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EVE as a desktop environment, as in EVE OS
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Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2015-06-02 15:29:00 UTC
Hello all

Seeing as this is the Linux forum, I think this is the best place to ask this.

As I've been playing the game, I've grown to rather like the EVE working environment, with its windows, tiling, and snap-to-edge functionality. I've been playing around with Ubuntu to no avail, and have come here to ask:

Does anyone know if there's a way to run the EVE environment as a Linux desktop environment? And can anyone point me to tools/software that might help me replicate it?

If not - does anyone know of a way to do so, or to replicate it somehow?

I've tried a few of the tiling window managers (i3, Xmonad, awesome) without much success, but my dream vision is to essentially have an EVE-themed distro - at least until someone sends me/us a C&D letter.

In terms of objectives; it would be awesome if we could get this running on top of Ubuntu, and I'm willing to spend a long time on fiddling with icons/themes/windows to try and get this to work. This is sort of like a learning project, so I've set myself a rather ridiculous task, which hopefully a few of you guys might be able to help me with - especially if something similar has been tried before.

Thanks in advance. Fly safe o7
Neuntausend
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#2 - 2015-06-02 17:16:30 UTC
You could of course run Eve in an X-Server as fullscreen or fullscreen-window without a window manager. Lacking the ability to launch anything that isn't built into eve, that wouldn't be much of a Desktop environment though.

I am sure however, that one could whip something up with some of the more customizable desktop environments that has the look, feel and functionality of that clusterfuck* CCP calls an interface. I am using Openbox, XFCE-Panel and Compton for my Desktop and I am sure that I could make something Eve-like. I might give it a try, should I find myself bored to death anytime soon.

*) Truthfully, it's by far not as bad as it used to be. Actually, kudos to CCP for packing as much information into a game interface that is at least usable.
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2015-06-02 19:40:22 UTC
I shall investigate those three and have a look-see

I'm currently seeing how far I can get GNOME to go in terms of behavior, as at some point I know I can create icons. At the moment it's the window behavior that's the key part for me - but many thanks for name-dropping some things for me to investigate!
Neuntausendeins
#4 - 2015-06-02 22:31:22 UTC
Awesome might aso work, although I find it difficult to configure.
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#5 - 2015-06-02 22:45:09 UTC
Yeah I think I need to revisit Awesome . It wasn't very user friendly at all, but it looks like that will be necessary in some way. Cheers!
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#6 - 2015-06-03 14:36:02 UTC  |  Edited by: Aleksandr Ivanovic
Updates from GM Smiley:

People have taken a stab at creating desktop themes based on EVE Online, but I'm not aware of one yet that has fully replaced system icons, much less modified the window behavior to emulate the snapping in the game UI. Modifying system icons isn't difficult with software specialized to modifying and organizing system icons. On the other hand, modifying the system UI to make the windows snap like they do in-game will be significantly more involved, since at that point you're modifying the operating system UI behavior rather than just swapping out icons. It's also not possible to run the game UI outside of the game. It's an integral part of the client that's closely tied to the specific features of the game. So you would need to completely recreate them.

Depending on your level of programming experience, you might start by reading up on Linux UI programming. Or if you have limited programming experience, try tackling simpler projects first to build your experience and confidence. But what you're asking about is certainly possible. Linux Mint Cinnamon for instance has some window snapping functionality built-in. It's just going to be a long and intense learning experience if you don't already have a solid programming background.


So from this, I'm going to begin focusing on developing a Cairo-Dock theme that I can hopefully publish somewhere. I'm planning on making it resemble the EVE dock as much as possible in looks, and Cairo-Dock is actually quite easy to configure (in terms of icons) once you spend some time poking around with it. Cairo-Dock should allow anyone on Linux to use the dock, and it currently runs in a GNOME environment.

Note on that GNOME part: I haven't installed GNOME in Ubuntu yet, so currently you just log in to a desktop with only the Cairo-Dock dock, and none of the other Unity stuff - but also none of the GNOME stuff. I had a previous installation with GNOME, and that ran very differently (not in a good way), but I will be firing GNOME up in order to edit UIs I think.

The next step will be trying to configure that snapping window behavior, and I know that will be much more difficult.
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#7 - 2015-06-05 12:01:58 UTC
Just a quick update:

Attached is the Cairo-Dock theme that I've got running so far. At the login screen, you can select a CD session, which basically runs Ubuntu with the CD dock. You can also run CD inside GNOME, as you can see in the screenshot, as well as inside Ubuntu alongside Unity.

However, I've got lots of work to do on building an icon and window theme, but as this is a spare time project, I'll be updating slowly as I go.

Once I work out how to upload it, I'll share this theme. CD is very easy to use in this regard, as you can just alter the icons to the ones extracted from the EVE developer image package

Here's the screenshot.
Neuntausendeins
#8 - 2015-06-05 12:24:07 UTC
Good job so far. However, making something that looks like the NeoCm is probably the really easy part. :)
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#9 - 2015-06-05 12:29:51 UTC
Neuntausendeins wrote:
Good job so far. However, making something that looks like the NeoCm is probably the really easy part. :)


I'm only too aware hahah!

But yesh - baby steps. I'm pretty new to this, and it's fun to tinker. Hope to update you all soonish
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#10 - 2015-06-09 21:13:10 UTC  |  Edited by: Aleksandr Ivanovic
Progress (of sorts)!

So KDE has the transparency stuff and the window snapping, and with a little mouse action on the title bar, you can manually scale down the opacity of the active window - while you can automatically set the inactive window translucency in the window behaviour menu, I can't see an option to do that to the active window.

Anyways, still need to do the icon and window themes, but at least I vaguely know what's going on now

o7

http://i.imgur.com/6dJ2KkE.png

In case you can't tell by the tabs, I'm a total noob!
Neuntausendeins
#11 - 2015-06-09 22:17:40 UTC
Wether it's Kwin or Compiz, what I don't like about the transparent windows is, that along with the widgets, the text turns transparent as well, which makes reading stuff really strenuous to the eyes.
Aleksandr Ivanovic
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#12 - 2015-06-10 09:12:48 UTC
Neuntausendeins wrote:
Wether it's Kwin or Compiz, what I don't like about the transparent windows is, that along with the widgets, the text turns transparent as well, which makes reading stuff really strenuous to the eyes.


Yeah, I'd noticed that. The other difference is that EVE blurs the content behind the windows - so I still have a lot of fiddling to do lol
Neuntausendeins
#13 - 2015-06-11 19:19:06 UTC  |  Edited by: Neuntausendeins
Compton and Compiz both can do the blurring, with Compiz being a full fledged window manager with a ton of plugins (including transparency and snapping) and Compton just being a compositor.