Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
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On Thu, 26 Aug 1999, John Gay wrote:
> 1: Most .deb's I've installed went rather well. Sometimes I have to look for
> other requirement first. Are there any requirements I should get BEFORE
> installing the Enlightenment.deb's?
If you are using the dselect tool, you won't really need to think about
what dependencies to download. It will handle everything for you. Just
tell it that you want to install enlightenment and it will know that it
needs to install the dependencies.
> 2: Will E configure as my default WM, or do I have to go and edit something?
I don't know here. I think it should, but don't take my word for it.
> 3: Is E fairly stable? I know what E says, I'd like some independent opinions.
NO! E is constantly being re-written. It is under heavy development and
is quite complex.
> 4: Is the configuration fairly straight forward? I get the impression that there
> is a lot of GUI configuring tools for E. Are they easy to find and use?
I haven't seen any. It seems to me that the actual configuration of E is
quite difficult, at least in terms of the construction of the themes.
There are many themes that can be downloaded from e.themes.org which will
make enlightenment look completely different, but they don't seem easy to
construct. On the other hand, simply changing the keyboard macros that
pop up menus and stuff might be quite a bit easier.
> 5: Would this be an easier WM for my daughter? I'd like to provide her with as
> much access as possible to encourage her to learn how to explore the PC and make
> the most of it.
Yes, I think she'd get the hang of it. But the same could be said of most
window managers, with a bit of time.
> 6: I've looked at KDE and GNOME, but right now GNOME seems a little TOO new for
> my liking, and I've heard many complaints that KDE is somewhat bloated. As a
> newbie, I'm just not ready to tackle these yet. How would you rate E in relation
> to these?
First of all, GNOME and KDE are much more than just window managers. You
can easily use E with GNOME. KDE includes a window manager, but you
aren't forced to use it. Both of those projects are large suites of
desktop software. KDE is much more mature than GNOME, and includes many
powerful productivity apps. As bloated as KDE might be, it probably won't
gobble up more resources than E would on it's own! (That might be a slight
exageration, but...)
> 7: At the moment, my daughter's PC is limited to 8 bit colour. Can E be
> configured to reduce any problems this causes? Right now, with fvwm95, if I open
> one app with lots of colours, than another one, the second complains there are
> not enough colours left and the screen keep switching different colours as the
> two app's borrow from each other. Is there some way to make the apps use the
> same colours?
Window managers don't control the colors that are allocated to the apps.
E would probably be a VERY bad choice if you've got limited colors. With
all the pixmaps and gradients that are used, there won't be any colors
left for your apps. Somebody suggested blackbox as a better WM for this
situation. You can also set up Window Maker easily to display few colors
(there are nice graphical tools for doing so). Note also that some (few,
probably) apps have options to allow them to install their own color map.
Netscape has the '-install' option. When you're using netscape, it will
claim all 256 colors that you have. This will make the rest of your apps
freak out, but they'll go back to normal when you move your mouse over a
non-netscape app.
HTH. Good luck.
Noah
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