HOWTO: Install a lightweight E17 based Ubuntu (Karmic)

[kappa962]

There should be nothing to keep networkmanager from working fine with E17. The problem seems to be that there are no GUIs for it that work with lightweight OSes. Some people have gotten it to work by using a system tray program for E17. Some of the pages that show up by googling "networkmanager "without gnome"" may be a starting point for tackling this problem.

WICD works for most purposes, but I'm not sure why it is necessary to reinvent the wheel here. Surely we aren't the only people who would like to use networkmanager without gnome.


Zezu, at what point does enlightenment freeze? How do you restart it at that point? Rebooting? ctrl-alt-backspace?

[clodio]

I use network manager with e17 and it works very well.
Anyone know how to use mail module? I can't work it

[Zezu]

Some people have gotten it to work by using a system tray program for E17. Some of the pages that show up by googling "networkmanager "without gnome"" may be a starting point for tackling this problem.

Im using Fbpanel as my sys tray, but I have to manually call up nm-applet each time I log in. After that, I dont have any issues.

Zezu, at what point does enlightenment freeze? How do you restart it at that point? Rebooting? ctrl-alt-backspace?

After I log in, the splash screen comes back up. After loading for about another 10 sec, the splash logo goes away, the splash background remains and my cursor appears. I can move the cursor around, but clicking does nothing. I use alt-ctrl-end to restart enlightenment and everything is good after that. I still havent figured out how to get alt-ctrl-backspace to work with enlightenment without inputting a command in the terminal every time I log in.

[Duskao]

Is it possible to install the E17 desktop aside the default gnome desktop and choose between them during login? I have no problems with the bloat of the gnome stuff still being around, but it would be nice to try out my own E17 desktop as opposed to MoonOS which I tried and while it was nice and all, I found it a wee bit cumbersome.

[Tux Aubrey]

Is it possible to install the E17 desktop aside the default gnome desktop and choose between them during login? I have no problems with the bloat of the gnome stuff still being around, but it would be nice to try out my own E17 desktop as opposed to MoonOS which I tried and while it was nice and all, I found it a wee bit cumbersome.

Not a problem:

Add in the Enlightenment repo. Add this to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list (assuming you are on karmic):

deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/ubuntu karmic main extras

Then add the key:

wget http://packages.enlightenment.org/repo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update

Install the software:

sudo aptitude install e17 emodules-all

Logout and you should have an "Enlightenment" session available from gdm.

The first time you log in, you will get a guided set-up - choose the "system" (or gnome) menus and a "standard" profile.

[cheshire]

I have a pentium 3 800mhz laptop w/ 256mb ram that has an ATI Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2X graphics card in it. I am new to linux and wanted to try ubuntu on it. I have discovered that I need to stay with something before the 9.0 releases to use the ATI drivers for my graphics card to get proper screen resolution and was wondering if you can use an alternate install of Ubuntu 8.04LTS w/ E17 describe here? Would that be a good fit for my machine? Seems like it would be lite enough to run well. Any input would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[julianb]

Cheshire - I know from experience that it's possible to run Ubuntu (standard version with GNOME) on a laptop with 256MB ram. For me, Ubuntu 9.04 was much quicker than WinXP.

However, there's no reason you shouldn't try something lighter, like the E17+Ubuntu 8.04 setup you mention.

Another option is to install the packages that "masonux" uses on top of a minimal Ubuntu setup.

[kappa962]

I have a pentium 3 800mhz laptop w/ 256mb ram that has an ATI Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2X graphics card in it. I am new to linux and wanted to try ubuntu on it. I have discovered that I need to stay with something before the 9.0 releases to use the ATI drivers for my graphics card to get proper screen resolution and was wondering if you can use an alternate install of Ubuntu 8.04LTS w/ E17 describe here? Would that be a good fit for my machine? Seems like it would be lite enough to run well. Any input would be much appreciated. Thanks.

It definitely can work with earlier Ubuntu releases, however, some of the packages I recommended will not be in the Ubuntu repos for the earlier releases. You'll either need to use alternate packages or find other repos. Or install them without the help of Apt.


Zezu, I haven't forgotten about you, I'm hoping to try and find some answers to your questions, but I just switched computers to a Macbook, and I'm fighting with all sorts of problems of my own right now (mostly relating to getting my linux partitions bootable.) Also, if you want to run a command before going into enlightenment, you can just put that in your ~/.bash_profile file, right before startx. I don't know if that could help your ctrl-alt-backspace issue or not. At one point I was using a command to enable the use of my right alt key (which Ubuntu disables for some reason) and I put the command there.

[Duskao]

Cheshire you could also use the open source drivers. You will likely get better performance from them as your card is rather old.

[Duskao]

Eeeeeek.... Followed what you posted and this popped up. I'm unsure about it as I don't want to funky up my network manager. Any thoughs??

Here is what it showed.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
network-manager-gnome: Depends: network-manager (>= 0.8~a~git.20090831t055002) but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Remove the following packages:
network-manager-gnome

Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
ubuntu-desktop recommends network-manager-gnome
Score is -81

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]