Enlightenment on Ubuntu
So just browsing around today I stumbled upon this review of VectorLinux 5.1. I’ve read about Vector before and have been meaning to try it out but have not yet gotten around to it. VectorLinux is an up and coming distribution based on the popular Slackware. The key feature and appeal of it is that it is optimized for raw speed and is designed to give you a lean, barebones OS but at the same time not cut out functionality or style. From the reviews that I’ve read, it seems like you can take any old computer from the attic, dust it off, install Vector, and you’ve got yourself a legitimately useful and responsive machine.
In any case, I still have not taken the plunge and installed Vector, but there was one interesting discussion in the above mentioned review that caused me to take a parallel investigative leap. Up until now, I have relied on both KDE and GNOME to serve my Linux desktop environment needs. For the past couple of years, I used KDE on Mandrake up until just recently when I switched to GNOME on Ubuntu. In both of these cases, I was using my old PIII 900Mhz, 512MB Thinkpad T22. The problem that I’ve run into lately is that GNOME is beginning to have a clunky feel to it on this system. It is well known that GNOME is fairly memory intensive; combine this with an annoying Firefox memory leak, and you have yourself a system that can really bog down. I tend to carry out several parallel tasks using open applications on multiple virtual desktops. The result is a lot of hard drive thrashing because the system keeps running out of physical memory.
Coming back to the original Vector review that I mentioned above, an alternative desktop environment called Enlightenment is discussed. I have seen Enlightenment before, but apparently there is a complete rewrite going on and the newest version, E17, has reached a usable form. Intrigued, I decided to install it on my Ubuntu system and see what it’s like.
The first thing that I will say about E17 is that in its current form, it is very raw. Still in a pre-alpha stage of development, a lot of the functionality isn’t quite there yet and at this point, it is certainly not for the weak. However, it is in a stable form and most of the drawbacks of using it lie in the fact that many of the configuration tools are not very polished and a lot of command line tweaks need to be done and support files need to be created and modified. Once you get it set up, though, it’s a desktop experience like none other. As it is mentioned in the Vector review, once E17 is finished, it will bring Linux on the desktop to a whole other level. It of course has lots of eye candy, it’s light years ahead of most other GUI’s in terms of efficiency and functionality, and most importantly, it does all this with a small memory footprint and no need for any hardware graphics acceleration.
Have a look at a screenshot of my desktop that I started working on configuring today. I’m still trying to muck around with all of the currently available configuration options and modules, but even in its present state it works very well.
