failing like never before

I've mentioned a few times in my previous posts, how much I liked Enlightenment 17, the desktop shell. Although E17 is technically still in alpha, it is surprisingly stable. Suffice to say, E17's alpha is about as stable as the final release candidate of Windows Vista. E17 has been in development for an ungodly amount of time, making the development phase for Debian seem lightning fast. But as I said, even now, E17 is still quite useable.

I had some problems with E17 a while back when I was running Ubuntu. I was using a third-party repository and one of the packages was unstable and ended up wreaking havoc with my Enlightenment installation. I eventually ended up removing all of the Enlightenment libraries and packages from my computer, and since I was too lazy to grab a stable snapshot from the Enlightenment servers and rebuild everything from source, I was left without Enlightenment for quite some time. I built E17 from source a year or so ago, back when I tried out Vector Linux, but it took a bloody long time, especially since I had to resolve all the dependencies manually.

Just a few weeks ago, I installed Debian (Lenny), having decided it was time for me get started on a more serious Linux distro. I'll write about my experiences with Debian at a later time. I decided to install E17 again, but this time, I decided to be a little more research first. In the Enlightenment user manual, there is a section on installation. The manual also provides some links to scripts that automate the installation process, which was really nice for me, because one of the reasons I like Debian is because I hate having to build everything from source and resolve dependencies. I tried using the "Easy 17" shell script to install E17, and it worked great. Easy 17 not only automates installation, but if you call the script with a "-u" argument, it will update your installation. You still have to resolve dependencies yourself, but that is to be expected.