A Look At the Lightweight Equinox Desktop Environment 197
Linux.com (who share Slashdot's corporate overlords) takes a look at the Equinox Desktop Environment and why, even though it is extremely lightweight, it may still lack the ability for widespread appeal. "the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users. [...] EDE feels as light as a window manager but also offers the features mentioned above. The speed advantage of EDE most likely lies in its foundation, a modified version of the Fast Light ToolKit GUI library. EDE started almost instantly on the 500MHz machine I tested it on, whereas the other environments needed at least a few seconds. EDE provides a coherent and simple interface that requires little effort to learn."
I thought ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did all my editing in vi, used epic for irc, naim (ncurses-based aim/icq client), w3m for web browser, etc.
I'd just Alt+F(x) between my vtty's and do my business. Frankly, I think that was one of the happiest times I've had on a computer in a long while.
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Frankly, I think that was one of the happiest times I've had on a computer in a long while.
(Perhaps you were fed up missing out on images?)
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mplayer -ao alsa -vo fbdev funny-youtube-link.flv
Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
When I went to school, I had to use X because I had to program in Java and do stupid Swing things.
About half way into my first semester my girlfriend ditched me after 5 years and I had sort of a break down and ended up switching to the English department, where being a sad, whiny little bitch gets you bonus points.
Then all I did was write papers. I never learned LaTeX, and even if I knew it, I'd have been too lazy to use it, so it was StarOffice and then OpenOffice.org - again, under X.
I'm going back to get another degree in engineering though, so I'm getting out of "lazy mode."
its not so much the images -- w3m can display them in frame buffer.
seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
Just be happy in the knowledge that your suffering has provided us with 30 seconds of entertainment.
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Dramatic emotional conflict.
Admissions of an emo/goth/whiny little bitch period.
Your post had it all, and now your response to moderation really shifted gears and made this seriously epic
I applaud you.
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That part made me snicker a little.
"If someone could please tell me wtf was so funny about that, I'd be much obliged. None of it seemed particularly funny to me while living it."
That part made me fall out of my chair from laughing so hard.
Re:seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
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After 3 months of ASCII porn, he started to get excited while reading books.
Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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And English major geeks write programs to write that stuff.
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What, no screen?
Re:I thought ... (Score:4, Interesting)
making E themes is actually why I need glasses to see far away now
Fluxbox is pretty nice though.
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Theme isn't great, but I'm personally far more interested in stability and performance. A GUI really is just a means to an ends, if it's taking up a whole lot of resources, that's just broken. The main reason I run fbsd is that I can get away with keeping a computer for several y
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Re:I thought ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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It was in contrast to mainframes and mini-computers of the day, this one could be placed on a desk and used.
On top of a desk is actually a pretty silly place to put a computer. I guess I always knew this, but it took until December 2007 for me to fully realize it. My bedroom was being redecorated, I left my PC on the desk while it was happening, my dad got clumsy as usual... BANG! Three foot fall on to a thin carpet on top of sturdy floorboards with no underlay. Poor San never stood a chance.
My new PC sits quite safely in a purpose-made cupboard on the lower left-hand side of my new desk. It's a bit quieter a
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Well yes, unless it is a desktop style case instead of the now more common tower.
(It's hard to find non-tower cases anymore, the best example I could fine was here [directron.com].)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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What, like Open Look with a decent file manager? I've been fond of that since forever ago - since 486 and 8 megs ago. Can anyone get more lightweight than that?
Gimme back my oval buttons, bitch.
--
BMO
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Re:Windows 95 called.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been so many great UI innovations in the last decade, this seems pretty niche to me...
Better that than copying Windows 3.1 [blogspot.com]. Seriously, this may have been meant as humorous but I'm starting to get frustrated. Windows 95 is one of the very few times that Microsoft got things indisputably right. Yet despite that, it seems that everyone is determined to redesign this classic formula in an attempt to making things more usable, only I haven't seen anyone actually get it right. I'm using KDE right now, since it seems they're the ones least infected with this "Let's change everything for the sake of seeming fresh and original!" virus (seems to have started [wikipedia.org] with [wikipedia.org] Microsoft [wikipedia.org] and spread out from there), but I'm sceptical about KDE 4. I know I'll probably use it someday, but I'm scared that they're going to fuck it up and the best desktop environment will end up losing a lot of its lead.
I'm sure there's a user interface revolution on the scale of Windows 95 out there somewhere, I'm just hoping we don't have to wade through too much more crap before someone finds it.
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You keep using that word... etc, etc...
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Remember when XP came out, and lots of people turned the GUI to windows 2000 mode. They weren't too fussed, they wanted it to work, responsively and quickly.
Remember now we have Vista that lots of people turn that UI off
So, that Evolution looks like Windows 2000 UI, that could be construed as a good thing. Now round those buttons off, before Ballmer notices and calls in the copyrig
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My XP desktop at work is in Classic mode right now.
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OLPC? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yucky (Score:2, Insightful)
"Missing Features" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Now that's what I like about slashdot, obscure references to quirky sayings that 99% of the world never heard in the first place.
In Soviet Russia tuits get round to you!
Plenty of choices (Score:5, Insightful)
1) New low-power machines with slower CPU's
2) Older machines being brought back to life
3) Lock-down environments were you want grant a little as possible to the user. Kiosks, single-purpose machines, etc
4) Thin client environments where you want to push as little eye candy as possible through the network
5) Smaller virtual machines where you want to use a little space as possible
6) Live distros that you want to load quicky
We have used IceWM for over a decade. Fast, stable, controllable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icewm [wikipedia.org]
Looks like EDE is just another to add to the mix of blackbox, fluxbox, twm, etc.
Re:Plenty of choices - missing use (Score:5, Funny)
Me to Confused Techie: "What are you looking for?".
Techie: "My Network Places".
Me: "Arf!".
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It went like this: Run the coax from the outside box to the basement and connect to the coax hanging from the basement ceiling. Go to apartment. Hook up coax to cable modem, cat5 from cable modem to computer, and plug in cable modem power brick. Power-cycle everything. Watch network connection come up on boot screen. Connected. Browse Google to confirm. Done.
"That was the easiest install I ever did" says he. Sure as hell
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Belt and braces. I was anticipating problems, especially since the tech wasn't familiar with Linux, and at the time I hadn't dealt with cable broadband installation before, being a former dialup victim. That was a few (5?) years ago.
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BMO
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Confusing the idiot who comes to install your Cable Modem.
My best experience of that involved the idiot insisting that he had to install the road runner software from his cd, or he would not complete the installation (or hand over my modem)
Me: "You can't. Not only do I not want you to install it, but it's actually impossible for you to do so. I'm not running windows."
Techie: "Is this a mac?"
Me: "No, it's Linux."
Techie: "If it's not a mac, it will work."
Me (actually amused at this point): "Be my guest and try it out."
I figured he would at least dou
Yes, (Score:2)
Re:Yes, (Score:5, Funny)
EDT - Exherbo Dev Team, EDE - Equinox Desktop Environment
EDT: Exherbo is one bad ass muthafucking distro! Seriously!
EDE: Cool! I wan to run on Exherbo.
EDT: No, you don't.
EDE: No really, I do.
EDT: OK. But we will have to break you since our distro is so badass that it does everything badly.
EDE: eeep
xfce (Score:5, Interesting)
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The number of tray plugins are sortof limited, but all it needs is more developers willing to help out with that end.
I've never had this problem. There's quite a nice list here [xfce.org], but if that's not enough, you can always use Gnome plugins with it [xfce.org]. Granted, a lot of people (including myself) refuse to install the base gnome or kde libs, in which case that wouldn't be via
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Quick Launch seems to do pretty much the same thing as Xfce's Quicklauncher plugin though, so you might want to give that a try first.
the cycle of lightweight software (Score:5, Insightful)
yet another light-weight desktop. fluxbox, xfce, ratpoison, etc etc. why so many?
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.
- program $Z is bloated and slow, lets write a small, streamlined, lightweight replacement
- 0.0 - the program runs, does something but not much
- 0.1 - it's beginning to be useful
- 0.2 - it's not bad, you don't miss program $Z so much now
- 0.3 - 0.9 - hey, where's my fave feature $F, you can't be seriously missing that out, ok, we'll add that in
- release 1.0 - quite good, not too bloated, fairly quick, has its serious fanboys, but most people would rather stick with $Z and buy a faster computer to keep the missing features
- 1.1 to 2.0 - adding all the features that made $Z great, gaining bloat and bugs, losing speed all the way
- release 2.0 - a direct replacement for $Z and runs 20% faster
- release 2.1 - fixing all the bugs discovered now the code base is too big to audit, making it much less secure than the now quite mature $Z
- Hey, your new program is a bit bloated and slow, I'm going to write a replacement for it and it's going to be a small, streamlined, lightweight replacemen
and repeat ad nauseamRe: (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously - Given 3 or 4 desktops (Gnome, KDE, some lightweights), are any of you going to seriously claim you can't find or custom configure at least
Re:the cycle of lightweight software (Score:4, Interesting)
If two teams both try for the exact same target program, then a single team which pools the available expertise is more efficient. However, if two teams try for two different target programs, then a single team is less efficient, since the result will be approaching neither of the two targets.
The mistake many OSS commentators make is that they think OSS wants to go where they would like it to go. Then they say things like why have several desktops, when the one ideal desktop *I* want is a combination of a couple of existing ones, and they would be more efficient at offering what *I* want if they combined forces instead of duplicating effort.
In fact, if the goal is to get close to what each person wants for all people at the same time (the "utilitarian" goal), the best approach is to have hundreds of slight variations of the same program, so that regardless of what any one person wants, there's a random program which is only a short distance away. The more programs there are, the shorter the distance for everybody simultaneously.
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Only if you assume that the resource pool is fixed. In open source, it tends to be a function of N. The more different approaches there are, the more people find an approach that appeals to them and decide to pitch in.
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Just for the hell of it, let's take an example. The killer feature I need is tiling of some sort. I don't want to have to hand-manage all my windows.
Anyway, take Gnome, KDE, and a couple of the more mainstream lightweights --- for example, fluxbox and aewm. They can do a lot of stuff, but not one of those does tiling. So maybe add Ion to the list. Except that also doesn't behave the way I like. Possibly quark, which is nice, but not so usable on such a tiny screen. Maybe the way to go would
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisiphus [wikipedia.org]
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Re:the cycle of lightweight software (Score:4, Insightful)
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.
A better theory may be that people are simply looking for different feature sets. This ain't Windows, so you can do things any which way you please.
To use your example of fluxbox, xfce and ratpoison, I doubt you'd find anyone who would say any of them is even remotely similar to the other, other than to characterise all of them as "lightweight", and that's only in the context of Gnome and KDE. Similarly, I doubt you'd find anyone using ratpoison, for example, who would even consider xfce.
Me, I use fluxbox. It looks and behaves exactly like I want. That's not to say I wouldn't drop it in a heartbeat if someone wrote Yet Another Lightweight Window Manager that was similar to fluxbox, but offered some trivial features that fluxbox lacks but are found elsewhere.
There's merit to the "cycle of lightweight software" argument, but I really don't see it being very meaningful or useful here.
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Make your own desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to use Gnome, but then it got too bloated so I moved to XFCE. Now XFCE is bloated (memory leaks in the panel app don't help either), so I made my own "desktop environment".
I use fbpanel [sourceforge.net] as a panel, Sawfish [wikia.com] as a window manager, ImageMagick's "display" program to set the wallpaper, the Gnome settings daemon/screensaver applications, and a quick little Bash script I wrote to launch a Nautilus window without taking over the desktop.
Sawfish has more features than Metacity, and pretty close to the same number of themes.
The whole thing takes less than 40mb. I realize something like this isn't for everyone, but for me it does just what I want without using that much memory.
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Re:Make your own desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never really gotten into the desktop idea, especially with the panel. I started my Linux journey with Gnome, and with a 800x600 laptop display I thought the panel is a waste of space. Later I used Enlightenment for quite a while, and finally settled into the lightweight window manager world with Blackbox and then Fluxbox.
My .xinitrc sets the background image with xsetbg and launches an xterm. I have a key combination to lauch more xterms, plus a few selected applications in the Fluxbox menu. The idea of opening a menu just by clicking the background is awesome -- no wasted space or distraction by the panel. I also use lots of virtual desktops, generally one per task, so as not to distract from the playing around.. I mean the job.
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On a desktop computer I probably wouldn't bother, but on my laptop I like having a wifi applet running as well as some sort of battery applet. I know there are other ways to have those (without the panel), but to me it seems like a fairly sensible place to keep them.
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Handles desktop items too. Running with IceWM it generally sits on ~50MB/60MB of RAM, but as we know wasted RAM is wasted RAM so I'm thinking they suck up as much as they can.
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Breadcrumbs and spatial navigation are two things I turn off immediately upon installation of Nautilus. I can't imagine who would actually want to use either.
Yes, it is pretty bloated. Most Gnome programs are, but for something I have open very rarely I could care less.
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Because memory costs practically nothing and my time is expensive?
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Because memory costs practically nothing and my time is expensive?
I spent maybe 20 minutes setting the whole thing up on a whim. It's not like I went out and coded my own DE.
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I use the terminal for most things, but when I do want a graphical file manager Nautilus takes the cake. ROX filer is just annoying, and Thunar (the XFCE file manager) takes up nearly as much memory.
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(I've used it since it was called Sawmill.)
Microsoft called... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would be quite upset if a GUI toolkit that looked like windows 95 wasn't quick on a 500MHz cpu. Win95 itself was blazing fast on hardware of that speed.
yet another (Score:3, Informative)
Same concept, but it sounds like its at a slightly more stable state. Check it out as I just did.
desktop environment vs window manager (Score:2)
Personally, I'm perfectly happy with just a window manager. I run fluxbox, and it's as fast as every GUI should be, i.e., fast enough that I can't tell that it's not responding instantaneously. The whole idea of having a computer screen littered with icons is something that I got used to ca. 1985, because it was the only game in town, but eventually I decided I didn't like. It feels like in addition to the mess on my physical desk, I'm also being saddled with a mess on my computer desktop.
But the good new
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Not impressed (Score:2)
Am I the only one who thinks that's a really bad idea?
I was going to rant about their blatant Windows 95 rip off, but thought I'd look at their official screenshot page [equinox-project.org] first. It's not as bad as the screenshot in the article makes it seem.
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Confusing screenshots (Score:2)
That using the foxes thing is pretty weird.. don't know what that's all about.
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Am I the only one who thinks that's a really bad idea?
Yes and no. While you are giving an unknown script root access (a bad idea if there ever was one), it is really not much different then "sudo apt-get install *package*" on Ubuntu as in both cases you are running an unknown binary. Or it could be similar to "just add" deb *somesite* to your apt source list and then sudo apt-get install *package* or it would be just as bad to just chmod +rwx *binary* and ./binary. So yes, it is a bad idea, but many other ways of downloading Linux packages are worse (as y
But a major feature is EDE's non-conformance to th (Score:2)
You know, what joker looked at the Unix world and said, "You know what we don't have enough of? Security holes based on file name extensions. That is really an advantage Windows has over us." and then implemented *.desktop?
Because it's the worst aspects of Windows's PIFs, and extension hiding, and everything else, all rolled into one. They couldn't be bothered to even make such files only work when executable.
Can't wa
Three words... (Score:2, Interesting)
MID is heavily based upon SGI's Indigo Magic Desktop and IRIX Interactive Desktop environments. I believe the developer may have an agreement with SGI also.
http://5dwm.org/ [5dwm.org]
Anyway, since it's probably not GPL you can mod this post down like I know you want to.
Missing it (Score:4, Insightful)
Ugly as Windows 95 (Score:2)
Grey is out.
Re:Ugly as Windows 95 (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Many non-technical users judge the quality of Linux by what the DE looks like. If it has a black bar on the bottom it is futuristic and "vista-like", if it has a brightly colored bar on the bottom it is automatically XP-like and seems to be as familiar to them as XP, if it has a bar at the top and the bottom it becomes OS X-like, however if it is grey on the bottom and uses a rectangle as a applications menu, it is automatically thought as Windows 95/98/ME and old and obsolete. Now, all this could be avoided by using say, black or another color on the bottom, but grey will always make the non-technical users think that Linux is as current as Windows 98. Ubuntu with the brown color scheme seems to avoid this as brown hasn't been used much in any default Windows theme yet.
What about IceWM? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The other window manager with damn small linux is Fluxbox. And I have to say I love fluxbox and it runs really quick even on my older comps (Celeron 466, P3 450, P2 233, P 200). I'll have to try out EDE and see how it stacks up against whatever DSL chooses to use.
What is the use of an isolated desktop? (Score:2)
Without that underlying toolkit i don't see a point. And most the ones that actually matter are pretty bloated these days.
FLTK might be quick, but where are the *real* apps?
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I wondered about the WordPerfect menu listing, and then noticed Cedega running in the tray, like you did.
Why not? Even though OO and Abiword read its files nearly as well as it WP itself and even skip paragraph indentations most times, just like the original, nothing is exactly like the original.
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