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TTaabbllee ooff CCoonntteennttss Table of Contents 4 e17: An Overview The PCLinuxOS name, logo and colors are the trademark of Texstar. 6 e17: Beginner Desktop Tweaks The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is a monthly online publication containing PCLinuxOSrelated materials. It is 9 e17 Settings Panel, Part 1 published primarily for members of the PCLinuxOS community. The Magazine staff is comprised of volunteers 11 e17 Settings Panel, Part 2 from the PCLinuxOS community. 12 e17 Settings Panel, Part 3 Visit us online at http://www.pclosmag.com This release was made possible by the following volunteers: 14 e17: Shelves & Drawers Explained Chief Editor: Paul Arnote (parnote) Assistant Editors: Meemaw, Andrew Strick (Stricktoo) 17 e17: A Look At Modules Artwork: Sproggy, Timeth, ms_meme, Meemaw Magazine Layout: Paul Arnote, Meemaw, ms_meme 21 e17: Gadgets Galore HTML Layout: Sproggy 23 e17 Accessories: ePDF & ePhoto Staff: Neal Brooks ms_meme Galen Seaman Mark Szorady 26 e17: Configure the Everything Module to do Everything Patrick Horneker Darrel Johnston Guy Taylor Meemaw Andrew Huff Gary L. Ratliff, Sr. 29 e17: Tips & Tricks Pete Kelly Daniel MeißWilhelm Archie Arevalo 34 e17: Create Your Own Custom e17 Themes Contributors: Darrel Johnston Agust 41 e17: Running Ecomorph, Part 1 coffeetime smurfslover 45 e17: Running Ecomorph, Part 2 Settings The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercialShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Some rights are reserved. Copyright © 2011. 2 WWeellccoommee ffrroomm tthhee AAssssiissttaanntt EEddiittoorr Welcome to another Special unobtrusive desktop environment for the X11 Edition of the PCLinuxOS From the Enlightenment website; windowing system. It is fully themable and easily Magazine! Just as we did with configured. There are a wide range of configuration KDE, LXDE and XFCE, we "Enlightenment is not just a window options to suite any taste." have compiled all the e17 manager for Linux/X11 and others, but also articles into one, easyto a whole suite of libraries to help you create access document. beautiful user interfaces with much less work We hope you find this special edition useful for than doing it the old fashioned way and configuring your e17 desktop! Many users adore the e17 fighting with traditional toolkits, not to desktop! We have many in mention a traditional window manager. It Sincerely, Meemaw our community who have covers uses from small mobile devices like Never Stop Learning! done custom isos and phones all the way to powerful multicore themes, so your e17 desktop desktops (which are the primary can look however you want it development environment). to look. I know that those who Posted by Linuxera on May 1, 2011 do isos and themes are hard The Enlightenment at work updating and Window Manager improving on their already was first released in awesome designs, and we 1997 by Carsten have all seen screenshots in the forum that promise "Rasterman" Haitzler. good things to come. Its release revolutionized the face of desktops on UNIX The Enlightenment Desktop Environment has been platforms and beyond, a real learning experience, but we have enjoyed the featuring a more graphically exploration. I learned so much about Enlightenment stimulating environment than in the last year! I originally tried it when it was e16 ever previously seen on a using an eLive cd. I quickly decided it wasn't for me, conventional desktop. Since so I opted to keep exploring live cds which, of that time the window course, brought me to PCLinuxOS. During our e17 manager has been emulated article series, however, I felt much more comfortable and has driven the graphical with it, so my earlier difficulty may have only been appeal we see on desktops because I was a beginner. everywhere. I noticed immediately that e17 does a few things The Enlightenment DR16 much differently than any of the other desktop Window Manager is a robust, environments, and so I did a little research into flexible, highly configurable, Enlightenment. graphically rich yet 3 ee1177:: AAnn OOvveerrvviieeww by Paul Arnote (parnote) Similar but different would be an excellent way to of working with and thinking about the Linux describe e17, also known as Enlightenment, or desktop. It does so without throwing away simply "E." In many ways, it brings a whole new way everything you've become accustomed to in a Linux desktop, while providing a lot of eyecandy, all within a small memory footprint. As such, e17 runs exceptionally well on older, less capable hardware. E17 really is a window manager for the X11 window system on Linux. It's not a fullfledged desktop environment, as KDE, Gnome, Xfce and LXDE are. The cornerstones to the popularity of e17 are its modularity and its ability to be heavily customized to the users needs. If you don't use or need a module, you can simply unload it without sacrificing system stability and features. With the ability to customize the e17 desktop, it means that users can create their own, unique user experience, tailoring the desktop to exactly match the way they work with the computer. History The first release of Enlightenment was in 1997, by Carsten Haitzler, a.k.a. Rasterman. Under development for more than a decade, the latest stable release is version E16 1.0.4. However, PCLinuxOS uses E17, which just moved from alpha to beta status within the last month or two. The rewrite of Enlightenment for E17 revolved around making Enlightenment more modular, via the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries). By breaking the window manager into smaller modules, the Enlightenment developers hope to make My customized e17 desktop, running the PCLinuxOSe17 Light ISO on an IBM Thinkpad T23 with a P3 1.13 GHz maintenance easier. It will also mean that only the processor and 512 MB RAM. affected libraries (and the applications that call them) 4 e17: An Overview will need to be rebuilt as Enlightenment continues to EFL (due to the speed), development is done with loaded in to launch a KDE application. Then, there grow and mature. the goal that it also runs on mobile phones, was about a 10 second delay before the display of televisions, netbooks and more. In fact, there are the KDE application on this older computer. I several major electronics manufacturers who have experienced no such delays when launching the partnered with the Enlightenment development Gtk+ applications in the light version. team, including Samsung. The light version comes heavily customized in the As a result, Enlightenment and EFL have been default installation. While experienced e17 users will successfully run and tested on x8632, x8664, love its flash and glitz, new users may have some Atom, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, Sparc, and other difficulty in figuring out what to do and where to go, Doing More With Less architectures. In fact, as little as a 200 MHz ARM since nothing is where you are accustomed to core will provide sufficient processing power to looking for it on the other desktops in the other adequately run Enlightenment and EFL. versions of PCLinuxOS. Fortunately, Texstar has The efficient use of modules allows E programmers created a package that will make the light version to "do more with less." In essence, the programmers The graphic needs of Enlightenment are quite look and act more like the other desktop focus on the meat and functionality of a program, modest, as well. It is designed to run on screens as environments. New e17 users may find installing the and independent "edje" files are responsible for small as QVGA (320 x 240), but the graphics package (called econfiglight) from Synaptic helpful handling the finer points of the graphical user architecture is designed to scale to fullHD (1920 x in getting their bearings. After all, there are plenty of interface. Thus, they don't have to spend large 1080) and beyond, using displays ranging from 8bit other things to learn about and explore in e17, and quantities of time on designing and redesigning the paletted colors all the way up to full 24/32 bit true that learning curve is made a lot easier if users have user interface (UI) for each and every application color displays. a familiar looking interface to operate in. Users can that is written. revert back to the flashy, glitzy screen layout at any time, simply by installing the econfigitask package from Synaptic. Impressions Memory & System Requirements The "full" Enlightenment ISO, containing a wide The Enlightenment web site lists the minimum range of KDE applications, is intended for computers Conclusions memory requirements for running Linux + with more modern processors (although, it will Enlightenment as 16 MB (and possibly as low as 8 typically run quite well on older computers). The If you are looking for a Linux desktop that is fast and MB). In order to experience the full "Enlightenment "light" Enlightenment ISO is intended for older, responsive, that uses a minimum of memory, and experience," 64 MB (and greater) are slower computers, and uses lighter weight Gtk+ that has ample amounts of eye candy, then e17 recommended. For PCLinuxOSe17, 512 MB RAM applications. On my IBM Thinkpad T23 (P3, 1.13 definitely is for you. Overall, I've found e17 to be is recommended, although it will run and install with GHz, 512 MB RAM, 8 MB S3 Video), the light very stable. Its ability to be customized allows users less than onehalf that amount of system memory. version runs faster and is more responsive. But it's to tweak and tune just about every aspect of the worth mentioning that the full version also runs quite interface, and to create an e17 user experience that While Linux desktop systems represent the most well.