Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Joshas]

About:
Equinox is small and very portable desktop environment designed to be very lightweight in memory and resource usage.
With this in mind, you can run it on very old hardware and various devices, but this doesn't mean you can't put it on the latest technology
Homepage

Installation:
Install eFLTK and EDE PETs the usual way, then logout, and type at the command line:
xwin startede

Notes:
* As this is my first released PET - it might have some mistakes. All advice will be appreciated. Bugs, if any, related to packaging will be fixed.
* It was compiled and tested on Puppy 4.00 only.
* Menus are not generated automatically, it should be easy to write appropriate script later.
* Some 48x48 icons has been removed to keep PET size under 1MB.

[muggins]

Hello Joshas,

I thought I'd give you some feedback, as it's been downloaded 10x & nobody has responded. It works on my pup2.16 but...as I'm sure you're aware...the menu is reflecting your desktop & applications, not mine. So the script to interface with which applications are actually installed is a definite requirement.

[Lobster]

Well done on your first .pets

Saw this as one of the requirements . . .

[Joshas]

Thanks for comments.

muggins,
menu generation script is still in my TO DO list. Now, that someone is interested, I have motivation to actually write it.

Lobster,
please note, that this is not only a window manager, it's a desktop environment, which includes WM, panel, desktop icon manager and configuration tools. Also it comes with few additional programs, like calculator, file search utility, time date changer and volume control. No doubt, that JWM with alternatives to those tools takes up smaller amount of disk space, but EDE is seamless, fast and has nicer configuration tools. Lack of stability might prevent using EDE 1.2 instead of JWM in Puppy now, but I hope that upcoming EDE 2.0 might have some chances. If they keep it as fast as it is now.

[Nathan F]

Some history might be nice. EDE was based originally on the fltk (Fast Light Tool Kit) gui toolkit, which is a rather lightweight alternative to gtk+ or KDE and has many advantages mainly related to speed and small size. However the EDE project forked fltk into efltk rather than working within the bounds of what fltk can do.

Fltk is a project which showed enormous potential but development has slowed substantially. It is much more portable than gtk+ and there are usuallly no problems porting it and it's applications to Windows or OSX. As I mentioned it is extremely small and extremely fast. The hope at one time was that it would fill the void for a small gui toolkit left when gtk1 became a complete orphan and unsupported. There are issues however with native language support that MUST be worked out before wide adoption could ever be considered.

Other fairly large projects using or being ported to fltk include Dillo, Cinepaint, and several programs from New Breed Software (the Tuxpaint guys). Those who have experience with these projects will know that like fltk some of these are also progressing at a rather slow rate of development.

I don't want to come accross as negative, because EDE is a very worthwhile effort and I see a great deal of potential for it if development can continue at a decent rate. I've been watching it's progress from time to time myself. As Joshas has mentioned it is an effort to create a complete desktop environment rather than just a WindowManager, but to do so in a more lightweight, less resource hungry manner than KDE, Gnome, or XFCE (which is hardly light and fast anymore IMHO). In this way it is much like Puppy itself, and much in the same spirit. I'm glad to see these packages available.

Nathan

[amigo]

I kinda like ede -I downloaded and compiled it from source. But, while it really is fast, it is not particularly light a typicall configuration which starts up the standard extras consumes around 30MB of RAM.

I really do like the integration of the various components, though it doesn' play well with desktop.org's standards and I find the desktop icon management pretty tedious compared to using ROX.

I'm thinking of contacting the main developer with some comments and questions -I wonder if programs which use fltk can be conjured into linking to efltk instead.

One thing which is not so great -it's written in C++ so there will always be binary-compatibility problems and it will be particualr about which compiler you use.

I like it enought hat I may try to use it some and get a better feel for it -and I am not easy to budge from WindowMaker.

[plinej]

I tried out this DE and liked it enough to write a menu generation script. I'll post a dotpet for it below. After installation go to the command line and enter:

# puppy-ede-menus

When that is done you should now have the Puppy menu. In the system menu you will find the "Update the puppy menu" entry.

Updated to version 0.3 on 2008-08-02 (fixed a few bugs)

[trapster]

plinej-
Very nice menu creator!!!
Any way you could make the menu's alphabetical??

This is a neat little DE, how did this one get my me..???? I will play with it for a few weeks. One thing I miss already (from fluxbox) is an easier virtual desktop switcher (is currently in a pop-up menu format on taskbar)

BUT......wbar and mrxvt are still transparent without "fiddling" around!!!

cool

[plinej]

Yeah, I noticed some things in the menus aren't alphabetical. I'm not sure why right now. I'll see if I can figure out something this weekend.

[magerlab]

i've installed EDE in Dingo and i've noticed that it has now tray insertion feature( like icewm-tray), so pidgn desappeared

and also does it support localization?

[Joshas]

to magerlab: Yes, localisation is supported. It was not included in PET intentionally, to save some space. Here is a localisation package for EDE. It includes German, French, Hungarian, Russian, Slovak and Serbian translations.

to plinej: Good work, much better than my buggy (unreleased) menu generation script. May I include it in main EDE package?

[plinej]

By all means, feel free to include it in the main package.

[plinej]

I updated to version 0.2 for the menu updater package. I fixed a bug that the dialog box wouldn't close when the program was done & fixed an issue where the "filesystem" programs weren't all getting added.

[plinej]

I think I figured out why some of the programs are out of order in the menu. I'll probably have an 0.3 version up sometime today.

[plinej]

Version 0.3 of the menu generator is now posted above. Almost everything should be alphabetical now.