Adventures in Enlightenment

[mindlord]

So, I thought to myself, "Now that we have a more current kernel. Thanks to SuperZaxxon beta. Why not give E17 a drive again?"


Fired up my Pandora and started installing packages.

Sudo opkg update e-wm

Hmm... Same old udev file issues.

sudo opkg update e-wm --force overwrite

Ah, there we go. Reboot to make sure I didn't break anything. No? Awesome! At least nothing I'm aware of yet.

Now, what command starts Enlightenment?

enlightenment-start

Cool, let's make an gui.conf entry

sudo mousepad /etc/pandora/gui.conf

Add the line

e;enlightenment;enlightenment-start;foo

Attempt to switch guis.

Odd doesn't work.

<Stumble><Stumble><search><stumble>WTF?<search><search><poke>

Ahh fedge. "e" doesn't work as a gui name for some stupid reason.

enlightenment;enlightenment;enlightenment-start;foo

Attempt to switch guis, and...

Hey alright! It's the enlightenment first run wizard. Ah, snap! There's no themes installed. Reboot back into XFCE.

sudo opkg install e-wm-config-standard e-wm-config-default e-wm-theme-default

Swith guis again, and YES! First run wizard complete, and E17 desktop is up and running!



Holy snikies this is nice. I really wish they would've pushed for this instead of XFCE. This is a much more small screen friendly WM. Looks great, and the eye candy doesn't seem to be hurting performance at all. If anything it's performing better than XFCE. Stable too.



Bummer, battery meter is always 100%, and I know that isn't true. Right click and settings. There we go! Switch to "Internal" and got a proper battery meter. CPU performance module seems to be working ok out of the box.



Wow, this is pretty swank. Hmm... enlightenment has it's own webkit based browser called eve, huh? Let's check it out.



Weird. Finger oriented. Kinda reminds me of Opera Mobile on Android, only with some style. Seems that I can't keep it from loading .mobi versions of sites. Still, a really nice lightweight browser.



Too bad there isn't a Network Manager in the dock anywhere. Let's see if we can add one.



Right click the dock.. shelf bottom.. content.. looks promising. Here we go. Connection Manager. Aww! Just a red box? Connman not installed? We'll see about that.

sudo opkg install connman-plugins-wifi

Still not installed? Hmm.

sudo opkg install connman

Still nothing, Maybe a restart is needed. I see some changes to init.d.



Reboot.



There we go! Now it looks like a WIFI symbol. Aww! What? There are boxes, but no details. :/ Click. Big cryptic error. God, this error is so long it doesn't even fit on the screen. To Google!

<search>

<search>

<search>

Ah! Here we are it's a permissions problem.

sudo mousepage /etc/dbus-1/system.d/connman.conf

Now... Let's try copying the root user policy and add my username to it. Probably wrong, but if it works, that's good enough for me. Now, let's see. Restart connmand service

sudo /etc/init.d/connmand restart

Hey already the entries actually have information in them now. Click my home wifi, and YES! It asks for a password. Looks good! Looks ... uhm... what's taking so long? Aww. Timed out?


Oh well, time for bed.


tl;dr


E17 is pretty great out of the box. Sure some things don't work straight away, but with some tinkering it looks like it might be a fine WM for using with your Pandora. If you've ever liked E17 before, and you got the smarts. Give it a go! It's probably going to be my WM of choice once I get this WIFI thing sorted out.

 

[elwing]

hum, enlighten? what do you mean by adventure?


pirates? => http://www.dealextreme.com/p/enlighten-block-pirates-series-corsair-sunken-boat-assemble-construction-toy-238-pieces-pack-49092?item=16


castles? => http://www.dealextreme.com/p/enlighten-block-pirates-series-corsair-rob-barrack-assemble-construction-toy-366-pieces-pack-49094?item=18

 

[commander-beef]

Hey, mindlord make PND installer for it..

 

[Farox]

Great ..i will wait a PND....

 

[Mr_Loon]

This looks rather interesting.


+1 for hoping for a PND for this.


For anyone, like me, who needs a bit of enlightenment as to what this is about then look here.

 

[Trip]

Hope you get it all running well, it looks like a decent desktop for use on the the Pandora

 

[mindlord]

Got networking working... YAY!


but it comes at a big cost... Network-Manager-applet. Booo!


but I found a replacement... called connman! YAY!


It might not work in XFCE... Booo!


It´s super lightweight, and I will be making it my personal default... Yay?

 

[elwing]

This looks rather interesting.


+1 for hoping for a PND for this.


For anyone, like me, who needs a bit of enlightenment as to what this is about then look here.

so it's definately not about lego clone... thanks for the headup

 

[keek]

A bit of random googling gives me this advise:

You can use nm-applet under E17 still, but first you need to add the systray module to a shelf somewhere so E has a method of displaying the nm-applet tray icon.

Would that help to keep network manager instead of connman?

 

[Cloudef]

I tested e17 when I had pandora

It uses too much ram and is akward to use.


Then I proceeded and forked monsterwm:

It's perfect. Especially since you can do everything with the keyboard.

 

[PaulForey]

How much work did you have to do get monsterwm to have the useful volume/battery status bar?


A tiling/dynamic window manager would definitely be something I'm after for my pandora once I get one.

 

[theshining]

Enlightement is deeply pretty, I run it on my eeepc 701 4gb, (bodhi linux) and find it much easier to use than kde4, but nothing in my humble opinion is as truly usable as xfce 4.10 for everyday use, so I can see why the OPT went with it.

 

[Cloudef]

How much work did you have to do get monsterwm to have the useful volume/battery status bar?


A tiling/dynamic window manager would definitely be something I'm after for my pandora once I get one.

It was simple C program that used alsa for volume information and standard utilities for other information. Output of this program was piped to dzen2.


If I wasn't in hurry with my pandora, I would've dropped dzen2 too.


The pstree for whole thing is here. However nowadays I would drop dbus and wicd all together for favor of netcfg. There might be other stuff too that is not neccessary there. Anyways, I look forward for getting own pandora to exprience that again.

 

[milkshake]

mindlord can we have some more screenshots / video?

 

[sixtyfifthbit]

E17 just popped their first release - are we ready for another adventure?

Oh, it looks like it might handle GLES 2 natively - I wish I had more time to check it out myself!