Some environment decision on my server

It's been a while since I didn't use my server with a decent environment, in fact it was running for months inside a simple tty just to do the basic stuff. A tty isn't that bad, you can control your MPD for example to stop the music or to set up the entire playlist. It is also sufficient for configuration files, and browsing on the WWW for information…

All was fine until my light bulb gave up. Of course I changed it, but with one that had additional 20 watts, and I wasn't happy for the lamp getting warmed up too much. So I choose to light up my hacking space with my server's display. What I was looking for was something with animations… nonono! not that one, plzkthx! The best I can think of is E17 ;-) It has the bling bling that no other environment has.

So I was getting started with E17 again, which I didn't use for hardly two years. The first day was mostly OK, I played with it and tried out different modules — the photo module is nice — and I also ran through bugs and crashes, but nothing blocking. The next day, I tried out more modules and locked myself inside my environment because of the “First Run Wizard” module which states in its description “WARNING!! DO NOT USE!!” which I didn't see -_-

So I talked a bit in #e and raster showed me the enlightenment_remote command to control parts of E17. I just didn't get how to export the E_IPC_SOCKET variable but now I do! So I finally decided that it was easier to delete the main configuration file which was actually a good thing because after that I had more options than before :-)

The desktop is now all simple and beautiful and shiny and lighty and blinky and decent. I have my workspaces with different tasks like music player, IRC, a web browser (Midori), and so on. My last addition is a simple script to put inside my cron table which switches the background. I run it every 30 to 60 minutes, depends of my mood. I really like the smooth background changes in E17 :-)

Light is back, fun is in too.