[E-devel] Gratuitous Enlightenment

[Stephen S. <za...@ho...>]

E Developers:

  I just downloaded the E16 sources (yesterday) and compiled them, then 
I had some problems with xdm/kdm which I just found to be caused by an 
errant newline in Xsession (which was a bitch to find - go ahead and 
laugh!). But even before I got that problem worked out (while I was 
running X from the console and then logging in to tty6 to start E and 
programs), even then I was impressed. Now that I have xdm working 
correctly and E starting up out of Xsession, I'm beggining to wonder why 
I spent so many months (years?) futsing around with KDE (which is a nice 
desktop environement -- I still love konqueror from KDE 2.1). When I 
started up E, started playing around with some themes, discovering how 
to add menus (both at root and user level - nice job on the menu system 
- it makes sense), and settling down to put E to use, it was like a 
beautiful woman walked in to the room, or some kind of miracle occured. 
I exclaimed "This is what a window manager should be like!" I was 
enlightened.

   First thing, I have two monitors run as screens :0.0 and :0.1 (I 
can't use Xinerma because :0.1 refused to work at higher than 8 bpp). 
Efigured that out and ran on both screens (with kde :0.1 was left to 
toil in wm-less hell). It even restarts apps on login using the right 
screen! Nice job people, I noticed a message saying that E didn't really 
support multiple screens, but it goes far enough for me (this was a 
message that E printed to the console a time or two). I like putting 
xdaliclock (www.jwz.com) and licq over on :0.1 (which is a 640x480x256 
screen on a 15" to the left of :0.0) so that they can always be visible 
and accessible. Good work.

  One question remains. Does anyone know of a launcher/task switcher out 
there like kpanel that offers a little more flexibiliy. Something 
divorced from on of the desktop shells out there? I would really love 
something I can put in :0.1 to control my main screen. If there's any 
great interest out there for this kind of thing, I'd be interested in 
developing it, but I'd need help because I'm not all that experienced in 
X programming.

-Zampire
-za...@ho...
-www.zampire.net/~zampire/