Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

(iczelia.net)

67 points | by snoofydude 3 hours ago ago

15 comments

  • sqbic 23 minutes ago

    I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.

  • pjmlp an hour ago

    Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.

    My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.

    In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.

    Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.

  • unwind an hour ago

    Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.

    There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:

        for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)
    
    But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just

        for (;;)
    
    That was confusing me a bit.
    • isaacfrond 14 minutes ago

      In the article just before that code:

      The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:

  • zeruch an hour ago

    The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.

    I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.

    • angled 44 minutes ago

      I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.

  • BozeWolf an hour ago

    I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.

    I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.

    To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.

  • mrweasel an hour ago

    > It’s themable, hackable, lightweight

    Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)

    I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.

    • drooopy 41 minutes ago

      No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.

  • madaxe_again 2 hours ago

    E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.

    I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.

    • malux85 an hour ago

      Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!

      • torh an hour ago

        Same for me. Slackware (I guess 4.0) and E16 was my first proper Linux installation. Learned so much during that time.

        • oldge an hour ago

          Same for me. He definitely contributed to my fondness and wonder of Linux back then.

      • madaxe_again 19 minutes ago

        SuSE 5.1 for me, as it was what I could easily get the CD-ROMs for, as bandwidth was just a single 64k ISDN at school.

  • _3u10 2 hours ago

    I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16