Enlightenment in 3D

[the_leander]

Yes, Elive has done it again.

The ultra lean, slick and fast Enlightenment desktop, combined with Compiz 3D goodness.

OMGWTFBBQ!

Tried it out on the EeePC 2G surf I have here.

Ran incredibly smoothly and was completely stable.

Oh, and it might even be pretty enough to tempt our resident macwhore (hello Bloodline!) to go over to the dark side, at least for a few hours  :lol:

Note to laptop users: Using 3D compositing reduces battery life. On my Eeepc, which has about an hour and a half of useful life in it (the surf model has perhaps the most crappy battery ever fitted to a laptop that didn't come from sony), was reduced by about 20 minutes.

[NovaCoder]

I've seen some strange vids in my time but...

[Wolfe]

Don't care much for Linux, but it did look cool. . .  :-o

[bloodline]

I've been studying Compiz recently actual, I think that OS looks really nice :-)

[the_leander]

This is a copy of my email to the developer list:

The following are my initial findings on the Elive+Compiz development edition.
 
System tested: EeePC 2G Surf,
512Mb Ram
2Gb onboard SSD
No camera.
 
Booting in live mode from a USB keyfob.
 
Things noted as broken: Splash screen missing, some stability issues found when running elive on defaults, these disapeared completely when I selected no bluetooth - this model doesn't have it, so I suspect that might have been the cause.
 
One thing I did note was that whilst the volume function keys and mute were not active, sound did work (albeit at full blast with no means to silence it) no function keys whatsoever worked when the "EeePC" specific boot option was selected All other function keys were supported in no bluetooth mode otherwise.
 
Battery life... Well, I have to estimate that it took around 15 minutes off of the battery life over the default Xandros install, which on the Surf model I have reduces it to UPS class times of a little over an hour or so. The battery status indication was fine, however the estimated time to shutdown was all over the place, ranging from 14hours (lol) to 0mins whilst at around the half way point of discharge.
 
Wireless picked up several access points, though none I could connect to due to not having the keys to them (obviously). The wireless did however support being shut down from function keys (a first - no other distribution, including eeebuntu supports that without much emacs voodoo). Suspend reboot and shutdown all worked without issue. The panel looked great, but possibly a little large for the size of the eee's screen.
 
Speed was superior to anything I have yet thrown at this little machine with the possible exception of slax running in memory only mode, the flip side is that slax doesn't support the EeePC's atheos chipset whatsoever in it's latest encarnation without having to compile your own. Stability wise, once I selected the no bluetooth option this thing was production ready stable. No crashes or oddness within the 6 hours I tested it.
 
Theme selection worked like a charm. As did every application I tested.
 
Temperatures were within acceptable norms with the fan kicking in a little sooner then normal, though I suspect this is down to the GPU (and I use this term loosely when speaking of the POS intel onboard) being pushed harder then usual.
 
One thing I might ask though is this: Is there any possiblity of getting a stripped down version of Elive/compiz so that it would fit on the 2G, as is, it takes 2.5Gb. Perhaps have an option to select what applications get installed at install time. Maybe have the option (within the non dev branch) of not including the compiler toolchain?
 
All in all. With the exception of the missing volume control, Elive as is, could be used day to day in terms of stability. 7/10

[persia]

I like how they had that girl fondle her breast half way through just to wake us up

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Sorry, I hated every bit of it. This graphic stuff only a burden to the processing power, the benefits can be easily achieved with conventional 2d graphics by a creative mind.
It's just the same 'shock and awe' song again. While there's still so much to do considering performance, flexibility and user friendlyness (and also flexibility in user friendlyness - for future applications)

 :roll:

[kolla]

I long for an advanced functional desktop *not* aimed at "most users".  :-(

[bloodline]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
Sorry, I hated every bit of it. This graphic stuff only a burden to the processing power, the benefits can be easily achieved with conventional 2d graphics by a creative mind.
It's just the same 'shock and awe' song again. While there's still so much to do considering performance, flexibility and user friendlyness (and also flexibility in user friendlyness - for future applications)

 :roll:

Don't worry Speel, this eyecandy is handled by the GPU... no CPU cycles are wasted, so it's good to put the GPU to some use other than sitting idle...

[persia]

They should put a disclaimer, "no cpu cycles were harmed in this demo..."

IT's pretty neat actually, but they don't tell what CPU and RAM are required.

[the_leander]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
Sorry, I hated every bit of it. This graphic stuff only a burden to the processing power, the benefits can be easily achieved with conventional 2d graphics by a creative mind.

The standard Enlightenment 17 offers this in buckets. So far as I can tell, this is just to show it can be done. Perhaps you should try one of the non 3d composited versions of Elive...

Fact is, is that Enlightenment uses a fraction of the resources a gnome or kde based linux does and is as fast as xfce on the same hardware. That it runs so smoothly even on something as pathetic (spec wise) as my eeepc is a testiment to the amount of optimisation that it has for "low end" systems.

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
It's just the same 'shock and awe' song again. While there's still so much to do considering performance, flexibility and user friendlyness (and also flexibility in user friendlyness - for future applications)

 :roll:

You might also want to double check Elive's minimum system requirements - Pentium 1 processor with 64Mb of ram, same as with a cut down linux running xfce.

Only prettier. And more flexable. And more conducive to keeping a high level of workflow.

I used Elive 1.0 on my PC after trialing SUSE, Ubuntu and a half dozen others, all of which I found clunky after using BeOS/Zeta. It was the first distro that I didn't have to prat about with codecs or drivers for, it was the first one that ran out of the box with all of my hardware first time everytime.

I loved it and it still bugs the hell out of me that that machine was stolen. I got so much done using it that it wasn't funny. It had a great interface, had a rediculously small memory and system overhead and it seemed never to slow down even when you were thrashing the hell out of it.

[the_leander]

persia wrote:
They should put a disclaimer, "no cpu cycles were harmed in this demo..."

IT's pretty neat actually, but they don't tell what CPU and RAM are required.

Elives system requirements for non composited E17 is a pentium 1 with 64mb of ram.

My EeePC, with a crumby onboard intel gpu ran the composited version without issue in terms of performance. Yes, the non compiz version is marginally snappier. But the difference is minute tbh.

[the_leander]

kolla wrote:
I long for an advanced functional desktop *not* aimed at "most users".  :-(

Try a linux that uses busybox or similar for its desktop  ;-)

[kolla]

If you're trying to be funny, you're not succeeding, and I believe you mean matchbox, not busybox.

[lorddef]

persia wrote:
I like how they had that girl fondle her breast half way through just to wake us up

Exactly what I was thinking, 45 seconds in.

To be honest nice looking desktops are fine, but I just can't be fu*ked with all the 3d stuff, I don't see how it could possibly increase my productivity.