Last whinge for today, honest. One of the big selling points for me about e17 is it's lightning quick startup time. When using SuSE, I have to put up with three minute booting time on my Athlon 3000+, so when logging onto KDE, having it take thirty seconds to grind to a start just adds insult to injury. e17 starts up almost as fast as a failsafe xterm, except when there are lots of eaps.
Running e17genmenu on a fully loaded SuSE Professional (hint, it is distributed on a double layer DVD, there is LOTS of software) generates lots of eap files. This is good, I have lots of apps, I want lots of eaps. However, subsequent e17 startups then take forever, it seems to spend a lot of time reading all those eaps. Cutting it down to just the 40 or so eaps that I really need on a daily basis makes e17 startup in a few seconds, a time I can live with. Everything else I have to start the old fashioned way (typing the executables name). For this whinge I have a suggested fix, but first some background, and a quick plug for one of my open source projects. I am building a Linux distro called My Linux (http://my-linux.sourceforge.net/, not to be confused with http://mylinux.sourceforge.net/, something I did in public once), one of it's goals is to provide not bloated, quick versions of the current popular, but slow and bloated linux apps that are turning the Linux desktop experience into something that a Windows user would recognise. Things like KDE, OpenOffice.org, and every browser I have tried are very slow and bloated. Even Opera, which advertises itself as small and quick, isn't. Quite frankly, there is no excuse for that. Blender, a fully featured 3D editing suite, which includes almost everything you need to do 3D work, including a game, video editor, and animation sub systems, also includes a plugin system with lots of plugins. It was used on such films as Scooby Doo. With all that stuff in it, and even running in OpenGL mode, it still starts up instantly. As stated above, booting SuSE on an Athlon 3000+ with lots of RAM and fast hard drives takes three minutes. Although this does include starting up many services, the boot time with minimal services is still way to slow for such a fast machine. My Linux takes seventeen seconds to boot on a test box that is one tenth the power of my Athlon. While there are only minimal services included with My Linux at the moment, they are not included in the boot time, as they are started in parallel on a different VT, the user is free to log on while they start up. This means that when combined with e17, the user can be logged on and doing useful things in about 20 seconds from your boot loader, long before SuSE has even started loading services. Combined with Linux BIOS, this can turn fast machines into instant start appliances. (My BIOS takes thirty seconds to hand control to the boot loader, Linux BIOS does the job in a second or two.) I like e17 and entrance, they fit the bill, and they will be made the official display and window manager for My Linux. My suggested fix to slow e17 startup with lots of eaps is the same trick I use to start up My Linux quickly independently of the services it starts. Don't load the eaps before giving control to the user, in fact you can load zero eaps before giving control to the user. Once the user has control, you obviously need to load the startup eaps, but this is already done, as the startups are invoked at that point anyway. The rest can be either loaded on demand, or loaded in the background afterwards. Actually both are a good strategy, load slowly in the background, but load on demand for any that are not currently loaded. Only the eaps needed for modules like ibar and engage, plus the eaps for startup programs need to be loaded first. Eaps for the favourites first layer menu only need to be loaded mhen the user first displays that menu, etc. In fact, there seems to be little point in loading eaps that are never used, something the e17 seems to do now. Or it could just be that eap loading is currently inefficient. I actually doubt that, since the reason you went with a binary structure in the first place was to increase the efficiency at load time. -- Stuff I have no control over could be added after this line. Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
