Difficulty in getting Enlightenment to work on Fedora Workstation 43

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1

Hello and good day,

I would use some assistance in figuring out on getting Enlightenment working on Fedora Workstation 43.

I’m not exactly a Linux newbie but no expert either. I’m just getting back to it after many years away and man alive the changes!!!

Anyways, while testing other distributions on a spare machine, I came across an old favorite that I used to run back in the day. Enlightenment.

Excited, I used dnf to see if it was available in the repositories and indeed it was so I installed it. So far so good or so I thought.

Then I logged out and attempted to start Enlightenment.

The screen went black/grey and just hung there. At first I still had keyboard input but eventually the machine would just get completely locked up forcing a power mashing reboot.

I saw this exact same behavior on the test system with a different distribution. It seems that even with Enlightenment attempting compatibility with Wayland, it hangs up badly!

Further into my research, I found out that GNOME has dropped X11 support in favor for Wayland.

So here is my thoughts and please if misguided, set me to the right path. Even not exactly super new to things but new enough especially with the changes!

  1. Since GNOME has gone to Wayland, I’m figuring that GDM does not like to offer up X11 to something like Enlightenment. So will switching my session manager from GDM to something that supports X11 allow Enlightenment to start?

  2. Fedora Workstation is GNOME centric by design choice and it may not offer up X11 support in any form without a fight (or so I think). Is this correct? I use my current setup Fedora Workstation 43 as my daily so I don’t want to break it too badly!

  3. Since Fedora Workstation is GNOME centric, would using a spin that is close to Enlightenment and then installing Enlightenment be a totally better way to go?

I will continue to research this on my own. Any constructive input will be appreciated on this.

Thank you for your time!

2

X11 has been totally eliminated on both Workstation and KDE with the release of Fedora 43.

There are spins of Fedora that do still support X11 at

3

Hello and thank you for your reply.

I was figuring that maybe workstation might have gone nuclear on it but it looks like KDE version as well.

I will look into which spin(s) might be the best candidate to download and test.

I wasn’t sure if the x-server was just omitted or something else could’ve been causing the issues.

Even though this was not the answer I was hoping for (hoping for no re installation), I appreciate an honest answer!

Time to play around and as they say, back to the drawing board!

Again thank you!

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4

AFAIK you can prevent re-installing by installing the dnf environment of some spin,
eventually switch the display-manager.

Try for example: sudo dnf install @cinnamon-desktop-environment

See the available ones with: sudo dnf environment list

5

Wow!

Thanks for that tidbit of information! I’m still learning/re learning things and this goes to show that I still need to learn a lot more!

I will look into this.

Question, does this command install the desired spin on top of what you have or does it remove the current one? Again please excuse my ignorance here. I’m still learning.

6

I think Enlightenment has Wayland support…

7

Yes. You will still have gnome if you have Fedora Workstation.

Not quite sure seen: the enlightenment about

The Enlightenment Project is moving towards using Wayland as the
base display system, while Enlightenment itself is to become a
full Wayland compositor in its own right. This takes time, and
there have been some bumps along the road, but the goal is that
support for X11 will be eventually be discontinued.
8

Hello and thank you for responding,

I thought that too however when I attempted to start up Enlightenment, it just ends up locking up the display server.

I was able inside of GNOME to get the environment to start enough to do the initial configuration and then when it attempted to start the full environment, it crashed.

I then logged out and attempted to start Enlightenment again, the same behavior again. It crashed.

This same behavior occurs on a test system I use to test distributions on. Under a Wayland session, it crashes. Under a X11 session, starts and works as expected.

I would like for it to be updated so it can be used without incident but in my limited testing and even more limited knowledge, it isn’t even good enough to start with the setup I currently have at the moment.

I appreciate the input!

9

Thank you again for your response.

So it will be like when I installed KDE to see what that was like. Still keeps GNOME but just adds that environment.

Good to know. Thanks!

Wonder if I use one that should use a X11 session if that support shows up? I know that I will need a different session manager to be able to start the necessary environment.

More testing and learning coming up!

10

Yes, a different display manager than gdm I think.

Try for example lightdm. It is used by at least MATE and Cinnamon and uses
slick-greeter that allows to choose the wanted desktop/session when logging in.

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