[ale] Window Managers for X

James Sumners james.sumners at gmail.com
Mon Sep 18 00:02:20 EDT 2006


Selective quoting is great; you can "prove" just about any point if
you only quote statements that allude to your position. The library
that handles all the eye candy in E17 is called Evas. Th following is
full quote from the website:

http://www.enlightenment.org/Libraries/Evas/
"Evas is a hardware-accelerated canvas API for X-Windows that can draw
anti-aliased text, smooth super and sub-sampled images, alpha-blend,
as well as drop down to using normal X11 primitives such as pixmaps,
lines and rectangles for speed if your CPU or graphics hardware are
too slow.

Evas abstracts any need to know much about what the characteristics of
your XServer's display are, what depth or what magic visuals etc, it
has. The most you need to tell Evas is how many colors (at a maximum)
to use if the display is not a truecolor display. By default it is
suggested to use 216 colors (as this equates to a 6x6x6 color cube -
exactly the same color cube Netscape, Mozilla, gdkrgb etc. use so
colors will be shared). If Evas can't allocate enough colors it keeps
reducing the size of the color cube until it reaches plain black and
white. This way, it can display on anything from a black and white
only terminal to 16 color VGA to 256 color and all the way up through
15, 16, 24 and 32bit color. Here are some screen shots of a demo Evas
application to show the rendering output in different situations

EVAS's project manager is Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler"

If you read what I wrote, I said it will run "best" on OpenGL
hardware. I didn't say it wouldn't run well in "software mode." Nor
did I ever say it will run dog slow. But the pixmaps (images) have to
be stored somewhere. And for all the pretty eye candy to be there,
some sort of images will be used. E16 doesn't use as many as E17,
therefore, E17 uses more memory. It is a simple conclusion.

On 9/17/06, Richard Kolkovich <sarumont at sigil.org> wrote:
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>
> On 09/15/06 12:38, James Sumners published:
> > I didn't bring up memory usage for a reason ;)
> >
> > E is all about eye candy.
>
> E is about having power, flexibility, and eye candy without being overly
> "in your face" OR hogging resources.
>
> > I believe the most recent releases of E16
> > have been fixing up some of the memory issues, but I don't recall
> > since I don't use it anymore.
>
> I cannot speak here, as I have not used E16 in probably 2 years.  I have
> been running E17 from CVS.
>
> > E17 will be even more of a memory hog
> > because of all the new pretty effects. It will also run best on OpenGL
> > hardware.
>
> Have you ever run E17?  I am guessing that you have not, as these
> statements are 100% inaccurate.  On my G3 clamshell, I booted into X
> running E17, ALSA and pbbuttonsd (power management) with less than 35MB
> of RAM used (oh...running gkrellm2, as well, to display this handy
> figure).  I had not turned down any of E17's "eye candy" features.  I
> think this sufficiently dispels this false statement.
>
> OpenGL hardware?  Here is a recent log from #e on freenode:
>
> 23:25 <@raster> everything is software rendered
> 23:25 <@raster> all pixels are caluclated with the cpu
>
> OpenGL hardware, when I last checked, does not assist the CPU in
> calculations.  It is only used when the OS's OpenGL implementation is
> called, thereby using the GPU, rather than the CPU, to render.
>
> I hope you will find this information enlightening (pun intended - har
> har).  Ignorance is a dangerous thing.  Please avoid it in the future by
> not speaking of things which you do not know.



-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59



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