Ryuga

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Elive is more then just a linux distro, it's a work of art.

I was getting bored with my current Zenwalk XFCE setup and wanted to try enlightenment. It was then I stumbled upon this peculiar distro that has it's default desktop be enlightenment. I was excited about this opportunity and decided to download the iso and give it a try for myself

Installation

I first put the elive 0.5 cd on my disk and was wisked away to the wonderful world of elive. The cd boots to a live cd but before it does that it asks some basic hardware questions such as what type of screen you use and what theme do you want to start with by default. I chose the night theme and told the program what type of screen I have.

Afterwards you are greeted with a login screen that is quite impressive with all of it's animations and such. You are given a dummy account and password to login with, no need to log in as root which is a good thing. Next you are greeted with a functional e17 environment. Once you are done playing around with the system you can choose to install elive by clicking on the icon in their taskbar known as ibar.

Installation itself was pretty straightforward. You are greeted then asked to check the integrity of your system. I recommend doing this, once you are cleared you are then given the choice of how you want to create your partition layouts. (Note if you have an elive system already installed it will ask you if you would like to update the system rather then do a full blown installation)

I chose the trusty cfdisks to make my partition layout (other option is gparted). If you need to reboot by this point you can and just come back to the installation. Afterwards you are asked what partition will be the root partition, along with what filesystem you wish to use. I chose xfs and was told I need to have a seperate boot partition which I already did. I chose the partition to put boot in. Next you are asked if you wish to add more partitions. The choices are home, usr, usr/local, and var then you are asked what file system you wish to use for each partition. Afterwards the installation begins. Then out of nowhere you are given a little card game program to kill time while then system installs, how cute. Once done you are then asked for the usual stuff; root password, user account, user password, what vga settings you want to use for boot up and where to install grub. After making my choices the installation was complete and I rebooted the system.

Post Installation

Once I rebooted I was greeted with the plain grub screen, I didn't mind too much. Afterwards shown the elive bootsplash and then came back to the pretty elive login screen. Once logged in I was greeted with my fully installed elive system. The system worked really well and everything was really pretty, from the twinkling background to all the pretty eyecandy and colors this was truly an amazing system. Elpanel also helped configuring a lot of different options, really handy and powerful. Since the system is debian based we have the famous synaptic package system which is always nice. The elive community is also very friendly and filled with a lot of creative, intelligent people who are willing to help and contribute to elive.

Though for all of it's positives there are negatives as well. Most of these bugs however are more problems and setbacks with enlightenment then anything else since the system is still under heavy development and constantly evolving.

Final thoughts and conclusion

A lot of love and dedication went into this system and it shows. E16 and E17 were painstakingly tweaked and modified to be a very useable and powerful system while still showing off all of it's eye-candy potential.

Is this distro worth looking at? I most definately agree.

Enlightenment is one very powerful and innovative desktop environment. I honestly think we are looking at the next big thing as far as desktop environments of the future goes. Elive just touches on the potential of this system and I must say, I like what I see. Keep your eyes opened for not only elive but for enlightenment itself, as we may be witnessing the future in progress

irish rebel

Guys I used to use evil entity Back in 2002 or so , I thought it was great but then the project came to a halt , it's been trying to revive as arcane linux but as of now I havent seen any release.That's where elive comes in. I havent used enlightenment for at least a year or so and this elive included the latest developement release of 16.999 or 17 as it is called.
Follow the initial bootup to a live cd format everything seemed good , so I decided to wipe out my ubuntu edgy desktop and install elive.
Following a quick install It was reletively easy to get networking up , I added torcs and gtk-gnutella via the synaptic manager .The administrator tool is great everything worked great dvd's played outa the box . Following a apt-get update sound broke but this was easy to fix via the administration toolkit.
I have a feeling that the iso available is out of date because there are over 400 potential updates , which by the way goes smoothly.
I have to relearn how to add items to the menu bars and to engage [the osx like application launcher] .
Overall a great distro I have updated everything I have added flash 9 beta and java, all multimedia codecs work Open office is up to date, and speed guys I am telling you this e17 [beta,] is fast .Elive has a great future if the devs hold it together and get some help with documentation.
New users would be attracted by the great look and feel of the desktop but as of now documentation is limited .

CouchMaster

Everything you want in a distro, and it works with out having to add packages for mp3/DVD. The installer didn't notice Windows so dual booting is tricky but what the heck - this is one good looking Linux.
In my humble opinion, if the installer were more like - say - SuSE, it would be perfect!