A whole mess of Enlightenment issues

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

So I just recently started to learn about Enlightenment and I like the way it looks and what I have heard about it from other people so far. From all of this I decided to give it a go.

I'm coming from KDE and at first wanted to have everything remain the same sans using a different window manager. I don't think this is possible (but please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that). I then emerged Enlightenment and, to make a long figuring-out-stuff-story short, I basically had to go to my rc.conf and change my display manager from kdm to xdm and change XSESSION to enlightenment. After this I restart my comp and I log in without a hitch to a butt-ugly XDM login screen. Here is my first issue: is there any way to change the way that XDM looks? For KDM I used kdm-manager and it worked great. I had a beautiful login set going for me and unless I can still use kdm to somehow log into enlightenment, I would like to make my login screen at least appealing.

Regardless of the looks, I was able to login and start up enlightenment without a problem. I read through the help file, trying everything out one thing at a time, and I get to something that I want to try that requires a restart. In enlightenment I thought I had to do this by logging out (back to xdm) and then shutting down from there. This is where my second issue comes in. My computer froze HARD. I click on the logout item in the menu and it starts to bring me back to xdm (I can even see where the boxes are supposed to be) but nothing graphical has loaded (other than the background, which is pretty plain as it is, and a mouse cursor). I can't move the mouse at all and the keyboard doesn't accept ANY commands whatsoever so I have to do a hard shutdown to get my computer to restart. I don't even know where to begin looking there for a solution to that problem.

My third and last issue came up when I restarted and continued my quest through the enlightenment help file. I come across the 'audio' section and I figure it's about time to get the sound working. As a note, I had alsa working just fine in KDE, so I didn't think that it would be such a problem in enlightenment. I go to turn on the sound (a simple checkbox) and I get an error saying something along the lines of: "Sound was started in enlightenment, but EsounD had a problem and couldn't start so sound is being turned off" (Please keep in mind that this isn't the exact error message, but from what I can remember it's the gist of it - more details to come a bit farther down) I notice in the help file that enlightenment needs both EsounD and audiofile installed. I checked portage and both are already installed (presumably before enlightenment was installed since (a) I think they both are dependencies of enlightenment; and (b) the only other thing I have installed since enlightenment was the update for openoffice). I then checked the forums and saw some stuff about USE flags (that I needed to have 'esd' as a flag when I installed enlightenment) I added it, since it wasn't there to begin with, and then I ran a pretend emerge on enlightenment and it didn't say that there were any updates, I guess that +esd is automatic unless specified otherwise so I don't think that is the problem either.

Another forum post mentioned that I needed to have 'esd' run just before enlightenment starts up by having my ~/.xsessions look like:

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

I potentially found a solution to all of the problems but I'm not sure how to implement it. At the VERY end of the enlightenment help there is an FAQ:

anfpunk · Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 1:51 pm Post subject:

make sure that your audio apps aren't set to route through arts and are set to go straight to alsa

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Do you mean something like having +alsa and -arts in my USE flags? or a setup issue?

gimpel · Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:11 pm Post subject:

you should choose alsa as output plug-in in any application, that's what anfpunk said

also you don't have to use that ugly xdm because of enlightenment, any other DM works too
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http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki - pro-audio software overlay

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

I'm then guessing that I would have to configure whatever DM I'm using to tell KDE to run enlightenment? Where might I find this file so that I could edit something like KDM?

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

Slowly but surely I am making progress. First of all I checked into getting enlightenment to work with kdm. Some searching showed that I just had to create a /usr/share/xsessions/enlightenment.desktop directory and put the following in it:

gimpel · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 10:03 am Post subject:

hmmm, sounds like the old mplayer vs. enlightenment 0.16.7.x bug, AFAIK this is fixed in e16.8 (enlightenment-9999.ebuild). xine should work properly

regarding E's system sounds you'll have to tell esd to use alsa as output, i guess. not sure how to do that.. i'm using e17 for too long time already, and that one doesn't have any system sounds (yet)
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http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki - pro-audio software overlay

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

enlightenment-0.16.9999 has the -* mask. Is it safe to unmask?

gimpel · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 7:04 pm Post subject:

mdshort · Apprentice Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 157

Use entrance as a login manager.. doy

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alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

Ok, I've made a few changes and some more things have been taken care of. I tried emerging version 0.16.9999 and I'm afraid that it did not fix the problem, but while I was doing something else I decided to give xine a shot and it works in fullscreen (it is more blurry than I would like it to be, but it looks like I can do a lot of configuring in xine, so I think I'll start using that to play videos)

I tried using entrance as a login manager (had several problems getting it to work, but I eventually got it going and it looks great!), thanks for the suggestion mdshort

)

I think that sound is something that I'll just forget about for now. I just don't really care enough to get my computer to start bleeping and blipping at me for everything that I do.

maxpayne · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 122

@alienjon:

Can you please share the difficulties and your expertise in how to get "entrance" to work? A beginner step-by-step instruction would be appreciated. Thanks!

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

Sure thing. I'll see if I can get on that over the next day or so.

gimpel · Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 12:28 am Post subject:

doesn't that help?
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_emerge_e17#Setting_up_entrance
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http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki - pro-audio software overlay

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1723

See? Didn't even see my fingers move, did ya :-p

gimpel · Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 11:57 am Post subject: