Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 05:18:39AM +0100, 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?
The easiest way is to just try to install the .deb. If you're missing
anything it requires, it'll let you know... However, the version of E!
I have installed depends on the following:
Depends:
freetype2
imlib1 (>= 1.9.4-1)
libaudiofile0
libc6 (>= 2.1)
libesd0 (>= 0.2.10-0.19990424.6.2)
libfnlib0
libjpeg62
libpng2
libtiff3g
libungif3g (>= 3.0-2) | giflib3g (>= 3.0-5.2)
xlib6g (>= 3.3.3.1-1)
zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.3)
enlightenment-docs
That's for the latest version of E! in the unstable Debian
distribution (0.16.devel.3). The demands for earlier versions are
probably quite similar.
> 2: Will E configure as my default WM, or do I have to go and edit
> something?
It shouldn't do. Check out the manpage for window-managers(5) for
information about changing the default WM in Debian.
> 3: Is E fairly stable? I know what E says, I'd like some independent
> opinions.
The answer you get for this will really differ depending on who you
ask. Personally, I've never had Enlightenment crash on me (I run the
latest versions from unstable), except when I've done things to cause
it to crash myself. So for day-to-day use, I've found it very stable.
> 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?
Some of it is quite easy if you use something like E-Conf, or with the
>0.16 releases of E!, the built-in GUI configuration tools. However,
the theming side of things, and some of the configuration can be quite
messy compared to the other WMs.
> 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.
It depends how you set it up... It can act quite a few different ways,
so it's hard to answer that. :-)
> 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?
There is no comparison. E! is a window-manager, whereas KDE and GNOME
are desktop enviroments. They don't manage windows (although KDE comes
with the KDE window-manager KWM, and GNOME normally is used in
conjuction with E!).
> 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?
That's really dependant on the X server configuration. Most of the
themes for E! tend to use a *lot* of colours, so you'd probably find
the problem you described was worse using E!, but that's not to say
you can't use a low-colour theme... But the way apps handle colour
allocation is out of the hands of the window-manager.
Well, that's my thoughts on it.
--
Matthew Gregan kinetik@ihug.co.nz
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