It had been the expected default for pretty much an entire decade. Also X often supported a different size viewport and desktop so the view would scroll. Not sure if anyone really liked using that.
I saw this in a magazine and it was so cool looking. A few months later I got Linux on CD and never looked back. That 3D Motif/fvwm look was amazing.
Funny enough, my BIOS did not support booting from CD. I remember in DOS, I had to load MSCDEX from a floppy but I have no recollection on how I actually booted and installed Linux from CD.
It should work fine in a virtual machine. Just make sure you provide suitably ancient hardware like IDE storage and old ethernet cards. On something that old, I would only provide a single CPU. To be safe, I would also try installing with a low amount of RAM and then increase it later. Older kernels could not handle multi-processor or RAM above a certain size. I think I might start with 700 MB of RAM to do the install. That might sound like nothing but it probably runs in 8.
It is easy today in our era of resource richness to forget just how meager the hardware was when these distros were new.
A distro that old is going to require some fiddling to get XFree86 ( x11 ) up and running. It should be ok in a desktop VM but I have had problems with older versions of X in Proxmox in case you are using that.
I kind of want to go install this myself now. Or an old version of SLS ( pre-cursor to Slackware ). I ran them both at some point in my Linux journey but it has been a while.
What I really want to do is to make OCI containers from these old distros and try to run them in Distrobox on top of a modern kernel. Has somebody done that already? Really old versions of Red Hat ( not RHEL, Red Hat, < 6 ) would be cool too.
I just noticed that, in the screenshot, it is running in 86box. So, you know for sure it works there and 86box works great on modern machines ( Windows, Mac, and Linux ).
Data is already plural, so the form datas does not exist. It even has the rarely used singular datum as it is just Latin for “given”, but using data instead is generally also regarded correct.
I think even Samsung was funding it for a while. They took a long time building libraries supporting rendering on X11 what I remember. I used the 0.16.x version with my 1GHz Athlon years ago, it was very cool.
That was probably close to one of the last versions of enlightenment I used regularly. It was such a fun WM to use at the time. If I remember correctly, GNOME and KDE were really ramping up about then and e fell behind.
TRANSPARENT TERMINALS! Haha it felt so futuristic and to this day I can’t run a terminal without a little transparency. Enlightenment was my first experience of it.
I mostly use it because it looks nice, but I’ve found that with limited screen space, they’re actually really useful! I can have the man pages or a stack exchange open in the background, and don’t need to constantly switch back and forth
There are way too many bars that look like dockable windows, the stuff at the bottom. Lots of stuff looking like decorations (but in general these buttons are confusing af even macOS is better than that.
And at the top it looks like the whole desktop is a window with decoration??
In general low contrast, too many strange thin things, no clear icons.
This is a screenshot of window running a VM, so yes it is a window running a whole desktop. The top window decoration, menu bar, and the very bottom panel are not part of the old desktop, but rather from the modern host system.
I agree though, it is confusing. Main problem (and I remember this) is that this is Gnome with Enlightenment as a wm, and Enlightenment had aspirations to be more than a wm. So there’s some duplication of effort there, and no integration/communication between the two projects (Gnome in the next version used sawfish/sawmill as wm, which was more coordinated with Gnome).
Enlightenment has/had its own toolkit, which you can see here in the DOX window, which is different from Gtk. Enlightenment also has a bunch of widgets, like the top bar and the stuff in the bottom corners, which are non-Gnome and clash with and are on top of the Gnome panel. The desktop icons are also zero pixels under the Enlightenment top bar, which suggest the people responsible weren’t coordinating at all.
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