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posted by martyb on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the stand-by-for-more-disappointments! dept.

What is Elive?
Elive is a non-commercial, cost-free operating system made for the daily use, a much faster, friendlier, and feature-rich replacement of your high cost and low effective default system.

Turn your old equipment, up to 15 years old into a high performance machine with an interface that dazzles anyone who sees it. Customized to meet your needs while keeping it lightweight and beautiful using minimal hardware requirements.

In literally less than 2 minutes Elive runs without the need to install it , choose the language and the desired options to get the maximum performance, or just let Elive to select the best options for you.

Because the user experience is our priority, it provides a very intuitive experience where anybody can use it from the first time, using simple interfaces not saturated of options and with tons of automations.

Elive is a very stable and reliable system based in Debian that will work day after day without problems. The customized Enlightenment desktop is ultra-fast and perfectly stable, with no random errors or surprises.

It comes with a full suite of applications, whether for work or for pleasure. It offers everything from a complete Office suite, tools, games and multimedia. You can enjoy watching movies or making your own. Professional video edition, graphic designing, media center, or even recover files from formatted disks. Make 3D animations, edit and manipulate audio and image files in always the best quality.

Oriented for novice and advanced users which can find incredibly useful tools inside, for desktop usage, laptops, schools or enterprises.

https://www.elivecd.org/

The first disappointment, there is no 64 bit version available.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:52PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:52PM (#734356)

    i wish them the best but i find enlightenment ugly and non-intuitive. i also have no patience for "stable" distros.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:30PM (#734382) Journal

      I used to feel that way about Enlightenment...then I actually tried using it for more than a day and found that it's actually quite awesome.

      I don't even see how it can be "ugly" considering that it's so minimalist that it's barely there at all. What is there to even *be* ugly? The control panel interface? The same interface that lets you customize absolutely everything and do it far, far easier than any WM I've yet seen? What, it doesn't have enough transparency for you? Or do you miss having every option buried ten levels deep under some apparently unrelated group of settings? ;)

      Although I have mixed feelings about Enlightenment for a *minimalist* distro. Even though I just mentioned that it's so minimalist it's barely there. To me, Enlightenment was the WM that made virtual desktops finally make sense to me. Was never quite satisfied with other WMs, so I gave Enlightenment a shot when I got a big 17" beast of a laptop from System76. Now I use Enlightenment not in tiling mode but kinda pseduo-tiling -- first desktop is half Firefox, half terminal; next desktop is entirely Thunderbird, next one is graphics or image editing, then the next row I've got a terminal and text editor sharing the first block, another browser on the second, and the third one is usually open for miscellaneous tasks. And all the system tray type stuff (system utilization, battery life, status of external servers, clock, weather forecast, etc) is drawn directly on the desktop with Conky which is visible through my semi-transparent terminals. I don't have to ALT-TAB and search through programs; I don't have to go scanning a giant taskbar full of stuff, I just hit ALT plus an arrow key to move around the grid and can get to exactly the window I want in just a couple taps. But of course to use it that way you have to have enough system resources to keep all of that crap running at once. Particularly the RAM for multiple browsers loaded with tabs :) But the other nice thing about Enlightenment is that I can go from a fresh install to having my desktop configured exactly how I want it in only five or ten minutes. That control panel *is* a bit ugly, I'll admit that, but it's so damn functional...

      And above all of that, I'm just happy to see more official support for Enlightenment. For a while it was pretty buggy in Arch (it would give an error saying it crashed, although it always restored itself correctly and never lost anything IME), but over the past year or two it's gotten far, far better. We've got this and we've got the older Bodhi Linux now both using Enlightenment so hopefully they'll be contributing some fixes as well.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:55AM (#734602)

        Title bars, and borders. And little things floating everywhere. I just want windows. Give me the program, give me hotkeys, don't decorate or do icons or anything else. Those things are all ugly, annoying, and take up space needlessly. These are why I stick to tiling wm's.

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:00PM (3 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:00PM (#734361) Journal

    "And now for this 3.0 version there's not any limitation at all. The installation doesn't require a donation either. The system is entirely cost-free and without any restriction because restrictions would simply be limitations, preventing people from experiencing all the good that it has."

    IIRC install cd was donationware

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:53PM (1 child)

      by Bot (3902) on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:53PM (#734393) Journal

      As for 64bit enlightenment distros, voidlinux is one.

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 2) by UncleSlacky on Friday September 14 2018, @11:27AM

        by UncleSlacky (2859) on Friday September 14 2018, @11:27AM (#734784)

        There's also Bodhi, which uses a (forked) E17 desktop (Moksha) on a -buntu base.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:19PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:19PM (#734508) Journal

      Yes, their CD has always been voluntary donation-ware. Version 1 would install from the downloaded CD. Version 2 required you to purchase a code for installation, so you were restricted to the LiveCD if you didn't want to "donate". Now, with Version 3, we are back to the donation-ware status of Version 1.

      I'm running a bastardized version of Sparky Linux, E-20 desktop. Sparky and several other distros have more-or-less dropped support for Enlightenment.

      I've been thinking about Void - it has received praises from several Soylentils. I've been putting off a new installation for awhile now. It's about time for me to make a move, or quit bitching, I suppose. Maybe I'll order a hard drive this week, so that I don't have to nuke my existing OS drive.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:45PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:45PM (#734386)

    On their website under "screenshots", there are a few video's. The most prominent placed one doesn't work, the second one is some really weird dubstep/flashingscreen amalgam. The third is even weirder.

    If the OS is in any way comparable, I want nothing to do with it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:18PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:18PM (#734405)

      First video works. Second video has amateur editing and bad music, as expected of what appears to be a one-man open source project. Third video is an old demo.

      In short, you're easily spooked.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @08:10PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @08:10PM (#734434)

        First video does not work while embedded. Says "Not Available". When following through to YouTube itself, the video plays. And it's horrible.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @06:17PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @06:17PM (#734942)

          Not only the embedded video has a problem. Try to download it. The torrent times out with no seeds available. Not a good sign.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:17PM (#734404)

    I'm sure this is a nice distribution, but I recommend Devuan. It's a solid Debian OS sans systemd, and, with the proprietary Nvidia driver, no problem with sleep/resume.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rigrig on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:17PM

      by rigrig (5129) Subscriber Badge <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:17PM (#734538) Homepage

      Devuan. It's a solid Debian OS sans systemd

      This is the kind of summary I want to see for distro articles. (or e.g. "Linux Mint provides full out-of-the-box multimedia support by including some proprietary software")

      Not "Debian, but with Enlightenment and 2500+ custom packages".
      What do those packages do/change compared to plain Debian, could we please have some screenshots of unique Elive features, and why is it running a 4 year old kernel?

      (If it sounded believable I'd also be very interested in the mechanism used to ensure that "It is impossible that a virus can exist here, due to how the security works internally.")

      --
      No one remembers the singer.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @08:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @08:26PM (#734443)

    ...tions?

    YES! Too bad you're not and your website is full of google!

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:32PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:32PM (#734510) Journal

    I stumbled over Version 1 within days of it's public release. Man - it was pretty impressive, so I downloaded the LiveCD. That CD was even more impressive, so I created a partition, and installed it. The installation was slightly disappointing - I had to research, and learn how to make the hard disk installation do the things that the LiveCD did. Still, I was pretty happy with it - except, 32 bit.

    Version 2 came out, and again, the demo was impressive. The LiveCD was equally impressive. I thought about installing, but, you had to get a code. There was a workaround to get the code, without actually paying for it, but I resented that shit and never jumped through the hoops, never paid for the code. And, again, 32 bit.

    Meanwhile, I found a couple distros that were shipping Enlightenment environments. I've distro hopped a couple times, but I've come back to Sparky Linux. Sadly, they dropped E as an installation choice. So, today, I have this bastardized, half crippled, repeatedly hacked and damaged version of Sparky Linux Enlightenment desktop. I really need to make a lot of repairs, but I'm not really competent to do everything that is needed. (I'm plenty competent to screw up an installation, repairs can get way over my head, LOL)

    So, here we are again, with Version 3 of Elive. I think it's pretty awesome, but I've been disappointed repeatedly by this guy. He does an awesome enough job, but he's just not in *my world*. My priorities aren't his priorities, which is all well and good.

    I've just been reminded that Void offers Enlightenment as an installation choice, so I'll most likely get a new SSD soon, and install Void.

    I can't praise the Enlightenment desktop enough. It's light on resources, stays out of the way, and it's mostly just plain reliable - all while being as pretty as hell. Seriously, there isn't another desktop environment which is any prettier and/or customizable than Enlightenment.

    And, maybe this time, I'll learn not to hack on stuff that I poorly understand. If I just stop butchering my desktops, they'll probably last for decades!

  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday September 14 2018, @01:03AM (2 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Friday September 14 2018, @01:03AM (#734607) Journal

    There was a cringe-worthy disclaimer about ATI video cards. I chose Japanese language so that my keyboard layout wouldn't be FU but immediately after that I was presented with a separate choice for keyboard layout. There was no button to go back to the previous setting. The fonts were too small to be readable, so I boosted the size which resulted in text getting cut off or overlapping things. I never did figure out how to change the screen resolution. I also couldn't figure out how to get the network to work (Realtek ethernet card connected to a LAN with DHCP, nothing obscure). I plugged in a USB SD card reader and nothing happened. One of the icons at the bottom was cycling through some random animations and I kept mistakenly thinking that it might be an indicator of some relevant information. Oops, no just that stupid thing again.

    • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday September 14 2018, @02:13AM (1 child)

      by shortscreen (2252) on Friday September 14 2018, @02:13AM (#734655) Journal

      Tried it on a second system. This time the network connected but firefox wouldn't launch (ping worked). Tried to run wget from the terminal but it didn't seem to be present, then windows started disappearing and the screen went blank except for the mouse pointer. There was also a message "S. H. Engine Unavailable" that came up about 30 times while booting.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 14 2018, @11:32PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @11:32PM (#735147) Journal

        $random comment about unsupported hardware from the mesozoic.

        Actually, that is informative. Apparently Version 3 is less polished than either 1 or 2 were. Both of those booted nicely on any hardware I tried them on.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 14 2018, @05:39PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday September 14 2018, @05:39PM (#734925) Journal

    I'm enjoying this discussion.

    Has anyone noticed we don't talk about OSes much anymore? The last time was the systemd topic. Is it because Linux, in the end, has won?

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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