klik://enlightenment

This is a first little highlight of what klik is able to do.

Previously, the autogenerated the klik://enlightenment package didn't really work, because usually your $DISPLAY is already occupied by KDE, yes? Enlightenment-17 being a window manager, it wanted the exclusive access to an X server display, but the :0 one was already the realm of the host's KDE. Yes, we could have gone for :1 -- but which user would have discovered it running there? Everyone would have thought it didn't work, and some would even have sent bug reports. _{(Hey, and if the above klik://enlightenment link didn't work for you, go back to my previous blog entries, or to the Dot story and read up on how to install the klik client.)}

So Enlightenment clearly required a degree of manual tweaking to the klik recipe. Our first "internal testing" package used Xnest to serve as the display. But Xnest showed some obvious disadvantages: its window size was fixed. You couldn't enlarge or reduce it.

So I proposed to use NoMachine's nxagent in place of Xnest. (As you may know, nxagent is part of the NX server, and it is part of the NX Core released under the GPL, being a nearly complete re-write of the original Xnest to support all the good stuff NX is able to do).

This worked very well (needed however to bundle some NX libraries to it), and you now have a resizeable window inside your KDE desktop, running Enlightenment 17. Just drag a window border with the mouse to resize it. And what is even more: you can use the NX keyboard shortcut [ctrl]+[alt]+[f] to toggle to a fullscreen e17 display and back!

Inside the e-17 window, you'll find a few menus (right-, center- or left-click the background to access them). You won't find many. But one of these is Konsole. Start it. Once Konsole is up inside e-17, use the commandline to start any of your installed applications: Quanta, kpdf, Scribus, amaroK, Konqueror.... Actually, Konqueror is coolest, because you could just type into its address field klik://klamav (to klik-install and run a ClamAV virus scanner with a KDE frontend), klik://kdissert (to run a very cool mind-mapping application) or klik://firefox (to run the 1.6beta1 release of Firefox) and you can see even more klik packages into your enlightenment environment. And once you leave enlightenment, the packages will still be there, ready to run inside your hosting KDE desktop.

Warning: It may happen that the enlightenment package doesn't shut down cleanly. You may have to kill the "wrapper" script and the enlightenment process, and do an "umount /tmp/app/1" (or whatever number is appropriate) to free the mountpoint again so it can be used by other klik packages. Also, a "rm -rf /tmp/app/1" may be required.

Enjoy my screenshots (click to enlarge and read some additional comments).

Till, do you like them? ;-)