For the past three days, I've spent a good amount of time with Enlightenment, a visually striking, light(-er)weight window manager for Linux (and other OSs). The initial install was simple, as Enlightenment is in Fedora's repos:
[sodo@computer ~]$ sudo yum info enlightenment
[sudo] password for sodo:
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Installed Packages
Name : enlightenment
Arch : x86_64
Version : 0.16.999.050
Release : 5.fc12
Size : 10 M
Repo : installed
From repo : fedora
Summary : Highly optimized and extensible desktop shell
URL : http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en
License : MIT
Description : Enlightenment 0.17 is desktop shell based on Enlightenment Foundation
: Libraries. It's highly optimized and provides extensive theming capabilities.
: A Desktop shell means it's a window manager plus a file manager, plus
: configuration utilitys all in one. It works reasonably fast even on old and low
: range computers, providing eye-candy environment.
Documentation
As a new user, I've found the documentation and resources for Enlightenment to be difficult to navigate. The best source for a new user is to visit the Wiki and choose "User Guides":
http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki
Module Installation
Also, module installation is buried in the Wiki:
http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Gadgets
Update 2011/02/12
I've since installed from source to give me the latest and greatest. The source install was relatively painless downloading the latest E packages from here:
http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=download&l=en
Install the sources in this order:
eina-1.0.0
eet-1.4.0
evas-1.0.0
ecore-1.0.0
embryo-1.0.0
edje-1.0.0
efreet-1.0.0
e_dbus-1.0.0
eeze-1.0.0
enlightenment-0.16.999.55225
For each of the sources, after extracting the source code via "tar xvfz
./autogen
make
sudo make install
The only occasional problem that I had was a missing library here and there, like liblua. I resolved this by installing the -devel package. A second problem I encountered was that I needed to set:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
***end update***
Enlightenment is very cool, very pretty, but it takes quite a bit of getting used to especially if you're coming from the world of Metacity.
I think I like it, but the jury is out due to all the configuration I've had to do.
A battle, as always
So here are a few of the problems I encountered, and some workarounds:
1) ALT-PrntScreen didn't work
I had to rebind the PrtScn key to gnome-screenshot, the default Gnome screen capture program.
Binding keys
The key bindings interface in Enlightenment is a little funky. You get there by clicking on the desktop, go to Settings, Settings Panel, Input category, Key Bindings:
The left part of the screen is the key and the right hand side shows the Action you want to perform. In my case, ALT+Print was not in the list, so I first had to Add Binding. Then I needed to bind the key to an action, which was to Launch a Command:
/usr/bin/gnome-screenshot -w
The -w parameter screencaps a single window. If you leave off the -w parameter, your entire desktop will be screencapped to a PNG file. Once I created this key binding, all was well and I was able to capture screens again.
2) ALT-space to maximize/restore windows was not bound to anything
Again, I had to bind this command to a Window:State:
The nice thing about the Maximize window state is that it toggles between Maximize and Restore (or Unmaximize in the Enlightenment world).
3) Icons for some of the programs I selected for my Icon Bar were missing:
I had to go and find individual icons by right-clicking on the space in the icon bar, select Change Icon Properties, select Icon, and navigate to the following directory:
/usr/share/icons/apps/scaleable
You can also find icons in any of the sized directories; for example:
/usr/share/icons/apps/32x32
I had to do this for Google Chrome, gnome-terminal, vmware player and my nvidia settings. I'm surprised that Enlightenment did not automatically find these for some of the more popular programs.
4) the Shelf's icon bar seems to start programs in their own environment separate from your user environment
I found this out because when I started Google Chrome in Enlightenment, Google Chrome no longer respected any of my proxy settings. The workaround was to create a simple shell script that exports my proxy environment variables and starts Chrome:
[sodo@computer ~]$ cat googleStartup.sh
#!/bin/bash
export http_proxy=http://http-proxy:8080/
export https_proxy=http://http-proxy:8080/
export no_proxy=localhost,127.0.0.0/8
/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome &
I then put that script in the Executable section of the icon. Don't forget the ampersand on the end of the command. If you don't have it, you may see an Enlightenment dialog popup saying something like "Enlightenment was unable to run the application..the app failed to start" when exiting out of the app.
5) The "Remember" feature:
..to remember size, position and settings of a windowed program (in this case, gnome-terminal) plain ol' just doesn't work. Haven't got a workaround for this yet.
Other bothersome things I have yet to fix
1) it is meant as a convenience, but it is irritating when the cursor jumps to the Save dialog
* this was corrected via Settings -> Settings Panel -> Windows -> Window Focus -> Advanced -> uncheck "Slide pointer to a new focused window"
2) desktop switches to the adjacent one when your mouse is next to a desktop's far edge
* this was corrected via Settings -> Settings Panel -> Input -> Edge Bindings and removing the binding for the Right Edge. Erg!!
3) ctrl-shift left or right does not select text, it brings you to the adjacent desktop
* ARGH..still no fix
4) clicking on an application does not make the applications in front of the clicked application disappear..erg!
* this was corrected via Settings -> Settings Panel -> Windows -> Window Focus -> "Click Window to Focus".
5) I miss the GNOME system monitor panel widget. Weep.
It's always a tough row to hoe in the Linux world..nothing great or tasty or beautiful comes without some work.
Keep you posted..
TAG
References
E User Guide
http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/10/e17-basics-faq.html
http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-enlightenment-faq.html
good info on features and keybindings of Metacity: https://github.com/tthurman/metacity
themes http://exchange.enlightenment.org/
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