Welcome to February 2009. It has been a few weeks since I last blogged about e17 and cafelinux, so there's a bit of catching up to do. Sorry for the delay. I blame the heat - Australia's summer has been an absolute scorcher.

Is Enlightenment Dying?

OK, I know that's a provocative heading - but how else are we to increase our hit rate, hmmm? But there's a serious side to the question too. I know that the concepts of "user base" and (heaven forbid) "market share" are alien to e17 culture, but surely One Day there needs to be bunch of people out there who use and test it in real-world situations. Look at the figures below (compiled from Desktoplinux.com). OK, the patient has a pulse - but any further decline may be difficult to recover from. As Linux becomes more "mainstream" (The responses to this survey have trippled since it started), Enlightenment - despite being an excellent and innovative WM - looks increasing like a hobby project. I'm sure the Rise of Ubuntu between 2004 and 2009 has a lot to do with the trends shown in the table. But the difficulty of creating a stable and updatable e17 distro "for the masses" must also be contributing to the malaise.

 Results of DesktopLinux.com "annual" survey - Windowing Environments Question

Updates Broke My Module!

We have had quite a few e17 updates recently that seem to have broken at least one module – notably “Places”. For the most part, these updates have compiled and installed OK but result in segmentation faults or X crashing when the Places module is loaded or unloaded.

If you get stuck in a “seg fault loop” and can’t get to the settings panel to cleanly unload the places module, don’t forget that the command line is your friend:

enlightenment_remote -module-unload places

run from a console or terminal should get rid of “places”

To get it back via the CLI, use:

enlightenment_remote -module-load places

enlightenment_remote -module-enable places

To see all the other enlightenment-remote commands, just use:

enlightenment_remote --help

Places

When it isn’t causing problems, the places module is very useful. When loaded, it provides a “Places” menu listing your drives and any folders you have “bookmarked. As a desktop gadget, it provides a neat set of icons displaying information about installed and available storage and enabling quick launching of your filemanager to work with those drives and folders.

One tip, if you aren’t using the e17 filemanager (and who does?), is to configure places to open your preferred filemanger when you double-click a desktop drive icon.

You need to specify the full path to the executable for your filemanager (eg. /usr/bin/Thunar) in the places configuration (right-click) dialog.

But the winner of the award for “Best Supporting Module” is……..

Execwatch!

OK, maybe I’m the only person on the planet who thinks so, but there’s surely no better way to manage you e17 updates?

Load the Execwatch module, put the gadget on your desktop, configure it for update_e17.sh and you have a great way to monitor both the Enlightenment svn and the CafeLinux “flags” as well as a quick launcher for updates.

Just remember to set that “poll” time for a decent interval – otherwise it simply feeds Compulsive Updating Syndrome. You can, of course, manually refresh it whenever you feel the urge.

Thanks for the Feedback and Questions

I'd just like to thank recent new members for their kind words and for posting their experiences (good and bad) with OzOS.  Apart from knowing that there are users out there, these posts prompt us to fix things.

Google Apps on the Desktop

I posted a mini How-To on the forums a couple of weeks ago describing how to create launchers for google docs, gmail, etc etc using Google's Prism application.  While I didn't think it a big deal at the time, I have found it surprisingly useful.  I find I use GoogleDocs more and more these days and Gmail has gradually taken over from Thunderbird as my main email client.  As the off-line capabilities of GoogleApps grow, I can see me doing away with the other apps completely - at least on my Acer netbook.

Finally

And speaking of netbooks, Intel's Moblin project is gathering momentum with the release of the second alpha last week.  I have booted the alpha image from a usb stick on my Acer One and, boy, is it fast!  Boot time was under 10 seconds.  The sample distro itself is just a minimal set of apps on XFCE and I couldn't get my wireless to work, but, hey, it really is an alpha demo.  If the temp here ever drops below 35C, I will try to build an Ubuntu/e17 image based on Moblin - maybe after the 1.0 OzOS release.

OK, I choose to end this blog entry .........NOW!

(Enjoy OzOS!)