# An Elive 1.6 reveiw



## Solaris17 (Mar 30, 2008)

Iv decided to do a reveiw for elive as i think doing more linux reviews will help fellow TPUers get the hang of an OS so expect more to come i have a laptop that does nothing and about 40 or so distros to try out...So we start with Elive a tiny little distro that has been around for quite some time and has only gotten better since iv used it last...

TEST Machine
Dell Laptop c500
700mhz single core intel celeron
128mb sdram single stick
10GB 4500 RPM HDD


We start with the basics booting from the disk you are given a plethera of options upon initial boot including options to boot from the first hard disk but before even that you have to select your language their is easily over 20 available and is not the classic english options eaither but instead of saying

English
Arabic
Chinese

you are greeted with every language written in its own alphabet..impressive and much more effective







The whole boot process is pretty self explanatory and actually relatively pretty for a disto that doesn't have any drivers installed except for the basic vesa init.





oo pretty

The log in is also very beautiful and not what i was expecting as my laptop had to run off of the very generic vesa driver to function correctly..the included radeon and fglrx drivers would not get me to desktop and i was greated with a command prompt...however after setting to vesa all was well and actually operated pretty smoothly for such a dated machine.






 (my apologies their is no print screen at the log in)

Now with such a dated system and such beautiful graphics (my pics do it no justice wait for the prntscrns) youd think it would take quite some time to load...however on an old cd rom drive the disk booted up and got to desktop in about 4min not bad i can already guess this is a well coded OS.


so after logging in we get our beautiful desktop....i must say i am so incredibly surprised. The stars in the background blink and change position while the system still maintains complete usability with no apparent slow down. This and the look of the theme in general makes it apparent why Samuel F. Baggen 'Thanatermesis' the creator calls this theme "enlightenment". 






The graphics are beautiful no doubt just look at the icons on the bottom the contrast and colors are extremely vivid...the (enlightenment) water mark on the background is a nice touch and blends in well making the desktop look more vivid and pronounced instead of the water mark being an eyesore. The star twinkle as stated before is also a nice touch and always gives you something to look at...on top of all this prettynes is the graphics seem embedded in even the simplest ways. buttons and menu bars have this effect that makes them look like they are made of gold getting turned in bright sun light they refract very well.






Now that we covered the "enlightenment" theme lets move on to another built in theme with just as much "coolness" as the first.  The Lucax theme as its called is darker more black and dark ocean blue with a hint of sparkle and matalics. The stars included in the background are in greater as is to be expected seeing as its night time...a very logical touch imo it seems this was developed while covering all angles. Dispite how beautiful it is it still appears to be in beta even in the final elive 1.6 release.






As you can see This version is a little darker but is still very sleek in my opinion a little better than the first as the dark blue black and occasional gold highlights really bring out the vividness of the desktop. The fact that the stars twinkle and move as well as the interactive sysmbol and moving water under it make this seem like the background is a gif...however it also seems like an interactive desktop as when you mouse over the symbol the emblem becomes a brighter gold color and revels the words "Where Debian meets enlightenment" as you can see in the pictures below this is also a very impressive theme beta or no.











The themes in general here make the Os seem very vista like while providing you with a new linux feel i havent seen on any other distribution but instead of new improved with a totally new vista like GUI like ubuntu 7.10 with the "Box" desktop chooser in Elive you get a very nice theme over a relatively small OS (693mb) but with old distro property's like simply clicking a box at the top right corner of your screen to choose which desktop youd like to veiw. This makes things really simple to navigate and adjust like the theme for example






However that is not to say their is some complication. for example their is no start button like traditional Windows or other linux OS's instead you have a type of doc menu like a mac..This does not seem to be a short falling however just a quick inconvenience for ppl like myself who have never used the newer mac OS's instead in order to access things you do so by right clicking on the desktop for the programs list or left click for a more advanced menu that includes the program menu. This was easy to get used to and i found i enjoyed it because it wasnt the same old same old this was actually turning out to be quite fun

the dark theme











As you may notice above their is a media player open This media player appears to be based off of xmms only uses an enlightenment skin. i found this impressive because it looks quite nice and their is nothing more that i like than pleasant looking non windows 95 programs. If you look carefully at the list above the menu includes a sub directory called "Configuration" What i found in their was vastly impressive and included something i had never seen before..for example you could adjust the FPS of the desktop hmm interesting so i moved the slider from 30 to 200 with no immediate difference nothing sped up or appeared to slow down or jerk a sign that the onboard graphics may be struggling.  Apart from no change i still thought it interesting enough to mention. still fascinated on how such a slow machine could keep up with this lightweight though impressively feature rich Distro i started looking for places were they may cut corners. For example i decided to look to see what the icons in the doc menu did. To my surprise they started jumping and bloating up






look closely at the icons in the screen shot and you will see the shadow and blur of what im talking about. Not being satisfied i decided to try harder and decided to open gimp. Perhaps bad coding could be the issue. For example deleting things from the memory immediately after closing or immediately deleting temp or boot files from the memory will make the system run much faster. so i decided to open gimp to watch my computer slow down. Instead the loading bars screamed along the bottom of the gimp program and it started in less than a minuet  in actuality less than 30sec. Impressive, however i was not convinced so instead i blamed it on the excellent work of the gimp team and left it open. It was time to make and prove that elive could cripple my system i went to each desktop and started opening things like crazy. I opened gimp xmms changed themes and played games and made them all run at the same ime in every window...and ATLAST!! my system ran fluently no hicup it was ridiculous. At last i had drawn a conclusion the system was built and configured excellently and i think i had found out the reason. during installation the computer had taken a second actually about 30min to configure every package to my computer specs. I had found this extremely impressive as with every linux install i had ever used required you to modify them yourself to fit your system needs. this was impressive

Now installation was however the slowest part of my experiance and was the only thing i was relatively unhappy about. Suse with 2GB of dats 4GB fully selected packages wouldn install in around 20min however elive at its meager in comparison 690mb took around an hour and then configured AFTER the installation was complete for an added 30min. However the install was pretty and was pleasant to look at 






and after our hour long install i was greeted with a simple yet pleasent looking boot window after my first restart







All in all its a very nice OS the temp gauge reads my proc temp correctly it gives me battery reading and charge level with expected life span and tells me whether or not im plugged in. All of which are move abe to diff spots on the desktop i can also adjust the size and add more. The only thing i didnt like all that much is the fact that you can only DL elive after a small donation the smallest being $5 usd. of course this has its perks also as you get a free bonus content CD with a pretty case and label however with an invite code you can DL the final version of elive for free. But if you would rather not do either you can download the Developement version of Elive 1.6 for free.

Here is the official site for videos and demos as well as acces to the developement and final releases.

http://www.elivecd.org/

how ever you can download older versions for free from here

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=elive

I hope you enjoyed this article for Elive their is more distros to come and each article is subject to change without you knowing.

some of my other reveiws.
Fedora core 9
Suse 11


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## xfire (Mar 31, 2008)

Thanks for the review and the reviews to come 
Here's a cookie O


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## qwerty_lesh (Mar 31, 2008)

i didnt know that enlightment looked soo nice, thanks Solaris17. all round great read 
i still am fond of my fedora install but its great to see members showing just how straight foward linux can be for basic use. i swear if i could get around all the steam bugs ive currently got id do away with my xp all together. out of curiousity, what shell is elive using? i may have missed where it was mentioned


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## Zedicus (Mar 31, 2008)

elive is amazing, i use it whenever i need a live distro, its the fastest and nicest looking distro.  and they put an amazing polish on the E17 WM. and being built with debian you know its stable.  

i like it for its refreshing interface, but i find a lot of peeple, especially peeple new to linux, say they dont like it becuz its not like windows. sad i guess, but to each his own.

i still prefer debian pure for myself too.


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## Solaris17 (Mar 31, 2008)

qwerty_lesh said:


> i didnt know that enlightment looked soo nice, thanks Solaris17. all round great read
> i still am fond of my fedora install but its great to see members showing just how straight foward linux can be for basic use. i swear if i could get around all the steam bugs ive currently got id do away with my xp all together. out of curiousity, what shell is elive using? i may have missed where it was mentioned



 elive runs on bash so it should be pretty east to anyone who has susede linux b4  thnx for the comments guys ill probably edit it to be better but im going to be doing this mroe often as i think we need to expand our linux community


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## xfire (Mar 31, 2008)

You might like to try DreamLinux. Its Multimedia oriented.


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## Solaris17 (Mar 31, 2008)

xfire said:


> You might like to try DreamLinux. Its Multimedia oriented.



ill give that a go thanks for the idea.


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## Zedicus (Mar 31, 2008)

you should do a review on mepis, its the best user friendly distro out there.


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## Solaris17 (Mar 31, 2008)

Zedicus said:


> you should do a review on mepis, its the best user friendly distro out there.



you got it


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## jonmcc33 (Apr 1, 2008)

Thank you SO MUCH for the review! I appreciate the time and effort that you took in this. As good as it looks I don't think it will replace OpenSUSE for me but I'll definitely try it in a VM.


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## PartyLikeARockStar (Apr 29, 2008)

That is just dead sexy. I wish I could get it to see all 4+gigs of my RAM. will a kernel reconfig help me?


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## Solaris17 (Apr 29, 2008)

its a real possability though i think its only x32 for right now. but im not sure if linux 32 has the same limitations as windows when it comes to ram


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## Solaris17 (Jun 11, 2008)

good news in the world of E-live TODAY!!!

Development build 1.7.7 is Finished!!

New Features include

    *  Bluetooth: If a bluetooth device is detected on your computer during the boot process, you will automagically have a bluetooth applet in your tray.
    * Notifications in the desktop: you will have messages on your desktop about misc events, like if you need to enter a bluetooth pin code, or if you need to wait a few seconds before unplugging a USB device (because it is still transfering data).
    * Xorg: Like you may have see in previous versions, there are big and important changes in xorg. Elive is adapting to it in order to have everything still working the way Elive does it.
          o Touchpad is re-enabled again
          o Configurator of the graphical mode in Elive has a new feature: it scans your hard disk searching for possible configurations to use. This feature is especially useful if you have a xinerama configuration in another distro or Elive installation, or for those who have a very special configuration needed in order to run their graphical system. 
    * Reports: Now, users in the channel that are reporting possible issues can do tests of their reports without the need to wait to download the next release
    * ATI: Some bugs were found with the FGLRX driver in Elive and nobody has reported them. It is suposed to work again now, but we still need your reports if something does not work correctly. 



And incase anyone forgot you can Download the developement version of Elive for free at http://www.elivecd.org/Download/Development and imo works fine


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## Deleted member 3 (Jun 11, 2008)

Tip: Make screenshots of bootscreens in VMware or VirtualPC.


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## Solaris17 (Jun 11, 2008)

good call thanks man


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