Was wondering what the status was on EDE development.  I tried doing some searches on the Internet and some of the other sites I ran across that mentioned EDE weren't even sure if the project was still active. 

I'm currently trying to build (and patch as necessary) some of the applications on the FLTK wiki's application links section and some other lightweight FLTK applications I've run across using FLTK 1.3.  Found the EDE site when I was searching for lightweight FLTK applications.  I really liked the snapshots of various desktops using EDE.  They have a nice simple, clean look to them.  It also appears that you can customize the look of windows nicely with EDE.  I'm currently using Openbox with a few LXDE applications, but would really like to find an alternative.  I am not at all happy with the support provided by GTK+ developers and would like to concentrate on other GUI toolkits with more user friendly support and with people who are more open to bug reports and patches.

Would love to hear more about the status of EDE.  I currently have one machine I'm trying to set up for Debian Squeeze and another old laptop running FreeBSD.  I can also get Cygwin running on a Windows machine.  I'd like to eventually get to the point where I can run the same open source operating system/distribution on most of my machines and with lightweight applications that can handle the functionality I need, but I am still a long way from that goal.  If I can help out with something, let me know.

Hi,

Thank you for showing interest for EDE :) You got here at the right
time: I'm completing some tasks and I'm hoping I will be able to make
2.0 release soon.

> I tried doing some searches on the Internet and some of the other
> sites I ran across that mentioned EDE weren't even sure if the
> project was still active.

The project is still active, although for some time were in a slow
paced mode, mostly due my other obligations. And not to forget how I
lost ssh access (provider mistake) to EDE web server and wasn't able
to update anything on the web for more than a year. That is now
resolved.

> It also appears that you can customize the look of windows nicely
> with EDE.

Yes, you can. However in EDE 2.0, the theme engine is mostly complete as
it has been rewritten; with it you will be able to much more things
than previously, as engine is now handled with Scheme interpreter so you
get full language to manipulates with themes. Still, I need some rock
solid demo to prove this :D

> Would love to hear more about the status of EDE

Well, 2.0 is almost ready for release and pretty much stable; I'm
using it at job/home computers daily for more than a half year: didn't have
a single crash except when Firefox is killing whole X session. There are
few rough edges and some things are not yet completed, but why 2.1 number
exists ;)

> If I can help out with something, let me know.

Of course: feel free to play with it, try to break it and, yes, I'm
open for patches :)

You can see installation howto at
http://equinox-project.org/wiki/InstallationHowTo2.0b.

Let me know if you have issues or more open questions.

Regards,
Sanel

I've been keeping an eye on this project for around three years or so.  I'd like to highlight EDE with a custom Linux distribution when 2.0 (or maybe 2.1) are released.

Perhaps an email interview published at webpath.net, and article about working with EDE would also stir some interest?

Cool! Very glad to hear that :)

> Perhaps an email interview published at webpath.net, and article
> about working with EDE would also stir some interest?

Yes, why not :) This would definitely boost some interest.

Regards,
Sanel

Will there be a source tarball for the project any time soon?  Tried following the Ubuntu Installation Guide information at the wiki that says to svn efltk and ede and I'm hitting some issues with a firewall.  Didn't notice any recent tarballs in the Sourceforge archives either.  If I can get some source tarballs downloaded, I'd definitely like to give the project a try using FreeBSD and Cygwin platforms.  Thanks.

Hi,

I'm planning to pack release 2.0 soon. In the mean time, you can always download tarballs from repository

* http://ede.svn.sf.net/viewvc/ede/trunk/ede2/?view=tar
* http://ede.svn.sf.net/viewvc/ede/trunk/edelib/?view=tar

> If I can get some source tarballs downloaded, I'd definitely like to give the project a try using FreeBSD and Cygwin platforms.

Yes, some testing can be useful especially on Ubuntu or FreeBSD. Also, if you find some spare time, if would be glad if you can record your installation experience in some form of installation howto on wiki ;)

Regards,
Sanel

Thanks for the links to the tarballs.  I attempted to get this to build using Cygwin because I figured I could get something up fastest in that environment.  Wasn't quite able to get it all to build.  I'll try on another platform when I have time. 

When trying to build edelib, hit an issue when compiling files with jam.  The error was:
scheme.c:90:20: error: conflicting types for 'strlwr'
/usr/include/string.h:90:7: note: previous declaration of 'strlwr' was here
Commenting out the strlwr function in scheme.c made it compile correctly.  That way, it used Cygwin's version of strlwr in string.h instead of the one defined in scheme.c

I tried installing edelib with jam.  It looked like it got installed to /usr/local/lib and like the .pc files were created okay.  However, when I tried to build ede2, it couldn't find edelib, edelib-gui or edelib-dbus.  When I tried to compile some of the files in ede2 anyway, hit an issue with pekwm/Util.cc.  Changed the following and it compiled:
//#ifdef ICONV_CONST
//    return iconv(ic, inp, in_bytes, outp, out_bytes);
//#else // !ICONV_CONST
    return iconv(ic, const_cast<char**>(inp), in_bytes, outp, out_bytes);
//#endif // ICONV_CONST

Because ede2 was having trouble finding the edelib libraries, I didn't get too far in building anything.  It did manage to build a few applications including ede-calc.exe which I was able to run in Openbox.  That's as far as I got for now.

> scheme.c:90:20: error: conflicting types for 'strlwr'

Good, you already fixed it ;)

> However, when I tried to build ede2, it couldn't find edelib,
> edelib-gui or edelib-dbus.

Do you have pkg-config installed? After that, do something like this:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

and try to recompile everything again (run again ./configure && jam).

Let me know if you have more compilation issues.

Regards,
Sanel

The export command helped.  It could find edelib after that.  For some reason, it wasn't finding my X libraries for some of the builds (such as evoke), so in Jamconfig, I set the following:
X_LIBS       ?=  -lXext -lXft -lfontconfig -lXinerama -lX11 ;
It was previously empty.  It's still failing 21 targets and I haven't had a chance to investigate why, but several are building fine now.

Tried adding in the missing X libraries in various jamfiles when things weren't linking.  Got several more files to build.  The panel applets system-tray and hider are failing while looking for some routines from Panel.cpp.  I tried changing the relevant jam files to
PanelApplet system_tray : Tray.cpp Panel.cpp;
and
PanelApplet hider : Hider.cpp Panel.cpp;
It claims to build without errors.  However, no .so files are created.

Also jam install doesn't seem to know how to handle files with .exe (Windows/Cygwin executable extension) and doesn't install them.
I installed the .exe files afterwards with:
find . -type f |grep ".exe" |xargs cp -target-directory=/usr/local/bin
I can get bits and pieces up and running, but still don't have things working as they should.  What I've seen looks really nice though.

> it wasn't finding my X libraries

Strange, since Cygwin should be compatible with stock linux
behavior. 'configure' script has options '-x-includes' and
'-x-libraries' to explicitly specify X11 path(s).

> The panel applets system-tray and hider are failing while looking
> for some routines from Panel.cpp

Can you please paste output here; I'm curious to see what is going on?

> Also jam install doesn't seem to know how to handle files with .exe
> (Windows/Cygwin executable extension) and doesn't install them.

Hm, I never considered EDE/edelib could be run on Windows/Cygwin. Is
there any output, so I can see if I can come up with some quick fix?

> What I've seen looks really nice though.

Thank you :)

Regards,
Sanel

>Hm, I never considered EDE/edelib could be run on Windows/Cygwin. Is
>there any output, so I can see if I can come up with some quick fix?

I'm not sure if it'll work on Windows/Cygwin, but I do know a lot of fltk applications do work on Windows.  So, at least parts of ede will work on Windows/Cygwin.  The calculator application even works on Windows (without Cygwin).  I have a later version that's working on Windows natively.  Think it would be very interesting if EDE did work okay on Cygwin.  There are very few window managers/desktop environments that seem to be available for it.

Let me start over from scratch and retrace my steps for building ede on Cygwin.  That way I know what I have is reproduceable.  Will post the output when I have a chance to do that.  Thanks for all your help.

Okay, built again from scratch. 

Made the following changes before building:

For edelib in src/ts/scheme.c
#if USE_STRLWR
//static const char *strlwr(char *s) {
//  const char *p=s;
//  while(*s) {
//    *s=tolower(*s);
//    s++;
//  }
//  return p;
//}
#else
//# define strlwr(s) s
#endif

For ede2 in pekwm/Util.cc:
//#ifdef ICONV_CONST
//    return iconv(ic, inp, in_bytes, outp, out_bytes);
//#else // !ICONV_CONST
    return iconv(ic, const_cast<char**>(inp), in_bytes, outp, out_bytes);
//#endif // ICONV_CONST

edelib seems to build with no errors.  ede2 had the following issues:

From jam:
failed updating 2 target(s)
skipped 1 target(s)

gcc -shared -rdynamic -o ede-panel/applets/hider/hider.so  ede-panel/applets/hider/Hider.o  -L/usr/local/lib -ledelib -L/usr/local/lib -L/lib -ledelib_gui -lfltk_images -lpng -lz -ljpeg -lfltk -lXext -lXft -lfontconfig -lXinerama -lpthread -lX11 -ledelib -L/usr/local/lib -L/lib -L/usr/lib -Wl,-enable-auto-import -Wl,-enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc-v2 -lfltk_images -lpng -lz -ljpeg -lfltk -lXext -lXft -lfontconfig -lXinerama -lpthread -lX11 -lstdc++

…failed Link ede-panel/applets/hider/hider.so …

gcc -shared -rdynamic -o ede-panel/applets/system-tray/system_tray.so  ede-panel/applets/system-tray/Tray.o  -L/usr/local/lib -ledelib -L/usr/local/lib -L/lib -ledelib_gui -lfltk_images -lpng -lz -ljpeg -lfltk -lXext -lXft -lfontconfig -lXinerama -lpthread -lX11 -ledelib -L/usr/local/lib -L/lib -L/usr/lib -Wl,-enable-auto-import -Wl,-enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc-v2 -lfltk_images -lpng -lz -ljpeg -lfltk -lXext -lXft -lfontconfig -lXinerama -lpthread -lX11 -lstdc++

…failed Link ede-panel/applets/system-tray/system_tray.so …

Going to the ede-panel directory and running jam from there, the following errors displayed:

Link applets/hider/hider.so
gcc: unrecognized option '-rdynamic'
applets/hider/Hider.o:Hider.cpp:(.text+0x142): undefined reference to `Panel::apply_struts(bool)'
applets/hider/Hider.o:Hider.cpp:(.text+0x2ec): undefined reference to `Panel::apply_struts(bool)'
/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-cygwin/4.5.3/../../../../i686-pc-cygwin/bin/ld: applets/hider/Hider.o: bad reloc address 0xd in section `.text$_ZNK8Fl_Group5childEi'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Link applets/system-tray/system_tray.so
gcc: unrecognized option '-rdynamic'
applets/system-tray/Tray.o:Tray.cpp:(.text$_ZN5Panel8relayoutEv+0xd): undefined reference to `Panel::do_layout()'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Looks like cygwin version does not support -rdynamic option. Can you try to remove it and recompile again? Or which options cygwin uses to create dynamic libraries (.so or .dll)? I'm not in front of my computer until Monday, so I'm not currently able to investigate it in details :)

Thanks,
Sanel

Don't think one needs to delete all the -rdynamic switches.  Cygwin appears to just complain and ignore it.  The other applications in ede are compiling and running fine with the rdynamic switch in the command line.  They all have similar warnings.  Not sure how to fix the undefined reference part though.  I think system-tray needs access to the panel object (or a library with it) to compile, but am not familiar enough with jam to figure out how to add that in.  Thanks.

True, as these symbols are used in Panel class (and should be visible
by Panel loaded libraries). I'm not sure does -rdynamic solves this:
can you try to replace it with: '-rdynamic' (got it by reading:
http://vivin.net/tag/cygwin/).

If issue persists, then we are having some linking issues here and I
will probably need to setup compiling Panel shared code into separate
library.

Let me know about the progress :)

Thanks,
Sanel

Went to ede-panel directory and modified Jamfile changing to entries for -rdynamic to -rdynamic.  Ran jam -a in ede-panel directory.  Still got failed updating 2 target(s).  Tried removing -rdynamic flag altogether and ran jam -a.  Same results.  If you come up with any other ideas to try, let me know.

Thanks for the help on this so far.  When I have more time, I'll give it a try on my FreeBSD machine and see if that gets any further.