Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
Well, after reviewing the replies I've received and having another look through www.x11.org's comparison chart, it look like the best candidate for most features, ease of configuration via GUI tools and good displays on my daughters remote X-Terminal with it's 8 bit colour limit, is WindowMaker. I believe that WindowMaker is installed on my system, I should be able to switch to it from the menu option in fvwm95. When I get a chance to have a good, long sit at my PC again, I'll give it a try. I have been reading up on how to set up the modelines for XF86Config, and my monitor's manual give great details, so I should be able to get this going with little bother, but so far I've got several resolutions available, but the desktop is still 1024x768. At lower resolutions, I can use the mouse to scroll around the screen. How to I get the desktop to change with the resolution? Again, I've found the people on this list to be extremely helpful and I'm forever in your debt for having got as far with my system as I have. I'm sure I'll be coming back here for more help and just wanted to extend my heartfelt thanks. Cheers, John Gay
Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
On Sat, Aug 28, 1999 at 12:33:30AM +0100, John Gay wrote: available, but the desktop is still 1024x768. At lower resolutions, I can use the mouse to scroll around the screen. How to I get the desktop to change with the resolution? In the XF86Config, check the size you've got for Virtual in each display depth setup. This determines the virtual desktop size... But what also happens is, if you have no Virtual entry for that display depth, XFree86 will take the largest listed resolution as the virtual desktop size, no matter what your visible resolution is. For example, if you had: Modes 800x600 1024x768 640x480 Then X would start up in 800x600 at that display depth, but still use a virtual desktop size of 1024x768. Which is pretty much what you described. I'm not 100% sure, but if you specify a Virtual size of 0 0, it should use the same virtual desktop size as the default resolution, so for the above example it would pick 800x600 as the virtual desktop size. But I'm not sure if it works this way. Alternatively, you can delete the higher resolutions (1024x768 in the example) so the largest listed resolution is the one you want to use. This is not a great solution. You could probably also try setting the virtual desktop size (via Virtual) to the same as the resolution you want to use (e.g. Virtual 800 600 in this example). Check out the manpage for XF86Config if my description is too badly written to make much sense. :-) -- Matthew Gregan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 03:03:17PM +1200, Matthew Gregan wrote: On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 05:18:39AM +0100, John Gay wrote: 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. Hmmm...I though E and most of GNOME used Raster's imlib, which means they do an excellent job of dithering, even in 8 bit color. At least that has been my expereince. It's the next best thing to re-writing X code to get applications to share colors nicely. Of course, a low color theme will free up color cells. And you can set imlib to use a very small color pallete, thus saving colors for other applications at the cost of appearance. Just run imlib_config. Just some thoughts, Robbie
Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 02:28:25AM -0400, Robbie Huffman wrote: Hmmm...I though E and most of GNOME used Raster's imlib, which means they do an excellent job of dithering, even in 8 bit color. At least that has been my expereince. It's the next best thing to re-writing X code to get applications to share colors nicely. Of course, a low color theme will free up color cells. And you can set imlib to use a very small color pallete, thus saving colors for other applications at the cost of appearance. Just run imlib_config. This is true, I forgot to mention this (well, it entered my mind, but since I only run X in 16/32bit, I don't know too much about the handling of colour shortages). The few times I've run X in 8bit mode, (using E!) it has looked quite nice (much better than trying a similar thing in Windows), though. -- Matthew Gregan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
E! Enlightenment for newbie?
I've been having a look around for general info about X, to get a better feel of how it all works, and had a look at www.x11.org. They have a comparison of window managers, and E seems to have more capacity that all the others. Right now I'm using fvwm95, as it installed directly from the CD, as I'm still to new to try any configuring yet. I had a good look at E's website, but I take anything with a grain of salt. I'm interested in trying E, and was just looking for any experiences, good and bad with E. I was also hoping this would provide a simpler GUI for my ten year old daughter. There is a link for .debs @ www.debian.org that I was going to try, but I thought I'd get some feedback first. The basic questions I have are: 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? 2: Will E configure as my default WM, or do I have to go and edit something? 3: Is E fairly stable? I know what E says, I'd like some independent opinions. 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? 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. 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? 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? I've still got lots of other configurations to figure out, but I'm getting there. Mostly thanks to the great help I get from this and other lists. Thanks for your time and opinions. Cheers, John Gay
Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
(I reformatted this to use 76 chars.. if you are in an xterm, I suggest you check to make sure it is 80 columns wide -- if using netscape or similar, please make the window smaller. :) On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 05:18:39AM +0100, John Gay wrote: E's website, but I take anything with a grain of salt. I'm interested in trying E, and was just looking for any experiences, good and bad with E. I was also hoping this would provide a simpler GUI for my ten year old I have never gotten E to work -- but that was with other distributions, I haven't tried debian's E yet. I think it would work much nicer under debian than the others, else it would never make it into stable. :) As for ease of use .. it doesn't seem nearly as easy as kwm under kde. *That* is pretty simple, as well as similar enough to windows so that your doughter will only feel revolted using windows, not completely clueless. :) However, kids being what they are these days, I do imagine E will give her no troubles, and she will probably soon be teaching you how to use it more efficiently. :) these yet. How would you rate E in relation to these? 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? As for the color-depth problem... the window manager does not have any say in what colors applications can use. E will probably make the situation WORSE since to look good it requires many colors -- and you haven't athat many to go around. If it runs high resolution, you can drop the resolution down to get more colors, or (if your card just won't do it..) get a new video card. Checking your local .forsale newsgroup might find someone who wants to part with their video card to upgrade.. If her machine has an AGP slot, it wouldn't be too hard to find a nicer new video card for cheap -- if it is PCI, used might be the way to go.. and if it is ISA-only system, maybe someone out there can help.. :) If the machine is a bit on the slow side, E might not be such a good idea either -- I have heard it takes many CPU cycles to remain happy. If this is the case, you may want to check out blackbox. (I think it is blackbox.fwiw.com -- themes.org has a section devoted to it..) blackbox runs quick, very little resources are needed, and it is still intuitive. You do give up icons, but .. not that big a loss if the video card doesn't have enough memory for higher resolutions. HTH :) -- Seth Arnold | ICQ 3172483 | http://cswww.willamette.edu/~sarnold/ I prosecute unsolicited bulk emails, using the RealTime BlackHole List. You should too. Ask me how, or visit http://maps.vix.com/rbl/
Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
Hi John I think Seth is right, probably the easiest solution to your colour problem will be to get a new video-card. I've had much succes using an old Tseng ET4000-based card in my slightly archaic 486/100. Gives me up to 1024x768 and plenty colors, with no troubles whatsoever. These cards are available very cheap or free, and very easy to configure (I'm a newbie too...), as they used to be very common. Good Luck Vitux Error is human; complete disaster takes a computer -Oprindelig meddelelse- Fra: Seth R Arnold [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sendt:26. august 1999 06:39 Til: John Gay; debian-user@lists.debian.org Cc: recipient list not shown Emne: Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie? (I reformatted this to use 76 chars.. if you are in an xterm, I suggest you check to make sure it is 80 columns wide -- if using netscape or similar, please make the window smaller. :) On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 05:18:39AM +0100, John Gay wrote: E's website, but I take anything with a grain of salt. I'm interested in trying E, and was just looking for any experiences, good and bad with E. I was also hoping this would provide a simpler GUI for my ten year old I have never gotten E to work -- but that was with other distributions, I haven't tried debian's E yet. I think it would work much nicer under debian than the others, else it would never make it into stable. :) As for ease of use .. it doesn't seem nearly as easy as kwm under kde. *That* is pretty simple, as well as similar enough to windows so that your doughter will only feel revolted using windows, not completely clueless. :) However, kids being what they are these days, I do imagine E will give her no troubles, and she will probably soon be teaching you how to use it more efficiently. :) these yet. How would you rate E in relation to these? 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? As for the color-depth problem... the window manager does not have any say in what colors applications can use. E will probably make the situation WORSE since to look good it requires many colors -- and you haven't athat many to go around. If it runs high resolution, you can drop the resolution down to get more colors, or (if your card just won't do it..) get a new video card. Checking your local .forsale newsgroup might find someone who wants to part with their video card to upgrade.. If her machine has an AGP slot, it wouldn't be too hard to find a nicer new video card for cheap -- if it is PCI, used might be the way to go.. and if it is ISA-only system, maybe someone out there can help.. :) If the machine is a bit on the slow side, E might not be such a good idea either -- I have heard it takes many CPU cycles to remain happy. If this is the case, you may want to check out blackbox. (I think it is blackbox.fwiw.com -- themes.org has a section devoted to it..) blackbox runs quick, very little resources are needed, and it is still intuitive. You do give up icons, but .. not that big a loss if the video card doesn't have enough memory for higher resolutions. HTH :) -- Seth Arnold | ICQ 3172483 | http://cswww.willamette.edu/~sarnold/ I prosecute unsolicited bulk emails, using the RealTime BlackHole List. You should too. Ask me how, or visit http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: E! Enlightenment for newbie?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- 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 PGP public key available at http://lynx.dac.neu.edu/home/httpd/n/nmeyerha/mail.html or by 'finger -l [EMAIL PROTECTED]' -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBN8VElYdCcpBjGWoFAQE+LwQAhoS5VpDZrOSWVcJGFUINmZtMAEVj+LqY 3tjnJb1n0VO56Zz29pDK8YA1lmmzF9Akdx6yCDA2minhQcoXZ3cbA66PIqtnx75G onvSBGuecpNlvtfHJHZQ+fN92VyRS2qxUZ+A9rtXeZQsG3NTZuk8Nm6AsKcJpUtr tO43noqnptg= =U5J6 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
