Bodhi comes on a very small CD with just the Midori web-browser and the Synaptic package-manger, leaving you to assemble your own custom installation. This, of course, means that you need broadband. For the impatient, there are two packages that can be obtained from the Bodhi site (not from the package installer): Pratibha for small computers and Nikhila for larger ones.

Pratibha was 155MB in size and gave me Claws-mail, Xchat, ePhoto, ePDF, Pinta, Inkscape, VLC, Deadbeef, Abiword, and Gnumeric; all worked perfectly. Media codecs are provided and all files played, even my “mp4 from hell”. The documentation suggests that 128MB is sufficient RAM, and Midori ran in 90MB (plus cache and buffers).

The minimum hardware requirements are a Pentium 2 and 128MB of RAM. Dial-up internet is supported.

Enlightenment is certainly the prettiest of window managers, and a number of preset-configurations are offered, like netbook, plain desktop, fancy desktop. Unfortunately it is not as easy to configure as IceWM or Fluxbox, and the documentation is poor. Keyboard shortcuts are odd, like Alt-F4 for moving to workspace 4. Hinting control, instead of offering “full, medium, none” gives “bytecode, automatic, none” with no explanation, and no mention of subpixel smoothing.