Yeah.. not much to it. You need to head on over here and add my repository to get the latest (experimental) e17 binaries. Then it's just a simple matter of:
That grabs everything you need for a functional setup. No need to modify any login manager files or anything because unlike KDE or Gnome.. Enlightenment don't need/care/want/have one.

Meh. This is all just my opinion of course but it was OK at best. It ran a little better than KDE4 .. but still slower than KDE3 and Gnome. On the up side the desktop looks very snazzy, and even has transparent task bars and all kinds of animated graphical goodies. So it's really impressive; but again - there's that speed cost. I was using iceweasel with it for a while and it was just downright cruel.. so I eventually gave up on using it for much lol.. but you could look at it for a while and just smile at your tablet . Yay for options.

You'll have to give it a try and see if you like it or not. It's not too bad... but I think I'll be going back to Gnome personally. The really nice thing about enlightenment is there are only maybe a handful of libraries, and e17 and e17-data packages you need to remove to get rid of it (or install it for that matter)... so it's small and easy to control. Unlike KDE and Gnome where it's just easier to trash your deblet and start over then try and remove 160 packages you no longer need.

Obligatory Screenshot:

nice! thanks! works better than i expected!

You can also test enlightenment e16 which is in debian repos.

Yeah.. but I was focused on e17 because:
A) It wasn't yet available
B) here,here, and here.

Everyone seemed to be asking about e17. e16 is equally easy to install you just don't need any special Repo's for it.. since Debian has already ported it themselves.

I know at present this requires deblet to run, but is there any major reasons why?
I was under the impression e17 sat ontop of x11 - which we have directly on our maemo devices without needing deblet.

I am sure there will be a good reason, but I don't know enough about deblet or linux in general to know the differences.

The answer would be dependencies and libraries... Penguinbait has ported KDE, Window Maker, XFCE (i think) over to maemo .. you might request e17 from him as he seems pretty good at that. All these require different versions and builds of X libraries (I believe) which would prevent them from running directly over Maemo..

Deblet is just the Debian libraries, I'm sure you could compile E17 for Maemo, it just might mean some more tinkering to get all the libraries in place. The beauty of compiling stuff for deblet is that you can use all the same libraries in your tablet that the app expects in the desktop environment. So often, when compiling stuff for Maemo, I hear developers complain about having to compile a dozen libraries or mess with the app because it won't work with the (old) Maemo versions of the libraries...

EDIT: I started typing my post, got distracted, and when I finally posted it, fatalsaint had beat me to it

Aren't there part of the libs already made available (though probably in other packages) by Openbossa?

Yes, on Mamona!

QEdje is available in extras-devel IIRC. Several parts of EWL are available here on Openbossa.

Here is the general wiki start page about QEdje. Includes a presentation from 2 weeks ago at aKedemy. Please note the 6,4 MB .7z file extracts to almost 100 MB.

I wonder is dynamic background theming will work well on the NIT. The Enlightenment rendering software engine is ultra fast according to the allnames marketing dept!

So, why is everyone raving about E17 when fatalsaint says that it runs slower than Gnome!? I've been using Minimal Gnome as my benchmark for "upper limit WM on the tablet", and if anything is slower than Gnome, it ain't no good.

Is it possible, fatalsaint, that your version is just too pretty? Maybe if you scaled back on the transparency and animations and all of that, it would be more usable? I mean, even XFCE4 has transparency, you know.

Or maybe if you based E17 on the Mamona libs, things would be more optimized for the tablets? But if that's the case, why not push those optimizations upstream? I'm sure everyone could use faster rendering, no?

But if you take out all the pretty bits, what's E17 got that you can't get from E16, which is easily available in the Debian repos?

I don't get it; It's a real head-scratcher.