bjoernvold.com

Enlightenment is a Xwindow manager that can serve as a Desktop Environment. I installed it in Arch and it found my Gnome3 and KDE installation and it automatically created the sessions e16 Gome and e17 KDE besides pure e16.

I like the flexibility of it and have played around a bit in Enlightenment Gnome3. It is not like Compiz and Emerald but it has a certain spirit to it.



It will only work in Gnome-panel. But I like the click anywhere on the desktop to get a menu thing and those menus are highly customizable in ~/.e16. In fact most of e16 can be altered in text files from there.

Thanks for the preview. It looks like there is a 4-desktop pager there? If so, can there be 6 or so? How about user-made 'Links to Application' buttons on the desktop? What is the Windows logo used for?

You can have as many desktops as you want by right-clicking on your desktop and pick Settings->Desktop. No problem!
When you click up the menu there is this user-app menu list.
I just added Iron and Nautilus there so I have quick access to often used applications:

You can add or remove as many as you want. I had to do some translation there too. No problem.
Also there are a lot of settings that you can alter from the settings when right-clicking the desktop. If you activate the sound there will be a nice lady telling you what is happening etc...

And the Windows logo is among my wallpapers and was animated by the still functioning wallpaper-changer that we have commented elsewhere on this forum.
It serves a specific purpose:
Whenever I do a presentation of this new and scary Linux thing the natural human defense is to fall back on the (known) Windows thing. Now I could spend the entire presentation relating Linux to Windows and explaining why it is not exactly like Windows, and listening to the self appointed Windows experts, who declare that Windows is better after approximately 15 seconds, thus sabotaging everyone who actually wants to hear about it. etc. etc........ +++

If you put that wallpaper up there and present the secure, reliable virus-free OS, with those fantastic features, you get the rest to listen, and those; insecure limited diverting, personalities will not discover that I am not talking about Windows before it is too late.

By then the intelligent people in the crowd have gotten a lot of useful information and mostly applaud it. And you will find those "experts" applauding along with them. They go with the flow.
As Windows fans that is almost by definition.

Very well done. So, it seems I can make the right-click menu show whatever I want but not put pretty icons on the desktop to click for individual programs? GF says I have too many of those but I guess that's her job.

A dirty job - but someone has to do it
I forgot to mention that the path to altering the Enlightenment menus is ~/.e16/menus.
I know there is this e17 experimental not properly developed and maybe stopped developing version. I have not tested that one.
Edit:
And I wonder if you will not get back your beloved icons if you start Nautilus (or your file manager)

To get in in you user apps menu when you click on the desktop just add:
at the end of ~/.e16/menus/user_apps.menu

Edit again:
That was just Nautilus malfunctioning in e16 bringing back part of the Gnome desktop. In fact e16 does not work all to well in Mandriva 2010. So I will now try e17 there.

E17 does not work in Mandriva so I will stick to testing e16 in Arch.
Making an extra icon window (to gather minimized programs) was real easy. But I have not yet fond a way to remove them
Pressing <ALT>+ right click brings up the remove option, but nothing happens.
.....
Ah found it! The menu says cancel and when pressing thatm it is removed - I have to fix that translation!
Lots and lots of themes that I only had to put in the ~/.e16/themes directory and they all work.
There are very cool sound effects too, but you go bananas after 10 minutes so they are best shut off.

OK so I have it fully working as standalone or as a Gnome window manager.

But even as stand alone DE it uses surprisingly much CPU:

How does that compute with this being fit for cell phones?
I can see that they have Joystick support, maybe the Playstation 3 implementation is to blame.

And I lost my Norwegian superduperletters: æøå ÆØÅ so I had to do some Xorg stuff again:
I had to edit:

And alter this section like this:

After that my keyboard works all over the place again. This is a point where the Americans have an advantage - every thing is always defaulting to US.

I have now loged into e16 pure. It is very minimalistic so I thougt I should add some epplets. I downloaded the epplets base pack and installed it.
Then, full of expectation I danced over to the menu (left click) and.... nothing
I tried the settings with right click. And there was this Maintenance point and under there there was a "Regenerate all Menus" point.
Ah life is good again:

Those small windows on the top are all very functional.
One of them is the snapshot epplet with which this pic is taken.

Always loved Enlightenment, myself. Just never had time to set it up completely properly. Much prefer e16 to e17. Need to do that when I get my computer back. Thanks.

Here is another look with the Starenli theme. Lots of fancy sounds there too. And the Metalic theme. The theme above is brushed metal with an individual background.

Not all themes do support epplets and some can have sound problems (not for dedanna) but mostly they are OK.
All themes mentioned here work OK. Like the Sleep theme:

The epplet called E-Exec is a command line like <ALT>+<F2>. There you can start applications or scripts.

E16 works fine under Gnome3 too, even with epplets:

And after having put opp some monitoring epplets I noticed that the CPU usage drops to a minimum after a while. That makes it interesting to keep Enlightenment.

Although you have a settings menu with a zillion options, most of the settings can be set in the ~/.e16 directory. The file e_config--0.0.cfg lets you set all the basic stuff from the settings menu. This is kind of an Arch way of doing things and it is particularly usefull if you have set a theme that "hangs" and freezes.
You can just alter it in that file and hit <CTRL>+<ALT>+<DELETE>.
That goes for all your config settings.