# Equinox Desktop Environment

The Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is a DE designed to be simple, extremely light-weight and fast.

It primarily offers the most basic things: A window manager (PekWM is used by default), a simple GUI including a panel, a daemon watching removable media and a notification daemon. Other than that there's not much more than some configuration progams, a calculator, etc. Beginning with version 2.0, EDE follows the FreeDesktop.org guidelines.

Unlike any other desktop environment, EDE² is based upon the FLTK toolkit. It's especially fit for systems with little RAM or for users who want to completely customize their system and need a GUI that is not already bloated with functions and applications.

## Installation

EDE is not very a very common piece of software. You usually have to compile it yourself. For Arch Linux there are however pre-built packages available via a custom repository.

### Installation (packages)

To enable EDE's repository, just add the following lines to your `/etc/pacman.conf`:

    [ede]
    SigLevel = Optional
    Server = http://ede.elderlinux.org/repos/archlinux/$arch

Next refresh the package lists and install the EDE packages via pacman:

- edelib
- ede-common
- ede
- ede-wallpapers (optional)

### Installation (AUR)

You can also build EDE yourself. Fortunately on Arch there are two AUR-PKGBUILD files available that allow you to build it without much hassle.

The first one is edelibAUR which is a dependency for EDE, the other one edeAUR the actual DE.

## Starting the DE

To bring up EDE you can either use a Display manager or use startx. If you choose the later, just write the following to the .xinitrc of your user:

     exec startede

## Applications

Since EDE is a bare-bone DE, you will have to add even the most common applications like a file manager or an editor yourself. It's all your freedom and choice.

Due to the nature of the DE, it obviously makes sense to install light-weight software. There are however not that many FLTK applications available so you will likely have to relay on a second toolkit like GTK+ for example.

### Some recommendations

- File manager: PCManFM
- Browser: Dillo or Midori
- Editor: Leafpad
- Terminal emulator: Xterm

Category:

- Desktop environments