HOWTO: Install a lightweight E17 based Ubuntu (Karmic)

[kappa962]

Not exactly equal to my expectations, but usable. It was a surprise for me that only 2-3 megs of RAM available after bootup - but it could be an issue of Karmic, not Enlightenment.

That's surprising to me too. I'm very happy with my installation, but it is using much more memory than seems necessary. Give me a few days and I'll hopefully find a fix.

EDIT: nevermind, I was reading the output of free -m wrong. My OS is only using 84 megs of RAM. I don't know why yours would be using so much.

[sh4d0w808]

First I have checked the output of top. Now I have run free -m and saw, that 68 MB reserved for cache and 50 MB is free of it.

[antonym]

Awesome howto, kappa962... I've set this up on a netbook with a tiny SSD and I'm really looking forward to using it.

I've noticed, however, that the non-elightenment-native applications (ie. lxterminal, wicd, thunar) all have a gigantic font for the menus and dialog boxes. I've fiddled with the Enlightenment font settings, but I haven't been able to fix this -- do you have any idea how I might bring it down to a reasonable size? (and perhaps even apply a gtk theme or something to them, to help them match the enlightenment theme somewhat?)

Thanks in advance

[raprap30]

You guys should try OpenGEU, it is an e17 based Ubuntu distro http://opengeu.intilinux.com/Home.html

[Igneo676]

I am definitely considering installing this on my little Toshiba NB205...
...though I was wondering if you all knew how good the battery life is on this compared to a standard Ubuntu install.

I typically get about 6 hours on a full charge, XP (before I wiped it) got 9 hours.

Beyond that, any additional packages I need to install to manage battery life, optimize for battery life, etc?

Never really have done this sort of thing before, heh

I also went for this install on my main desktop on my 2nd hard drive just to try it out: ecomorph was extremely buggy and a quick replacement with standard E17 finished the job quite nicely and ended my seg-faults.

I also noticed that I couldn't set myself up for an auto-login since the /etc/init/tty1.conf didn't exist. Did I do something wrong? I noticed rungetty either didn't run or simply appeared the same as the standard command-line login indicative of the CLI. Given, I typed out the bash file by hand and I may have done something wrong there as it didn't automatically run startx though that shouldn't interfere with rungetty, should it?

Just a tad bit annoying when you have to automatically run startx and login yourself when you want an OS that boots with significantly smaller boot times.

Edit: Come to think of it, maybe ecomorph's segfaults were the result of not installing the necessary Nvidia drivers? I need to find some documentation on installing nvidia drivers without using Envy or the native Ubuntu driver installer...

[kappa962]

You guys should try OpenGEU, it is an e17 based Ubuntu distro http://opengeu.intilinux.com/Home.html

OpenGEU is a decent E17-Ubuntu distro, as is MoonOS (which appears to be inspired by Linux Mint and OpenGEU). Both of them are a little too heavy for my tastes, and I like having an OS based off a more recent Ubuntu release. A modified MoonOS was my primary OS for a while. However, now that it's so easy to get an E17 based Ubuntu with the official E17 repos, there's not really many advantages for me using a separate distro.

I've just updated my howto and added links to both of those distros.

[kappa962]

I am definitely considering installing this on my little Toshiba NB205...
...though I was wondering if you all knew how good the battery life is on this compared to a standard Ubuntu install.

I typically get about 6 hours on a full charge, XP (before I wiped it) got 9 hours.

Beyond that, any additional packages I need to install to manage battery life, optimize for battery life, etc?

Never really have done this sort of thing before, heh

I also went for this install on my main desktop on my 2nd hard drive just to try it out: ecomorph was extremely buggy and a quick replacement with standard E17 finished the job quite nicely and ended my seg-faults.

I also noticed that I couldn't set myself up for an auto-login since the /etc/init/tty1.conf didn't exist. Did I do something wrong? I noticed rungetty either didn't run or simply appeared the same as the standard command-line login indicative of the CLI. Given, I typed out the bash file by hand and I may have done something wrong there as it didn't automatically run startx though that shouldn't interfere with rungetty, should it?

Just a tad bit annoying when you have to automatically run startx and login yourself when you want an OS that boots with significantly smaller boot times.

That's odd. What files are in your /etc/init/ directory? There should be .conf files for tty1-tty6. Also, can you CTRL-ALT-F# to switch between terminals?

Now that you have the OS runnable, you can just open ~/.bash_profile in your text editor and copy and paste the text from your browser. That should get startx to autorun.

I haven't actually timed my bootup yet, but it seems much faster than other Ubuntu's I have used. Karmic seems to have made some huge strides in shortening bootup times, and E17 starts up nearly instantaneously.

E17 automatically installs e-modules for cpu-frequency scaling and battery-related tasks. I don't use them, but I believe they are functional. I wouldn't expect this E17-Ubuntu install to be much better than normal Ubuntu for battery life. Let me know if you notice it being significantly different.

[Igneo676]

Ah, my own eyes are treacherous

I thought it was ttyl, not tty1. I was typing this ALL in manually and so therein lies the mistake. I'll get everything working and report back from the desktop.

Any advice for getting ecomorph to work? I would rather get it going than not and I'm not entirely sure how to install the drivers for my Nvidia card...

Edit: Success! Everything boots perfectly and works as it should have. I feel rather noobish now, heh. And even got my nvidia driver installed.

I'll be doing this on my lappy before long

[kappa962]

Any advice for getting ecomorph to work? I would rather get it going than not and I'm not entirely sure how to install the drivers for my Nvidia card...

Unfortunately, I can't get ecomorph to work either. I'm hoping to tackle that issue soon. As far as drivers go, most drivers that you might need are installed with the Ubuntu kernel and/or Xorg. So you should, theoretically, already have them. Compiz works with my video card in Gnome, but E17-ecomorph doesn't seem to know how to use it.

[Igneo676]

At one point I went through with Envy and discovered it does work, and it ended my segfaults on Ecomorph...
...my issue became how to enable the fancy effects. I loaded up the ecomorph module and couldn't figure out how to do it. It did have a section on activated the required part like standard Compiz, and it did slow me down for a second, but ultimately there was no change.

Do you know the file that the configuration module edits? Maybe manually editing the configuration and restarting will fix it?