E17 and Qimo

Enlightenment 0.17, or as it's usually referred – E17 is one of the DEs, and mighty old one too. If I remember correctly, only KDE is even older. Not that it matters – after initial burst of activity, there was 10 years of coma and version stayed on 0.16. Now, the thing has been revived, devs not only made new release but also have took up the task to enlarge whole desktop to new level – new libraries, new apps and so on. There are lot of information on their page for you, curious ones.

Whole thing is written totally differently of other Linux desktops – which makes it also totally uncompatible with anything outside their own package-range. It also looks and behaves very differently of others. And it is blindingly fast.

It is not a popular DE. Seems that only Bodhi Linux has it as default DE. But quite a few distros provide a meta-package. Whole thing looked freaky and interesting to me.

I tried to install Bodhi twice, with exactly the same result: installation hung after discovering my mouse... I have no idea why my mouse was so frightening to Bodhi.

But being stubborn, I then took another road - installed Lubuntu as a test-base and stuck E17 meta-package into it as a separate session.

When running E17 session for a first time, you will be asked various settings-questions. It made me feel in a contradictory way – 'oh it's so caring' and at the same time - 'why the hell I couldn't do all this afterwards, on desktop'.

One of things it asks is general font size – which is presented as bunch of size samples. I left it default – which appeared to be 11pt or so. When arriving to desktop I was greeted by font sizes of approximately 6pt... which is almost bloody unreadable!

Changing font sizes was extremely unwieldy and silly, and despite I changed everything to bigger – everything did not change. And what did was now too big. Doh.

There were obvious bugs and glitches. There wasn't any connection – 'you have to install connman' announced E17 helpfully – which you can't download of course, because you don't have connection...

And whole menu architecture was freaky indeed. And despite of nice icon-set whole desktop looked ugly and outdated.

'Completely remove' after one hour ended my date with E17.

The second thing I tested was Qimo Session – a package of educational Xfce-based kid-games. If I am not mistaken, for age 3-7. Contains various alphabet, word, number, association, math and so on games. Also has Kid-Paint – a simple drawing app, with a lot applicable stamp-pictures, different brushes and talking voice. Quite nice thing this Qimo, if a bit rough around edges.

After successful testing I installed Xubuntu + Qimo to my sons' computer as a double-boot with Winxp. Son definitely prefers Linux, well, because of games, I suppose. Or maybe because Ubuntu is the first choice in Grub ...

Also – as two different sessions are kind of overkill for 3,5 year old, I fused them together. Qimos' apps invaded Xfce menu anyway. So I left only Xfce (passwordless login – see 'Users and groups' ) and took Qimo away from login screen.

HOW-TO remove a session from login menu: Which is very simple thing to do, really (I am talking about Xubuntu, and accordingly, of Lightdm greeter (Light Display Manager)).
Go to /usr/share/xsessions, where .desktop files for every installed session live – delete or rename those you don't want to appear in greeters' menu. Easiest way, probably is: Open terminal, type sudo thunar, enter your password, file manager starts with root privileges, navigate to abovementioned place, rename currently un-needed files.

There is also Quest session in greeters' menu – and this is not represented by .desktop file. To remove that: Go to /etc/lightdm/ folder, open terminal, type sudo leafpad lightdm.conf, and add new line to the end of file
allow-guest=false

Save, and next login will be Questless.

Besides testing those two DEs, I also played around with Lxde itself – which I found a bit too 'light' for me. That is – Lxde really is very light thing, not very much a desktop if compared to gnome or Xfce. It even uses Openbox as a window manager, 'cause it doesn't have its own. Not that Lxde doesn't have its uses – if you have really old rig, then it's spot on and fits well.

THING TO AVOID: When installing Lubuntu I put Grub to MBR and overwrote Grub2 of Xfce. I then booted to my Xubuntu and did update-grub, and everything seemed OK.

When I finished my tests and decided to remove Lubuntu, I went to Xubuntu, formatted Lubuntu partitions, did update-grub again, rebooted – and found non-booting bootloader.

So, updating Grub is not enough in such case, I probably should have to reinstalled whole Grub from Xfce - after Lubuntu install.

I googled, I tried to repair my Grub (no immediate success). Then I decided that reinstalling whole Xubuntu again is lesser pain – and that was what I did.

And I probably used up at least three day quantity of curses. Sigh. And repeating once more – do not overwrite booloader you want to use afterwards. Put new one into root partition and it will cease to exist without problems when daddy Format comes.