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Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

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Using Enlightement DR17 with Slackware

What is E17?

Enlightenment DR17 (E17) is the long awaited successor of E16, a window manager which was distributed in Slackware 10 years ago. It is classed as a “desktop shell”, providing the things you need to operate your desktop (or laptop), but not a whole suite of applications. This includes launching applications, managing their windows, and doing other system tasks like suspending, rebooting, managing files, etc.

E17 doesn't come alone. Actually, it uses the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) which can be used to develop other applications like in the Qt/KDE world for instance. There are, as in February 2013, 15 libraries in EFL and a lot of external modules or applications that can be used with E17.

Installing E17

Pre-built packages

SlackE17

The easiest and fastest way to get E17 running on Slackware is to install the E17 packages from the SlackE17 project. You just need to have the latest release of Slackware, Slackware64 or ArmedSlack.

Just download the tarball corresponding to your architecture (i486, x86_64 or ARM), unpack it and read the doc. To install the packages, you have several options:

  • Install everything using:
# upgradepkg --install-new e17/*.txz
  • Use the supplied script to install only E17 and its dependencies using:
# ./slacke17-install.sh std
  • Use the supplied script to install everything using:
# ./slacke17-install.sh max
  • Or you can just:
# cd e17 && pkgtool

Compilation

SlackE17

SlackE17 provides all the source code and SlackBuilds in one tarball so you can rebuild everything easily. You can build the packages one by one, but it's more efficient to use the BUILD/slacke17-build.sh script. You can pass some options to the script:

  • To get debug symbols:
# DEBUG=1 ./slacke17-build.sh
  • To optimize for your box:
# ECFLAGS="-march=native -mtune=native" ./slacke17-build.sh

SBo

SBo provides SlackBuilds for EFL and E17, but you will have to download all the source code by yourself and build the packages one by one.

Using E17

You need to update your .xinitrc using xwmconfig and choosing xinitrc.e17. Most of the configuration can be made by the right click menu. If you want to manage who can use the system menu, you should take a look at /etc/enlightenment/sysactions.conf.

Sources

 howtos:window_managers:installing_e17 ()