(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Equinox is tiny desktop environment written in FLTK and requiring nothing else.
The developers claim that Equinox uses less ram and cpu then xterm.
For an entire desktop environment, that's very tiny.

I haven't tried it yet so I can't be sure if the claims are really true.
However, if it is really that small then it seems like it would be a good choice for a puppy.

homepage: http://equinox-project.org/

For an entire desktop environment, that's very tiny.

What is an "entire desktop environment"?
In EDE's case, not a heck of a lot. I tried EDE 2 the other day and as far as I can tell it didn't even come with a filer. A lot of panels have so many applets that I think they are more of a desktop environment than EDE is.
It doesn't have its own window manager any more either (it uses pekwm), but I don't have anything against that.

IMO EDE is a nice idea, but at the moment there isn't enough of it to be worth the bother, and I'd rather use the programs with the most efficient gui instead.

older ede threads (for 1.2 and discussion)
1.2 dotpets
further discussion
fwiw, I've used ede 1.2 on pups up to wary 514 and quirky 142 - it's not terrifically 'light' in use but does have some interesting alternatives/features such as its own 'pinboard'-desktop

@Gnuxo - good choice for a pup? dunno, as some things may conflict with stuff like the rox pinboard

Good to see the devs have got it up to 2.0 release

__addenda (see below)
..perhaps I should have said relatively, compared to say afterstep or xfce4. Haven't tried the 2.0 version, but the ui for 1.2 is a bit clunky in some ways (menu and desktop-switcher on taskbar, for instance besides a few foibles like starting apps from the menu invokes ede's start thingie in background as a kind of ghost). Other than that, like disciple says it's a bit sparse but the goodness is in fltk. No idea if it could be compiled with other wms like say openbox or an ultralight like mcwm. In 1.2, eiconman (the desktop) can be killed without much fuss and a roxpin substituted but killing the taskbar or ede itself is kind of senseless.

added to wiki

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/DesktopEnvironments

can EDE use different window managers?

How come its not light in use?

Here's a question.

I did a comparison between Pekwm and Openbox months ago.

I've used them both before and I always found Pekwm a bit faster and easier to configure then Openbox while at the same time providing almost the same functionality.

On a bare bones debian install, Pekwm only required 800 kb to install on a net install of debian. Openbox took 38 mbs.

I find this astonishing. Especially considering how pekwm and openbox are so similar that an unaware person may confuse the two.

That being said, why isn't Pekwm used in Puppy? It seems, that would decrease the ISO size greatly.

I think, it's wise of EDE to use pekwm because it's lighter then openbox.

On a bare bones debian install, Pekwm only required 800 kb to install on a net install of debian. Openbox took 38 mbs.

That doesn't sound right... openbox is only 2MB on Arch.

Anyway, good old JWM is the best - I find it "astonishing" that people would consider anything else as the default for Puppy

You didn't take dependencies into consideration.
That's what I meant. Pekwm, barely has any dependencies on a barebone install of debian, while openbox required 30 mbs of dependencies.

Arch is probably not a good example because you are able to pick and choose which dependencies to install.

However, It change the fact that I just like Pekwm better then openbox.
...And JWM is pretty light but I always found that Icewm was far more responsive. Perhaps that is just my opinion.

Though the fastest WM I've used by far is WindowLab. It's little known though.

Actually, I did look at the dependencies and the only unusual one was imlib.
Did you perhaps install the optional Python dependency? On Arch Python2 is 70MB, not 30, but Arch doesn't split up packages into separate pieces, and it also compiles with default options, so its packages tend to be very bloated...

JWM is pretty light but I always found that Icewm was far more responsive.

Some people say that, but I've never been able to see it. Anyway, I like JWM for its usability.