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[goney3]

That is a sweet looking desktop, though on the tiny XO screen, do those icons on the lower left corner seem legible at all?

And when you say E17 is "fast" ... do you mean the applications response time? flash player performance and boot times?

Thank you for posting the image so quickly

[Pierre]

Congratulations !

Could you come up with a mini-howto ? 

I would love to get enlightenment on my XO too. Sounds like the perfect desktop manager for the XO to me.

Do we really need to build the source or is it possible to get the binary from yum and migrate to the SD ? I am still unclear about how to install stuff on the SD using yum (--rootinstall handles the dependencies ?).

Thanks you so much !

[electropriest]

the icons, i'll admit. are small - but that is because i made them small. there is a panel across the bottom (windows-style), and another across the top (mac os9 style), both of which are invisible. that's why you see only icons. The invisible panel is set to be above all applications, so those icons are there on top of everything - my preference. you can also make panels auto-hide, and stretch them to whatever size you want.

e17=fast. no two questions. no slower than xfce, anyhow... not a snail like sugar.

pierre - i will work on this sometime in the next few days. the problem is that e17 isn't actually released persay... which is why you can't yum it. after a full day of compiling, i see e17-cvs in synaptic, which means i could have likey used that or apt-get... but compiling things to your own system is always good anyhow.

besides, you need to edit some files to make it run, unless you have gdm or something installed.

i'll let you know.

my final thought is this: i may be tempted to go back to fluxbox. it's tiny, smaller and faster than xfce or e17, and can be added simply via apt-get or synaptic. one could, theoretically, make the same type of desktop in fluxbox, but it would be faster, smaller, and easier... just without fancy animations that perhaps aren't as important on a tiny screen...

[goney3]

Thanks for the update electropriest... so fluxbox? ... I'll have to look it up. Been looking at Puppy and Linpus lately too as well. Any thoughts on those?

[electropriest]

sure. first, linuxes like puppy are "distrbutions". basically, everything is based on the GNU/Linux kernel, and other software and graphical interfaces are put on top of them, to the designer's taste, then they are posted as "distributions". Puppy, Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat, etc... all distributions. To make matters worse, Ubuntu is a selection of software on top of Debian, and Fedora is on top of Redhat. Then there are attempts to reduce those piled-on versions to more streamlined ones, i.e. Xubuntu.

The main difference there is the window manager. Ubuntu uses Gnome, Kubuntu uses KDE - those are the most power-hungry and bloated, also the most popular and commercial looking. Xfce is small, and really speeds a system up (though it looks like windows). Xubuntu uses that - so does puppy. I'm not sure that I would go to the work of getting puppy linux up and running, because it runs the same window manager as xubunt, at the same speed... though with far less software packages and options.

if you want to play around on another PC, get yourself a copy of DSL (damn small linux), and burn it to a live cd, then boot from that. DSL uses fluxbox, and though the default is a junky looking interface, you can really customize it and soup it up without sacrificing speed or reseources. check out the website for fluxbuntu (fluxubuntu?) too... i dont think anyone has it up and running, but another attempt to scale down ubuntu for older devices using fluxbox. (i'd use it hands down over puppy).

and in the end - it's all preference. there are 30 some odd window managers you can use (at least,) so that your computer can look and run the way you want/need it to... and so that we don't all melt into the mess of blue backdrops, grey taskbars, and start buttons. (maybe what we need is a stop button)

[goney3]

Thank you for that write up electropriest

I am very new to all this and that really helped a lot, I checked out fluxbuntu and DSL, but got a little confused.

The DSL people don't mention which versions of Fluxbox they are using in their 3.x or 4.x series (that I could find). The Fluxbuntu looked outstanding, but that little bar at the bottom would probably ruin my eye sight on the XO 

Over at the Puppy site they are working on "Dingo" which is supposed to be tailored to these "baby laptops". And not have repeated read/writes to the NAND flash causing them to go bad.

Have you heard anything about this? Is this read/write hardware based with the XO? Or does Sugar handle something like that?  I'd hate to install an OS on a SD card and have it kill the card because of a software glitch.

Thank you again!

[electropriest]

remember, "look" can always be changed. the size of that bar is changed with a few clicks, as well as location (top, bottom, side, etc.,) number of bars, and so. when using fluxbox, i often turn the bar off entirely, as a click anywhere on the desktop will bring up the menu. it's all customizable.

as far as "dingo" - they might be aiming the newest version and the new subnotebooks, but i i'm not sure about the read/write operations... both dsl and puppy (as well as beatrix, etc,) run on old and small machines, with little ram. all are "live CD" systems, which means they boot from a cdrom, without installation. DSL began with a commitment never to expand to more than 50MB, which speeds it up on older systems, but gives the disadvantage of software that doesn't look as nice or is older. fortunately, though, it means less copying back and forth to ram or to the swap disk (which is where all the read/write comes from). like it or not, all flash memory has limited read/write cycles before it dies... though never in my lifetime have i outused flash memory. i woulnd't worry about that. even if your nand dies someday, you'll be able to boot from something else.

one more thing that comes into that... every xubuntu or otherwise distro that instructions are posted for does not include any swap space! with the limited resources on the XO, this can slow things down.. (*nix fdisk usually means at least 2 partitons, one for the data, and one for SWAP space-i.e. virtual memory in windows). while no swap space limits the back and forth copying on the system, it also limits your system to the ram installed (and therefore the speed of/amount of software the unit can handle at one time).

[electropriest]

btw - when i mention lack of swap partitioning, i am referring only to current XO methods - though a live cd leaves you with exactly the same situation, unless it picks up a swap partition on your hard drive while booting.

[GLOW]

Hi folks!  Looking forward to more chat sometime!
: )

[goney3]

Hi electropriest, I downloaded DSL, Fluxbuntu, Linpus-Lite, and Puppy last night and tried out the LiveCD's on my desktop... DSL ran (after some issues with xinit) but looked "older" like you said... Fluxbuntu is apparently an installation CD and NOT a Live-CD ... Linpus-Lite started to load, but then put my screen out of sync and was just darkness... Puppy loaded and ran just fine... I still don't have an XO so I can't test things out, but thought I would share my experience so far with it. Thank you again for telling me about DSL and Fluxbuntu. They still seem really cool

Though I did read on the FAQ for Fluxbuntu that its installation size was 1.3 GB ... so much for having that on the XO's internal memory

How big is E17?

[vince]

btw - when i mention lack of swap partitioning, i am referring only to current XO methods - though a live cd leaves you with exactly the same situation, unless it picks up a swap partition on your hard drive while booting.

so add a swap file to your SD card and tweak fstab to mount the SD card and then the swapfile on it.  Works great and really seems to speed the system up for me.

[crackhead]

Oh my God that is beautiful.  I second that request for a howto.  I don't mind compiling it myself...I'd be interested to learn how to do that on an XO.  Thanks for this, electropriest!

[rraucci]

Well,  I poked around a bit, and I found a way to get Enlightenment running on my XO using a streamlined Fedora install.

Looks pretty nice.

***

Five Steps to Enlightenment E17 on the OLPC XO (under the standard Fedora Core install)

1. Get the required software repository loaded into Yum.

From a terminal, type in:

   su

To get a root prompt,

then type in:

   rpm -i http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/share/dc-fc5-yum-repo-1.0-4.fc5.noarch.rpm

Let that run, then type in:

   yum update

2. Then get a required software library for the installation.

Type in:

   rpm -i http://www.city-fan.org/ftp/contrib/sysutils/Mirroring/libcurl7155-7.15.5-5.cf.fc5.i386.rpm

Once that installs, you're ready to Yum it.

3. Get the software via Yum.

Type in:

   yum --nogpgcheck install enlightenment

Let that run until it finishes.

4. Edit the .xsession file.

Open the /home/olpc/.xsession file with nano, and change the Start= line to read Start=enlightenment_start

Save the file.

5. Restart X.

Hit Ctrl-Alt-Erase to find Enlightenment.

Notes:

You may want to set the icons in the dock to the maximum size for legibility.

You can find more themes over here:

http://www0.get-e.org/Themes/E17/

You can install a screenshot module like this:

yum --nogpgchek install e_modules-screenshot

Here's a shot of my system running it:

[jdebay]

Thanks a Million, Instructions worked like you posted.

I love E17, have Elive on desktop and Elive Development. I love E17 so much.

Thanks again for taking the time to find and writing the simple and plain instructions.

Now I can have xfce or E17, but will stay with E17 for now.

J

Update, Reset XO to build 653. Then Enlightenment to system again. No xfce this time. Still configuring and learning the limitations. But I love it. Use Elive Gem too on Desktop system. j

[ashtond33]

Wow this is a nice looking desktop. Is there anyway we can get the battery monitor and other modules to work?*

I believe the XO kernel does not support acpi which is what most battery monitors use. Is anyone familiar with patching the kernel?