Enlightenment

Enlightenment is a light weight and eye candy Desktop Environment. This guide will highlight and go trough installing enlightenment E17 or DR17 or 0.17 version. Although the stable 0.16 version is available in the official tree, I'd advise to make the plunge to install the live version. One of the advantages of E17 is that you can really build what you want/need with just enabling or disabling e_modules_$module USE flag which will permit to make a truly light weight and lean DE that nothing could match. LXDE can almost match the light weight and lean side of E17 with the old style or classical DE touch.

''Enlightenment is not just a window manager for Linux/X11 and others, but also a whole suite of libraries to help you create beautiful user interfaces with much less work than doing it the old fashioned way and fighting with traditional toolkits, not to mention a traditional window manager. It covers uses from small mobile devices like phones all the way to powerful multi-core desktops (which are the primary development environment).''

If you decided to install DR16 version, then go ahead and merge and unmask some package if not all, if need be, to get the latest bits of enlightenment development trunk.

From here on, this article will deal with installing E17 using enlightenment overlay maintained by the enlightenment and gentoo developers.

Preparation
To install E17 you will need with svn support. And then add enlightenement overlay with layman.

With the premises done, we can now move into configuring the installation before merging the DE.

Configuration
If you have an `/etc/portage/package.[accept_]keywords' directory, you can keywords all the base packages with a single line (lazy way).

Or else you will have to add every necessary package in that file with something like the following.

Notice that there are a few package listed above, especially those after the `e17-extras' commented line that are not yet in the official overlay, so you will have to either add them to your local overlay or add another bar-overlay which had them. It's good to be able to get at least a few themes especially those that are supported and hosted on enlightenment trunk. So go ahead and the previous cited overlay if you don't want to make ebuilds.

I will also advise to add a few USE flags as sane default to be able to auto mount removable devices etc.

Some USE flag can be set globally like `jpeg png opengl nls gnutls ssl' ... in `/etc/portage/make.conf'.

Installation
If you don't want to undergo the painful manual installation of each package, you'd better use sets, which are supported by portage >=2.1.11. One can add these two sets to to ease merging and rebuilding the packages.

And now one can finish the installation with:

Tips and Tricks
There are two sets to avoid unnecessary issues implied by the order of merging. Now one can start E17 desktop environment by launching the default display manager.

Or else, one can use simple ~/.{xinitrc,bash_log{in,out}} or zsh version `~/.zlog{in,out}' scheme to avoid unnecessary extra packages to just be able to log into your session. And do not forget to install NetworkManager and to be able to switch to different networks easily because, last time I've checked,  did not work at all despite that there's a E17 module for it.

A zsh version could be used instead.

The previous can be used to login into an E17 session easily without needing any middle man like depending on tty or console used to log in.

Additional applications
You may need a good and light weight terminal emulator:, you may consider installing a perl module for copy/paste and url handling dev-perl/perl-URxvt.

You may need a burning application: or  or a KDE alternative.

You may need a document viewer: you can try the excellent or.

You may need color profile application: or  or even better.

You may try or.

You may need a calculator: or  or.

You may need a graphical file manager: try plus :0 for automount or  plus  for automount because the file manager module is not that usable/practicable.

instead of the following for automount support.

For a complete office suite do no hesitate to merge moloch or the binary package if it's too much for you machine.

Tired of entering again and again your wifi pass and so on? You may look at or enable gnome-keyring USE flag globally ( has that USE flag for example).

etc.