Elive 0.4
Elive 0.4: "Serenity", featuring both Enlightenment 16 and 17, was released yesterday. "This version is a stabilization of 0.3, a better release with all bad things fixed, but also with many of new features; new installer, with more file systems supported and a cleaner installation." We tested last week's pre-4 and were disappointed in an inoperative harddrive installer. Did we have any better luck with the distribution release?
Elive, or Enlightenment live CD, is a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution and live CD featuring the Enlightenment window manager. New Features this release include:
- all bad things fixed but also with a lot of new features
- New installer, with more filesystems supported and cleaner installation
- Elive mounts
automatically USB sticks, cdrom's, asking you what you want to do... and
also Windows CD's (you can insert a windows game and play it) see example *features available after install* - Debian based kernel 2.6.12 for the installation + udev
- Firefox with java and flash (for java you need to "apt-get install java")
-
ELPANEL: The new powered control panel of Elive, with a lot of features, all the description of this panel in this link: ELPANEL
- Theme "elive" for e17 fixed for the buttons of the window borders, added a nice silver cursor and also for the graphical system
- Easy printer configuration.
- Cinelerra 2.0
- Elive is now much faster: DMA enabled now giving you a system that
is 3 times faster, especially when launching programs or using the hard
disk), fast boot of e16, better video playback through oxine and mplayer (easier on cpu) - Driver modules updated and also new ones added
- New version of AMSN, with WebCam support, some webcams are added, for example spca5xx chipsets based webcams.
- Now Elive use Xorg 6.9 and not XFree86. New option to use xcomposite to enable real transparencies and shadows from xorg.
- You can try out or use composite on xorg with just 2 steps, included directly on 0.4 also the liveCD mode
- Support for WideScreen (notebooks or TFT in 1280x768)
- Reading and writing multisession CD's
- List of all packages: Packages
- Networks:
- Easy connection to Windows dekstops
- Easy connection to Linux desktops
- Options to Share directories on your network or internet, and
see shared directories on another Elive system (or NFS connection) - E16
- Different look, theme and background changed by default (originals included also)
- E17
- A lot of new configurations
- More stable version
- A new file-manager integrated in e17 menus (under developement, not really usable at the moment)
The E17 desktop looked pretty much the way it was presented in previous report, however the E16 look is updated and much improved in my opinion. Now it features a lovely blue background and coordinating menus and windecs. It looks great with an accentuating pattern looking as though it was drawn on with a "spirograph." I'm not sure if the startup sound is new as I don't recall. But whether it's new or not, it's pretty cool! It sounds almost like a synthesis of robot or computerized voices singing "e-live!" against a background of almost techno-like notes.
We find much of the same kinds of applications as originally reported for all sorts of tasks.
Some new stuff includes this mplayer demo of ibm's commercials showing a multiscreened mplayer. If we could figure out how to do that with all movies... Their new configuration panel is really modernized with some wonderfully impressive special effects and the added benefit of it actually working. I believe qemu to be a new addition this release as well as their disk autoexe. Of course I couldn't get any windows games to actually install, but I figure it's miraculous enough at this point that a wincd is autodetected and wine is launched.
As the changelogs states, java is installable and other browser plugins work out of the box. Whoops, the mplugger movie is showing bluescreen, but it was working. I may, but probably won't, go back and retake that shot under different video output.
Speaking of video, mplayer did it's job admirably.
And of course, the piece de resistance, the harddrive installer. I'm not privy to the reasons they changed from the morphix installer, but their new one is working fine now. I had looked at a preview of 0.4 and it was having problems. They seem to have that fixed now.
Elive is an exciting project, being one of the first to bring e17 to the user and a great looking e16 as well. They stated performance was increased about 3 times, and although I'm not quite sure of that figure, I can state that elive did perform fairly fast here. Most applications opened almost instantly. I had no stability issues with any of the applications or the system as a whole. The only problem encountered was with the wine implementation. This go around all the original themes and settings are translated to the harddrive install as well as including a few others. The harddrive installer itself works great now (after a worrisome problem with a preview). In summation, a great livecd and an even better installed system.
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Very nice
Very nice work getting Enlightenment set up so well!
Re: Very nice
Very nice work getting Enlightenment set up so well!
I know, gorgeous, gorgeous system. I love it.