Equinox Desktop Environment 1.1 review

Equinox Desktop Environment (shortly EDE) is small desktop environment, builted to be simple and fast

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Equinox Desktop Environment Team

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Equinox Desktop Environment (shortly EDE) is small desktop environment, builted to be simple and fast.

Comparing to other desktop environments, EDE is much faster and smaller in memory space (EDE's window manager use less memory than xterm).

The word "equinox" comes from the Latin for "equal night". The equinoxes in March and September are the two occasions each year when the day and the night are of equal duration.

For measuring the length of a day, sunrise is the moment when the sun is half-above the horizon and sunset is the moment when the sun is half-under the horizon. Using this definition, the length of the day (and the night) is precisely 12 hours at an equinox.

Here are some key features of "Equinox Desktop Environment":
desktop with icons and wallpaper;
Xft font anti-aliasing;
taskbar with configurable menu, cpu status, easy keyboard switching;
theming;
localization;

Graphical front-end for:

xscreensaver configuration;
software installation (.rpm, .deb, .tgz);
time and time-zone configuration;
fast file and directory serch utility;

Requirements:
usual build tools (gcc, automake, autoconf, etc... - you should not worry about this, this comes with your distribution);
eFLTK, a modified FLTK version;
small amount of your nerves;
coffee and cigars for enjoying;

What's New in This Release:
general
Version number is now uniformly handled throught the docs, via configure

eworkpanel
Notification Area a.k.a System Tray support patch by Elleo + fixes
for proper unloading and some KDE support
Battery Status Monitor with support for ACPI and APM
Quick Launch Bar (area with programmable icons) "patch" by dzooli
Time Format (12h vs. 24h) patch by Elleo
Numerous layout and redraw issues with panel fixed
Implemented maximize and restore in taskbar context menu
Logout is now via edewm
Restore implemented

ekeyconf
Add support for custom shortcuts now you can define any command you
want and assign a keyboard shortcut (patch to edewm by AW)
Fix bug 1329447 ekeyconf not properly grabbing keyboard (making it
impossible to use already defined shortcuts for something else)
Some improvements to UI

etip
Completely new etip

emenueditor
Ability to edit the system menu (you need to be root to do this)

ecolorconf
Fix crashes in font dialog (when Xft is used)

efinder
Totally new code and look. Now works as should.

edewm
Added focus follows mouse.
Added maximize (netwm) and restore via messages (so can work from eworkpanel)
Windows are no more out of screen (was this before ?)
etc.