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First Look: OpenGEU 8.10Ubuntu and Enlightenment meet again |
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Another week, another First Look and yet another Enlightenment-using distribution came knocking at our doors. It's OpenGEU this time around and it has reached version 8.10, beautifully codenamed Luna Serena. If my memory is correct, OpenGEU (actually Geubuntu, its ex-name) was my first encounter with the Enlightenment window manager and, though I couldn't get used to it,
I was quite impressed overall. As you probably already realized, OpenGEU is built on top of Ubuntu (not a surprise these days) and though the packages for the 8.10 version were made available about a month ago and users could upgrade their 8.04 install, a complete Live CD was just released a few days ago. A bit late, given the fact that Ubuntu Jaunty is right around the corner, but still a good (and fun) time-waster for users and a "development and testing playground for the upcoming version" for OpenGEU's team. Without further ado here's our test machine configuration: · AMD K8 nForce 250Gb Motherboard · AMD Sempron 2800+ Processor · Nvdia GeForce FX5500 Video Card · 512 MB RAM · LG CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive · 17" BENQ T720 Monitor And so started the usual process. Downloaded the 687 MB ISO, quickly burnt it to a CD, booted from it and was greeted with the golden OpenGEU logo and a loading bar that was probably intended to be golden as well but, because of the low resolution, it turned out to look like mustard. And mustard looks good only on a hot-dog. It didn't take long and the desktop appeared with the usual rising Enlightenment sun and the lonely tree relaxing/getting bored on a pretty pasture. I immediately noticed a problem with the golden cursor, which, depending on its location on the desktop, was invaded by some green pixels (zombie-pixels maybe?). I didn't allow myself to be bothered by a minor glitch too much so I went on and clicked on the Install button on the bottom panel (or shelf). A few more clicks and OpenGEU took its place on our hard-drive. A normal 47-second boot time from GRUB to a functional desktop was expected so no surprise there. The developers said that all the latest updates made to the Ubuntu Intrepid would be available in OpenGEU 8.10, and so it was; only fifteen more had to be downloaded and installed. The login screen looks very nice and polished, featuring the same golden sunny appearance. It would have been nice though if it automatically changed its colors depending on which of the two official themes (moonlight and sunshine) you used last. Besides the aforementioned bottom shelf, the default desktop has another one that sits vertically on the right edge of the screen and consists of five icons: a simple and elegant analog clock, a battery indicator, a CPU frequency module, system temperature and a calendar. Being surrounded by Enlightenment, I expected some eye candy as I hovered my pointer over them, but they didn't seem to care and remained static. Moving on, the menus can be accessed by left or right clicking on the desktop. At first, my eyes took some time to adjust, as the shadow behind the menu items' text was a bit too obtrusive for me, especially on the Moonlight theme. Speaking of which, the Moonlight wallpaper appeals much more to me with the huge moon surrounded by pretty stars that twinkle from time to time (animated wallpapers rule!). This time, the cursor is blue and doesn't suffer any glitches like the golden one. After playing around with the themes, I started looking through the installed software and I was happy to see that the developers included more than the usual choices for a Linux distro: the Hydrogen drum machine 0.9.3 and the Jokosher Audio Editor, both very entertaining and more productive than a session of Same Gnome. The flash plugin wasn't available by default but installing it was easy. Also, I had to manually download the graphics card driver in order to enable some pretty fading and transparency effects. Moreover, OpenGEU offers some impressive animated modules like snow, rain, fire or walking penguins. As you can see in the screenshot below, it's quite a sight having all these enabled. Unfortunately, our poor test machine wasn't too excited about them, as they are extremely hungry on resources. One of the advertised features of OpenGEU is the Defaults Configuration Manager, a tool that, for some reason, didn't seem to work on our machine. It was supposed to either restore the system to its default "factory" state or log you out and present you with a wizard to configure Enlightenment to its finest details. Another nasty bug revealed itself when I tried to access the "Colors" option under "Appearance." And it doesn't just crash the application, it freezes the whole system, pops an error and asks if you want to exit or recover, so either you'll be returned to the login screen or the window manager will reload. Please use the comments section below and tell me if this happens to you too. (Update: this bug occurs in moonOS 2 too - it's an Enlightenment problem). Overall, the system was very snappy and responsive while running OpenGEU, with the CPU chillin' at around 9% load and only 33% of the RAM occupied. USB devices were, of course, recognized the moment I plugged them in and the Internet connection was auto-configured. Gnumeric and Abiword come in handy if you actually need to do some work (instead of watching those penguins fly around your desktop!), but if they're not enough for you, Synaptic is there to make your wishes come true and install OpenOffice.org. In the end, OpenGEU 8.10 is a pretty decent distribution, but I think it's safer to wait for the 9.04 version as it's sure to improve on many aspects. The Enlightenment window manager still fails to make a fan out of me, but it definitely deserves its share of appreciation and devoted community. Having tested three Enlightenment distributions to date ( Elive Compiz, moonOS 2 and now openGEU), many of you are probably curious which of them I would choose if I had to. And though it's a tough call, as all three have their flaws and qualities in equal amounts, I think I would stick with moonOS 2 for it is, in my opinion, more stable, more eye-pleasing, and has more useful tools than the rest. Download OpenGEU 8.10 right now from Softpedia.
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Excellent (4.8/5) |
9 vote(s) |
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User opinions: |
| Comment #1 by: Airdrik on 19 Mar 2009, 14:55 GMT |  reply to this comment | On the Enlightenment crash where everything freezes and you are given the two options: exit or recover; Depending on the revision of enlightenment you/they are currently using this "eBSOD" will occur more or less frequently. This is because E17 is still under (more or less heavy) development.
When using the SVN version of e17 and I get this error, I usually change the session and update/reinstall enlightenment before returning. Sometimes it takes a couple of days of doing so before things return to relative stability.
I'm not sure how exactly OpenGEU packages E17 -- how often they update it, how much they test it, etc. Perhaps this example should be reported to OpenGEU's bugtracker. |
| Comment #2 by: TheDarkMaster on 19 Mar 2009, 15:17 GMT | reply to this comment | I'm interested in this in particular:
"One of the advertised features of OpenGEU is the Defaults Configuration Manager, a tool that, for some reason, didn't seem to work on our machine."
What was the problem? The tool should open with a simple selection window, asking you either to restore defaults, or to customize the configurations. What happens instead? And from the screens, it doesn't look like you changed theme using the OpenGEU Themes Manager... because I can see a screen in which there is the Sunshine theme, but with moonlight gtk.. or did you make it on purpose using the Geutheme gnome theme changer? |
| Comment #3 by: TheDarkMaster on 19 Mar 2009, 16:40 GMT | reply to this comment | Ah, and as for the stability compared to MoonOS... do you know MoonOS uses E17 from our same repos? I wonder how could it be more stable than our E17... since it's coming from the same repo! |
| Comment #4 by: TheDarkMaster on 19 Mar 2009, 16:48 GMT | reply to this comment | As for the Colors bug... for example, this happens in moonOS too! In fact they use our repos :)
Thanks for reporting, I noticed it in my box too, it is replicable. To install video drivers, you said you used the terminal, you manually installed them, right? Why didn't you use Menu --> Settings --> System --> Hardware drivers?
We're building an upgrade right now (since we need a Jackalope repo too at this point) and upgrades to E17 svn are created everytime something very interesting is implemented or everytime we find a show stopper bug. Oh, and don't be warried by what I'm saying: I'm trying to discuss about it cause I'm the OpenGEU project's leader and am interested in everything you're saying here: I need to know what to change in the Quarto di Luna version: what disappointed you exactly, what didn't work, what I can improve. So please contribute with replies and suggestions! Everything is fine! Really. |
| Comment #4.1 by: Daniel Pop-Silaghi on 19 Mar 2009, 19:46 GMT | Hello, and I'm glad to see that you're actively trying to improve your distribution. I didn't know that the "Colors" bug was present in moonOS too, because I didn't try that option while I was testing it. :) Thanks for the heads up. It would be nice if both you and moonOS developers would warn users about this or have a visible "known bugs" section on your sites. Or even better, remove the "colors" entry altogether, if that's possible, of course.
About the "Defaults Configuration Manager" tool: after selecting one of those two options and clicking "Next", the warning window pops out informing me what it will do. And when I click OK, both windows close and nothing happens. Am I doing something wrong?
Oh, and the menu text is not very easy on the eyes, as I said in the article. A bit less shadow under the letters would be better, in my opinion.
Anyway, sorry for blaming your distribution for the "Colors" bug, I will make a note in the article too.
Again, congratulations to you and your team for creating OpenGEU. I guess most of the problems come from the Enlightenment window manager, still under heavy development. Have a good day and good luck with Quatro di Luna! |
| Comment #5 by: TheDarkMaster on 20 Mar 2009, 07:50 GMT | reply to this comment | Thanks for your answer! If there was a way to directly indent my reply after yours, please escuse me but I didn't find it! :(
Well, as for the Colors Bug, we didn't know about it, I think you are the first one who mentioned it :)
Honestly, I never use that Enlightenment option and in any case, yes, all our E17 problems are of course E17 related but we have developers INTO Enlightenment (Dave, Quaker), so we can actively correct them. That's why we have a launchpad account! So, this bug could have been reported to our launchpad for example. I'm not blaming you of course, the important is that now we know about it and we'll correct it in the next E17 upgrade :)
But, as I told, no one reported it before, we didn't know.
As for the colors in the theme, I'm really sorry you had some problems, but you are not the only one who reported problems in reading menus, etc. I will correct it. I'm the one who creates the main themes in OpenGEU, and now Artpulse, another professional designer, is actively collaborating with me! Actually, we almost completed the development of a new Sunshine theme and we took care of all the problems people had looking at Murrina Sunshine. In any case, I have to say I had no problem at all with the colors, otherwise I wouldn't have released it ;)
The problem in the default configuration manager.. well, I don't get it honestly. Can you do me a favour? Since you are the first to report this problem, open a Launchpad bug about it so that we can hunt it down. I'll ask you to run our script from the terminal, so that you'll be able to show me the output.
As for the loading screen... mustard? Really? That's bad :(
Everyone said that the Usplash was really looking great, this is the first time I receive complains about it.. hope at least you liked the Moonlight Usplash. Well, in any case, I'll redesign the usplash theme too, to resemble the look of the new themes in Quarto di Luna, and you'll be able to tell me if you will like the colors in the Beta release :)
I'm really looking forward for your collaboration man. I see from this "first look" that even if there where some details missing compared to the first look to MoonOS (Like the fact that they share the same E17 version with us.. quaker from our team is the maintainer of those repos, he's responsible for the E17 svn organization and he often recompiles it and updates our repos... that's why I tell you we are for some degrees inside E17 already ;) Not mentioning Dave again..), you are very analitic and give me nice feedback. Thank you :) |
| Comment #5.1 by: Daniel Pop-Silaghi on 20 Mar 2009, 09:02 GMT | Just click "reply to this comment" and your reply will appear like this. :)
Yes, the loading bars on both openGEU and moonOS look bad to me. As I said in the article, it's probably because of the low resolution during the bootsplash. Maybe remove some gradients from it? The logo itself is very beautiful indeed, just the loading bar bothers me a bit.
I will try and run your "defaults configuration" script from the terminal and submit a bug later tonight. |
| Comment #6 by: TheDarkMaster on 20 Mar 2009, 07:51 GMT | reply to this comment | Ah, I forgot one thing: as for stability, I hope you understand now that MoonOS has the exact same stability we have.. as for the useful tools, what's missing in your opinion? |
| Comment #7 by: Airdrik on 23 Mar 2009, 16:35 GMT | reply to this comment |
Ah, and as for the stability compared to MoonOS... do you know MoonOS uses E17 from our same repos? I wonder how could it be more stable than our E17... since it's coming from the same repo!
Now, I'm curious. What distinguishes MoonOS and OpenGEU (aside from aesthetics)?
Does OpenGEU have Ecomorph (Compiz for E17)? Are there any tools which OpenGEU has which MoonOS doesn't?
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| Comment #8 by: TheDarkMaster on 23 Mar 2009, 20:35 GMT | reply to this comment | The problem with teh Default Configuration tool has been fixed, and I just released an optimized version of OpenGEU for the EeePC! ;)
It's the same as this release, but it includes this fix and optimized drivers and configurations to be right ready when installed on an EeePC :) |
| Comment #9 by: elastic on 25 Mar 2009, 20:58 GMT | reply to this comment | I'll try to explain - DM please correct me if anything isn't like I'm telling it ;-)
1. yes OpenGEU has ecomorph: logoff, switch session to ecomorph and login again
2. both use the same e17 base and they look similar (because both use e17 and a great artwork) but they are significant different in their implementation of not-e17 tools and in configuration. They both have their own tools for look and feel and more.
3. and finally on my system OpenGEU runs better ....
Test both and choose then ;-) |
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