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News broke this week of a new sub $200 system being sold in American stores running a 'gOS' distribution of Linux. As it turns out the 'g' is indeed for our overlords Google as the system comes with several Google Apps installed as per default. In the obligatory attached screenshots I noticed a slightly unusual desktop environment running and decided to do some digging. It turns out that the window manager used is the minimalist Enlightenment with a number of tweaks and customisations. gOS is available as a LiveCD which I have now downloaded but not had a chance to try. Seeing some quite impressive screenshots of Enlightenment DR17 in action I decided to take the plunge and try to install it onto my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop. This took about an hour because it has to compile and a lot of the material you find is out of date.

The last official built (E16) was released in 2000/2001 and as a result its horribly out of date. The most recent unstable release is DR17. Unfortunately with this release, it has to be built from CVS although there is a script written by Morlenxus which greatly simplifies the process. Annoyingly, since the last unofficial release was a good few months ago, the default dependencies have either changed, been superseded or have broken. As a result it might take a few attempts before the script completes. I opted for the minimal installation + extra modules.

The first thing I needed to do was add the appropriate sources to my sources.lst. This can be gone either from the GUI or via:

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these lines...

deb http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

deb-src http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

Save and close. Next you need to download the gpg key for this repository to check the digital signatures of the code downloaded.

wget http://lut1n.ifrance.com/repo_key.asc

sudo apt-key add repo_key.asc

You can now delete this armored key file. Next you will have to update your lists.

sudo apt-get update

SIDE NOTE: According to ubuntugeek, all that is now required is the command 'sudo apt-get install e17' however this is not how I did it so I can not attest to this working.

Next I downloaded and installed some required dependancies to make sure they were all present on my system.

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 libx11-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libfreetype6-dev

libssl-dev zlib1g-dev xlibmesa-dev xlibmesa-gl-dev libxine-dev libtag1-dev libxml2-dev

automake autogen libsqlite3-dev libtagc0-dev

Now I downloaded the rather good script by Morlenxus using the following command. Make sure you are in your home directory for this. (If you are not sure use the command pwd)

wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh

Now make the script executable.

chmod +x easy_e17.sh

According to the official instructions, the next command entered should be './easy_e17.sh -i' this would by default install E17 with all the modules and dependencies This did not work for me for the reasons described above so instead I used the following command.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,elitaire,

emphasis,empower,engycad,scrot,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,extrackt,

engage,enthrall,rage,emu,flame,moon,rain,screenshot,snow,language,mixer

This will omit the troublesome packages. If you still have problems then you can try installing just E17.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,e_dbus,

elitaire,emphasis,empower,engycad,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,scrot,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,

extrackt,engage,enthrall,rage,scrot,alarm,bling,cpu,deskshow,emu,flame,forecasts,language,mail,

mem,mixer,moon,net,news,photo,rain,screenshot,slideshow,screenshot,snow,taskbar,tclock,uptime,

weather,winselector,wlan,mixer

You can always install packages later. Once the installation has completed, you need to add the path to your opt/environment file.

sudo [insert your favourite text editor here e.g. gedit] -w /etc/environment

Append the following to the PATH line:

PATH="(whatever was here before):/opt/e17/bin"

Mine looks like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/ bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/opt/e17/bin"

Save and exit. With the skip script above, Entrance, the default login manager for E17 has been left out as it can sometimes cause problems according to several threads. As such your existing login manager will be used. A guide how to install Entrance with E17 can be found here and basically involves removing entrance from the --skip.

We now need to add an entry for Enlightenment so that it is can be loaded after login.

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /usr/share/xsessions/enlightenment.desktop

And add the following:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Enlightenment

Comment=Enlightenment Window Manager - www.enlightenment.org

Type=XSession

Exec=/usr/bin/enlightenment_start

TryExec=/usr/bin/enlightenment

Please note the _start in bold. This is important and not on any of the forums link to from this article. If you do not add this then Enlightenment will not start properly. It crashed on loading and recovering via F1 didnt fix the problem so appending this will save you some headaches.

That will give you a fairly minimal E17 to customise. You will however want to change from the default theme fairly quickly and Get-E.org is a great source for themes. As a side note, if you want to update E17, use the following command :

sudo ./easy_e17.sh -u

Enlightenment also supports animated backgrounds, however I have not tested this feature and all the example videos I have seen show it to be horribly stuttery.

For more information or support I would encourage you to visit the following places : old & updated ubuntu installation guide, Enlightenment page.

As a whole, I rather like E17 but I have not had enough time to really play with it. When I have I will post some more on the subject.