this market... or... adapt FreeBSD like Apple did. Either way, it would be a huge blow to the Microsoft ego and very upsetting to their developers.
It's funny that Microsoft feels they can't afford NOT to compete.
Re: (Score:2)
This, however, is were
Re: (Score:2)
Forget MS vs Linux, or MS vs Apple, this is gonna be the *real* computing holy war of the future: MS as computing institution vs MS as springboard for screwy new technology.
Re: (Score:2)
Once upon a time, I ran Linux on a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM, a 40MB hard disk, and still had room for X11. Admittedly, not room for much else.
More recently, I've run it on a 586 clocked at around 66MHz with either 4 or 8MB of RAM and 32MB of storage space. And still run X11. *and* an application or two.
Windows CE ran on the same hardware, but was significantly more of a pain in the ass to work with.
Re: (Score:2)
actually, now that I think about it, I used to run a roomfull of 486DX2-66s with 16MB of RAM and 500MB hard disks. They ran Debian âoePotatoâ (2.2), just to give you an idea of vintage. They ran it rather *well*, at that.
I'm sure Microsoft will get there (Score:2, Flamebait)
They can leave XP available for another several years. Just enough for Moore's Law to finally make it not look stupidly fat! Honest!
Blackbox (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't a slimmed-down Enlightenment just be Blackbox with transparency, menus that "slide" a bit, and more "textured" themes? What did I miss?
Blackbox seems to be using all of 4MBs of RAM here, and next to no CPU time. With a 3MB binary, that's not surprising.
Re: (Score:2)
See Raster's news page [rasterman.com]. Scroll down to Sunday 29 May 2005 or search for "E17 is being optimised". It's obviously quite dated, but interesting anyway. Granted, if someone's product looks good because of the tests the same person wrote, you have to take the results with a grain of salt... but it is all open source. I have always hoped someone who knew X really well would come along and make a more complete window manager performance and benchmarking suite.
Also of interest on the same news page is the
Re:Blackbox (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe. But those effects are what make a GUI look less 1990 and more 2009. Enlightenment is more or less where lightweight meets design and "prettiness", rather than the polarity of KDE, Gnome or Blackbox and Fluxbox, etc.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Okay. And how about Sawfish...? (Without GNOME)
You certainly can't say it doesn't look modern, since it IS the entire basis (WM) for the GNOME desktop (just as Enlightenment was back in the 0.x days), and it's certainly fast when used on its own.
I cursed it (Score:2)
I switched to E from my aging Amiga. Now both of them are primarily used to power cell phones.
Sorry about that, folks. Maybe I'll switch to Vista to balance it out.
He doesn't seem to "get it" yet. (Score:2)
Looking at the screenshots... In the same way the qt people didn't "get it" with Qtopia (do they now? I haven't checked for several years).
You can't simply dump a desktop windowing metaphor onto a phone. A phone has a tiny display and painfully inconvenient buttons. Lets see you hit one of those menus, pull a scroll bar. Try reading the tiny fonts.
Since when is 32M small? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The US tax code is probably more than 32 megabytes, even in its most efficient coding implementation.
Finally the lack of updates make sense (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The Revision Log [enlightenment.org] Begs to differ.
It gets updated quite a bit, there's releases every now and then, but it is still considered a development version.
Re: (Score:2)
It's the GNU Hurd of desktops!
Can the summary be any more unclear? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I can hardly restrain myself. I want two!
Re: (Score:2)
No no, this is about actual enlightenment.
Well, then there's no surprise that it's open source.
Re:Can the summary be any more unclear? (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't a tabloid either. The readers are assumed to generally have a clue, and how to use google.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If you dont already know what E17 is then this article isn't really for you anyway. The article is only of any interest to those who have used E17 on their desktop computer and thus migh
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
... and ignore all mention of some former band with the same abbreviation.
Uncanny! (Score:2, Informative)
The last time I tortured myself with Enlightenment, that's almost exactly the kind of machine I ran it on, about ten years ago.
I wonder why Rasterman didn't just grab some old Enlightenment code from his geriatric tree and nearly do a straight port.....oh.
Aw, snap! (Score:4, Funny)
My reaction remains unaltered though: wow, it's still around?
At what cost though? (Score:2)
I agree it's cool that E17 runs on cellphones. Whether it's as cool as the UI of my HTC Touch is another matter.
But more to the point is the question of what's been sacrificed in order for this to happen. I think I've got the answer ...
Raster has been pushing in this direction for years now. Even before his year-long stint at OpenMoko, he's been devoting much time and effort to get E17 running respectably on very lean hardware. But at the same time, he's flatly refused to support compositing, and in particu
No, wrong tool for the job. (Score:3, Informative)
No, I don't want to run software designed for a desktop on my phone. Stop trying to shoe horn software into places it doesn't belong and focus on releasing it where it belongs.
Why is it that techies think this sort if thing is cool, but if a handyman or construction worker saw you trying to use a jackhammer to put a nail in your house they would realize you were a complete moron instantly?
Do because you should, not because you can.
Re: (Score:2)
With the march of time and processor power, the current Enlightement 0.17 release, aka "E17," has come to be considered a lightweight alternative to GNOME and KDE, used for example in gOS 3.0 , a commercial Linux distribution aimed at "low-powered" netbooks. Yet, it appears that E17 could be primed for a renaissance of relevance in even smaller devices.
Re: (Score:2)
E17 will be released right after Duke Nukem Forever by the look of it. And I'm talking about first alpha release here.
Re: (Score:2)
from outside, it's a bit confusing.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/17th_September%2C_2008_-_Activity_since_launch [openmoko.org] says - "Raster left the project."
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates/October_3rd%2C_2008 [openmoko.org] - "Raster is still with us."
sounds like some weak hollywood movie with spirits and whatnot.