TinyCore plus Enlightenment(E17) makes a Dreamdistro

[slashyy]

I just tried TinyCore Linux and it's fantastic!

The only thing I miss is the e17 window manager. Let's just consider the facts:

- e is super scalable, highly efficient, simply beautiful and mega costumisable.
- while many complain about it's slow development, it' actually moving faster every day
and approaching it's first alpha release : http://www.libertatia.org/blog/?p=234
- it would be perfect to combine it with tinycore to make a Dreamdistro
 (  minimum system requirements,  super speed + beautiful look)
I think it would be a dream come true ... 

What do you think?

[baz]

I'd love to see it.

[althalus]

Just finished building a series of e17 extensions, and testing them now. Will submit them soon.

[slashyy]

Fantastic news

But let's take the idea a step further.

The libraries upon which E is based on, provide a perfect ground for building new and exciting applications, while being highly efficient and portable. TC provides an ideal base for developing such applications as well as E itself. Currently ther's a debian based distro centered around E called Elive ( http://www.elivecd.org/ ), but TC surely would be a much better option. TC + E(EFL) has a great potential, therefore a cooperation of TC and E developers, in my opinion, would bring great benefits to both. Attracting new developers and designers, to create exciting new GUI apps based on the efl libraries and combining that with already existent, actively developed, highly efficient and portable software like  mplayer, xmms2, dillo ... etc, should be the main goal for such a new distro, therefore providing all the neccesery tools for effective testing, developing ...etc.
Especially because of his high efficiency and portability, the superb dillo web browser should be established as the third corepart and the main browser in such a distro. Uniting TC, E and dillo developers with a common goal, centered around a coredistro, with the common pourpuse of the „democratisation of information“ as expressed in dillo's project objectives: http://www.dillo.org/funding/objectives.html could bring about the long awaited  "New World Order" ! ( just kidding ), but surely a STATE OF THE ART  OS.



I'm planing to create a website dedicated to this pourpuse, but  i'm still very busy writing my diploma, so that little part will have to wait a little...  For now i wrote this, simply to point out the obvious parallels between TC and other projects and of course, in hope to bring some attention to E.

Cheers!

Links:

http://www.enlightenment.org/
http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=docs&l=en
http://www.elivecd.org/
http://exchange.enlightenment.org/
http://e17-stuff.org/

http://www.dillo.org/

PS:
Sorry for my bad english and thank you very much for all your good work.


The Times They Are a-Changin'

[slashyy]

A nice performance comparison regarding startup times and memory footprints between different WM's/DE's :

http://edjy.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/memory-and-time-results/

E17 clearly beats them all...

[bmarkus]

A nice performance comparison regarding startup times and memory footprints between different WM's/DE's :

http://edjy.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/memory-and-time-results/

E17 clearly beats them all...

LXDE is missing

[Juanito]

Is this the same E17 as comes with ydl for ps3? If so, it's way, way slower than fluxbox or jwm...

[curaga]

The last time I tried e17 (wow, nearly 2 years ago ), it took nearly 5s to start (and this is a c2d ffs!), loading I don't know what and showing a startup animation. It also was buggy and incomplete.

Other than that, it sure was beautiful, and it was fast when running. Just not for me, at least then.

[bmarkus]

Why not measure it on TC?

[slashyy]

While LXDE seems to be a nice project and all ...  i  can't imagine it could beat fluxbox, especially because it's powered by GTK+ 2:
http://lxde.org/lxde
regardless of that,  in my opinion and with all respect to the developers, neither LXDE nor fluxbox or jwm  have, or ever will have the potential and features that e17 and its EFL libraries already offer...

We all know that benchmarks are not the best way to measure the overall performance, but the fact that (despite it's feature richness) E seems to outperform fluxbox should speak for itself...

Is this the same E17 as comes with ydl for ps3? If so, it's way, way slower than fluxbox or jwm...

Well i don't know about yodl but have u ever tried elive?
I think it's a mater of implementation... Also we should keep in mind that e17 hasn't even had an alpha release yet, but it will soon ( read above).
Here's a more in depth look at the performance issues and improvements/problems (today's post): http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/blog/efreet-xdg-temporary-breakages

You can also read more about e's system requirements here:

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en

We have run and tested on x86-32, x86-64, Atom, Power-PC, ARM (ARM9, ARM11, Cortex-A8 and more), MIPS, Sparc, and many other architectures. The suggested minimum RAM required for a full Linux system + EFL application is 16MB, but you may be able to get by on 8MB. For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs). [...] Enlightenment libraries already power millions of systems, from mobile phones to set top boxes, desktops, laptops, game systems and more. It is only now being recognized for its forward-thinking approaches, as products and designers want to do more than the boring functional user experiences of the past. This is where EFL excels.

And that's why i would propose to unite forces with the E developers, creating a new distro, based exclusively on TC + E, providing a clean platform for developing new and exciting apps powered by the EFL libraries and incorporating  already existent, highly performant software to create something completely NEW and different.

Now, this is NOT TinyCoreLinux anymore. I'm talking about a complete HardCore Operating System... Imagine a 50mb, cooler then MacOS , faster then a bat out of hell, all you need OS (and no disrespect to DSL, but it was not that cool nor fast... , but with the EFL libraries + TC im sure it's possible).
The key here would be to provide an -out of the box - development and collaboration environment, attracting new coders, testers, designers.. etc..., creating not just a community, but a culture surrounding the project.
I'm sure u understand the future potential and the benefits it would offer to both projects - TC and E.

The last time I tried e17 (wow, nearly 2 years ago ), it took nearly 5s to start (and this is a c2d ffs!), loading I don't know what and showing a startup animation. It also was buggy and incomplete.

Other than that, it sure was beautiful, and it was fast when running. Just not for me, at least then.

Well on my c2d notebook it takes 55s to load kde4 (just the DE + 40s boot time ffffffffffsss!!!! ), about 25s to load xfce and about 7s to load E.

Now the point is, we could argue about 2 seconds (the time it takes to put my glasses on) a whole lifetime... But as you say curaga: „The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.“



Cheers!

[Toma-]

Hey folks!

Im the monkey that made those results. Yes, LXDE is missing. Read the 1st paragraph... These are some quick results I made for a CSS table for my Uni work. It was not conducted on an ultra-scientific method. THAT BEING SAID; it was conducted with real life setups. I setup each environment to a point where I could use it and enjoy it, which IMHO is more important.

I really welcome using E as a part or variation of TinyCore. I hear about TinyCore a lot on reddit but the one thing I always see with minimalist distros is LXDE/Fluxbox/XFCE and all those other lil guys. I think the main reason people steer away from E17 is they think its 'not ready'... well its in the next version of Ubuntu so I figure it must be quite ready.

Nextly! The theme attributes a bit of weight to the size of E17 install and memory footprint. Heres my Edjy theme http://exchange.enlightenment.org/theme/show/174 ...its about 174kb installed and uses close to no RAM at all. There are no images in it so everything is rendered in realtime. Much like fluxbox (but its a few little animations). These tests were conducted using the default E17 theme so I imagine you could get faster and leaner with Edjy.

Anyway, thanks for discussing my results

[slashyy]

Thank you so much for your response Toma-  ,

I also posted on the Enlightenment mailing list and got a pretty quick response from one of its core developers. Here's his reply regarding further cooperation between both projects:

Definitely we can match our goals perfectly. We are light, if not it
is a bug. We're fancy, if not it is a bug. Yes, we can be both at the
same time.

Since you have a custom system, I bet our customization options will
benefit you there. For sure you can count on us (or at least on me) to
provide a good selection of compile flags and what should go in and
what should not. For instance, compiling eina and evas with static
modules will save you some space and help performance. Compiling
software with amalgamation support (eina, eet) will also help those.
Even e17 have couple of modules that could be compiled out, or just
not enabled by default... it is as simple as creating your own profile
(e.cfg, created from e.src... see our e/config directory for
examples).

Just note right now we're quite in flux, the situation should
normalize soon. We're collapsing some modules to reduce the number of
required ".so" and also polishing them. Last but not least, see my
post about Efreet's temporary situation:
http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/blog/efreet-xdg-temporary-breakages
This is important to avoid torrent of complaints.

Also see our http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Packaging
instructions. I'm maintaining Gentoo ebuild in our svn, so they might
be a good source for configure and compile flags.

We expect our situation to become stable by early April, so we can do
a stabilization snapshot by mid April. Then I'd recommend you to pick
up the code and package for your distro.   Of course you can report
bugs and help with patches :-)

Thank you for your interest on E/EFL!

BR,

--
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
--------------------------------------
MSN: barbieri@gmail.com
Skype: gsbarbieri

So, TC-E developers, please feel free to contact barbieri regarding any problems you may encounter.


Thank you for all your hard work.