Baltix

Bug #365238
Comment #2

Comment 2 for bug 365238

Revision history for this message

Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas) wrote on 2012-08-01:

After 5 years of work new Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) 2.0 was released on May 2012. This release is the major EDE redesign and cleanup with a lot of goodies. Outdated eFLTK backend is replaced with more stable and maintainable FLTK 1.x. This will make EDE more approachable as FLTK is standard library on almost every Linux distribution.
Also, EDE 2.0 is freedesktop.org standards friendly. Now EDE will understand system menus, load desktop icons, read icon themes, cooperate with other toolkits and more.
Additional library (called edelib) was added, extending FLTK with a lot of useful code and making EDE easier to port on new platforms.

Newest Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) 2.0 can be tested from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS based Linux distribution. This job was done by Remastersys guys, see http://remastersys.com/downloads

For more info look at http://equinox-project.org/page/news and http://equinox-project.org/wiki/ChangeLogs

Detailed news for each EDE component (2.0 alpha and beta changes are not listed):

EDE Library (edelib)
  * Improved theme engine. Theme meta code is simplified and (by introducing translation support in tinyscheme backend) allows translation support.
  * New font name handling engine. FLTK does not have support for readable font names (e.g. Pango style, like sans:12) so this code adds this feature.
  * Extended scheme backend with news functions and syntax. Parts are inspired from Clojure.
  * Small improvements on compiling with older FLTK releases (e.g. 1.1.10, but absolute minimum is 1.1.7) and *BSD.
  * Improved shared libraries installation.

Panel (ede-panel)
  * Workspace switcher now correctly display workspace names.
  * Added panel hide button (called hider). When clicked, it will slide panel to right side, hiding it until explicitly unhided.
  * Cleaned a couple of memory leaks.
  * Added memory applet where current memory/swap state is reported. Only available on Linux for now.
  * Added Screen Lock option in menu.

Launcher (ede-launch)
  * Support for loading .desktop files directly.
  * Startup notification is now builtin, replacing extern program that handled this job.
  * Prevent loading self: if given ede-launch as parameter with sub-parameters, parent launcher will pick up those parameters.

Notifications support (ede-notify-daemon)
* New service, started when EDE was loaded. It will display notification messages prescribed by http://freedesktop.org.

Preferred applications tool (ede-preferred-applications)
* New tool where user is able to select preferred browser, terminal, mail agent and file manager. It will cooperate with Launcher (ede-launch), as the former will use selected programs to open predefined patterns, like urls will be loaded by select browser and etc.

Window manager
* edewm is retired and replaced with pekwm. With this, a new, customized pekwm theme is used by default.

Desktop (ede-desktop)
* Implemented missing functionality: icons can be created, renamed and deleted. Still some properties-like option (for editing details on existing icons) needs to be implemented.

After 5 years of work new Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) 2.0 was released on May 2012. This release is the major EDE redesign and cleanup with a lot of goodies. Outdated eFLTK backend is replaced with more stable and maintainable FLTK 1.x. This will make EDE more approachable as FLTK is standard library on almost every Linux distribution. 
Also, EDE 2.0 is freedesktop.org standards friendly. Now EDE will understand system menus, load desktop icons, read icon themes, cooperate with other toolkits and more. 
Additional library (called edelib) was added, extending FLTK with a lot of useful code and making EDE easier to port on new platforms.

Newest Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) 2.0 can be tested from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS based Linux distribution. This job was done by Remastersys guys, see http://remastersys.com/downloads

For more info look at http://equinox-project.org/page/news and http://equinox-project.org/wiki/ChangeLogs

Detailed news for each EDE component (2.0 alpha and beta changes are not listed):

Notifications support (ede-notify-daemon)
  * New service, started when EDE was loaded. It will display notification messages prescribed by http://freedesktop.org.

Preferred applications tool (ede-preferred-applications)
  * New tool where user is able to select preferred browser, terminal, mail agent and file manager. It will cooperate with Launcher (ede-launch), as the former will use selected programs to open predefined patterns, like urls will be loaded by select browser and etc.

Window manager
  * edewm is retired and replaced with pekwm. With this, a new, customized pekwm theme is used by default.

Desktop (ede-desktop)
  * Implemented missing functionality: icons can be created, renamed and deleted. Still some properties-like option (for editing details on existing icons) needs to be implemented.