A Different kind of Enlightement
Theme of the week at the moment but I’ve just recently installed Enlightement on my home machine. E is a window manager thingy, and it absolutely rocks. It looks great, is very very fast compared to the full blown kde, and has some very funky features. It’s virtual desktop management is well cool, and very intuitive. E does take a little setting up – and with the current build a lot of the “Epplets” or little applications for Enlightement won’t compile on my system – I had initially thought because they were for an earlier build but a lot of the errors look like syntax errors. E hasn’t had a release in the last 3 years (it’s a brand new release in the last couple of weeks that’s gotten me into it) so perhaps those epplets haven’t been updated since then – in which case it’s very likely that they’ve fallen behind whatever the changes have been to gcc etc.
Anyways – E is very cool. I’ve got some nice transparency set up, I’m using ETerm (a terminal program with special adaptions for Enlightement) which is fantastic and I’ve replaced gkrellm with a number of epplets which do some very funky monitoring stuffs. My favourites at the moment are the cpu and network load monitors – they display this graphical flame style thingy which intensifies and grows as the load increases – looks very nice 
(to clarify, it’s in nice blue and greeny colours, not normal flame colours*).
Working on getting the menus sorted, and in parallel with the ones I use on the kde system, and still organising some of the customizations that will make E completely convenient for me – but all in all I think I’ll stick with this. It’s a lot more stable than it used to be way back when I was just dabbling years ago, and it’s much faster than the full suse kde desktop. Whatever overhead reduction I’m gaining allows most apps to launch faster etc, and uses less memory so I’m loving it.
* For our lexically challenged brethren in the US, yes – colour DOES have a “u” in it 
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