Enlightenment releases first E17 alpha

A pre-release version of E17 running on Ubuntu

At the EFL Development Day, part of LinuxCon Europe, the Enlightenment developers have announced the release of the first alpha of Enlightenment E17. As the developers point out, the desktop environment has been "under development for a couple years" but they are now "happy enough with it" to do a first official release.

Enlightenment E17 constitutes a complete rewrite of the earlier E16 version of the desktop environment. It is designed to be light and nimble, yet include all parts of a full featured environment, consisting of a compositing window manager, common desktop elements such as a panel and notification area, its own file manager and a system to manage virtual desktops. E17 also provides a large number of compositing effects such as shadows, animations and transitions.

Speaking to The H about the upcoming release, Enlightenment project leader Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler said that at times, the responsiveness of the rendering surprised even the development team. This was also recognised by Samsung which uses E17 and the underlying Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) for some of its mobile products such as Tizen, because of the flexibility and performance of the technology.

The source code for the first alpha release of Enlightenment E17 can be downloaded from the Enlightenment web site and can be browsed through the project's version control system. Enlightenment E17 is licensed under a two-clause BSD licence.

(fab)