| ELIVE 1.0 - ELIVE GEM |
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| Written by Administrator | |||||
| Sunday, 08 July 2007 | |||||
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WHERE DEBIAN MEETS ENLIGTHENMENT.
It's more than just a Live CD, it's art!
Elive 1.0 or also called Elive Gem was officially released on 5th of July 2007 after about 6 months of development. It is based on Debian Etch. It uses the Enligthenment window manager 16 and 17 to enligthen your old and new desktop and to charm the Linux users who have been using Kde/Gnome/Xfce-based Linux distributions. According to Elive 1.0's developer, Mr. Samuel Baggen aka Thanatermesis, Elive can even run on a PC with only 100Mhz of CPU and RAM as low as 64Mb. Thanatermesis has worked on Elive on a full time basis out of pleasure and for pleasure. It's now on the 27th spot at Distrowatch.com. It's a Live CD with an installer that you can download from linuxtracker.org. The iso image is about 678Mb. Package management is easy, as it uses synaptic. It has more than 400 Elive-specific packages in its repository. If you need a fast download and wish to donate, just go to Elive website. You can also download the bonus CD that comes with extra softwares after a donation. Your donation(no matter how small) will definitely help!
For this review, I used my Dell Inspiron 600m notebook with Pentium M 1.4Ghz cpu with only 128MB of SDRAM. The graphic card was ATI Radeon 250. The sound card was AC97'. The wired ethernet was of Broadcom type (BCM5705M). The wlan adapter was the built-in ipw2100 type. I also plugged in my Netgear PCMCIA wlan adapter with atheros chipset.
In addition to the beautiful user interfaces, better entrance theme, new night look background, and lots of hotkeys, the other capabilities that I amazed me were:-
-Helpful and intuitive Elive panel.
-Running Gimp while installing Elive to the hard disk wasn't very slow despite having a mere 128MB of SDRAM.
-Able to automount windows partition (ntfs partition in read/write mode).
-Has reliable flash player plugin for the browsers.
-Can play MP3, WMA, etc.
-Can play encrypted DVD video.
-Can play Google video, MPEG video, WMV, etc.
-out-of-the-box support for my wlan card (atheros chipset and ipw2100 chipset via WEP).
-Jre1.5.0_2 was well implemented. So could easily use Logmein java applet.
Under the hood are Linux kernel 2.6.18, gcc 4.1.1, glibc 2.3.6, xorg-server 1.1.1. Since this distribution is still using the 2.6.18 Linux kernel, the naming system for the hard drive and optical drive are still the same: hda is still hda.
Office application available are Abiword 2.4.6, Gnumeric 1.6.3, Xpad 2.12, etc. If you need Openoffice application, you can download the bonus disk from the distribution website. On the networking side, Elive 1.0 provides Iceweasel 2.0.0.3, Icedove 1.5.0.10, Samba 3.0.24, aMSN, Gaim, gFTP, Torrents, LinNeighborhood, and Xchat. Graphics-wise, you have Blender 3D, Gimp 2.2.13, etc. Other essential application available are Brasero 0.4.4 for burning CD/DVD, Thunar file manager, Mplayer, XMMS player, Qemu launcher, etc.
Loading up the Elive 1.0 Live CD. When Elive 1.0 Live CD was loaded up my Dell Inspiron 600m notebook, I could see the various boot options. However, I needed to select the language (default = English) prior to selecting the boot option. Then the bootsplash with a message of "System start in progress, please hold on" appeared with no verbose messages all the way to the selection of the desired look and feel. I chose the 2nd option, which was night look, supposedly the one with the best look and feel.
Boot option screen.
Language selection. Default is English. Need to select the language before you can select the boot options.
The boot splash. Press the Escape key to get the verbose mode.
After having chosen the desired look, I was prompted to either select a special driver for my touchpad or just choose a normal mouse driver. There was also a warning that my touchpad would not work properly if I were to choose the special driver. Then, Elive 1.0 detected my ATI Radeon 250 graphic card and recommended me not to use the proprietary fglrx driver. It recommended me to use the open source radeon driver which also has some success with 3D acceleration. After acknowledging the advice, I was requested to choose either radeon driver, fglrx, or vesa driver. I chose radeon! From my own experience, this driver worked!
Choose the default look/theme.
Choose monitor resolution.
Subsequently, I was requested to choose the resolution for my monitor. Even the unusual 1440x900 resolution was there. Good for those who had problem with 1440x900 resolution. Then, I was told that the user was eliveuser and the password was elive. The password for root was also elive. Then the beautiful login manager appeared. Amazing! You should see it for yourself. The login manager was really animated! 128MB of SDRAM was enough! At login screen, I could also choose E16 session instead of the default E17 session.
Info on username and password.
Login manager for the default Elive look/theme. Words like Elive, Debian, futuristic, slick, Intuitive, , passion, open source, different, fast ,etc would twinkle at the login screen.
Can choose other sessions for the default Elive too.
Power-off button of the default login manager very animated.
Login manager for the night look theme.
Can also choose the sessions while you are at the night look login manager.
Cute power-off and restart button in night look's login screen.
While I was in the E17 session, I could see the desktop panel, called IBar, at the bottom of the desktop. By right-clicking or left-clicking the touchpad, I was able to reach out to the various applications. In my opinion, the IBar should be a bit more animated. The taskbar aka IBox was located at the left upper corner of the desktop. Strange place. The IBar and IBox asides, the background of E17 (the night look) was marvellous, the stars twinkled gracefully. The menu's visuals were also great in this night look desktop. The mouse pointer moved with great resistance, so, in order to make the touchpad work faster, I should have chosen the normal mouse driver instead of the special driver for my touchpad.
Desktop panel called IBar.
One can easily edit or configure the icons, IBar, desktop pager, or applets on the desktop by just right-clicking on them.
Menu system in default look.
Menu system in night look.
E17 desktop looks like this if you logged in as root user whether you are in the night look theme or the Elive default themed desktop. No points logging in as root user, as there is nothing that you can use, not even the terminal!
E17 desktop in night look.
Exit button of night look desktop.
The beautiful confirmation dialog of the exit task.
E17 desktop in default Elive look.
Exit button of default look.
The beautiful confirmation dialog of the exit task.
E16 desktop in night look.
Without wasting my time, I struggled to find the icon for the famous Elive panel. I took me some time to locate the Elive panel icon. It was located at the IBar, 2nd from the right end.
Elive panel.
Where is this Elive panel located on the desktop.
The categories of tools found on Elive panel are:-
Look and Feel ( represented by LCD monitor icon). for E16 session:- -background selector. -Engage manager. -GTK Themes and Fonts. -Terminal manager. for E17 session:- -GTK themes switcher and fonts. -Entangle, the icons and menus manager. -background manager. -Terminal manager.
User Configurations (represented by a man icon). -keyboard configuration. -language selection. -date and time setting. -audio mixer. -root terminal. -personal configuration upgrader. -screensaver. -direct remote desktop.
Admin and System Configurations (represented by a bunch of keys icon). -monitor setting. -audio configurator. -printer manager. -daemon's manager. -networks configuration. -packages manager. -mounter and unmounter manager. -admin shared directories. -users manager. -entrance themes.
Install Elive 1.0 to the hard disk. A lot of people think that Elive is actually a Live CD distribution. Well, it comes with a very straight forward installer. Below is the sequence of events that I came across while installing it to the hard disk of my Dell Inspiron 600m:-
1) First of all, execute a single left-click on the installer icon which is located at the very right end of the desktop panel or IBar.
2) You would be advised to check the quality of the Elive CD. It took me 9 minutes on this.
3) Then you would be asked to do some partitioning of your hard disk, either using Gparted or Cfdisk. Recommended to have at least 2.5Gb of space for the root partition and at least 512Mb of swap space. You must create a /boot partition of between 64-100Mb in size with ext2 filesystem if you prefer to use XFS filesystem for you root partition.
4) You would then be prompted to choose the root partition.
5) Then you would be advised to create /home on another partition for safer future upgrade. If you choose to create /home directory on a separate partition, you would also be advised to mount /boot , /var, /usr, or /usr/local directories on another partition. However, please do not put your /etc, /sbin, or /bin on another partition.
6) Then installation started automatically.
7) Then you need to enter root password followed by creation of normal user account.
8) Then the hostname of your computer. Default is Elive.
9) Then you would be asked if you need to install Grub or not.
10) Ask if you need to add FrameBuffer to the booting of Elive system.
11) Postintallation started. Lasted for a few minutes.
12) Rebooted the system and the Grub menu appeared. Detected Xp and Mepis.
13) Took about 40 seconds for the first boot.
14) Login manager appeared. The login manager was very intelligent. If you type in the wrong username, it would not let you type the password.
15) While in the E17 Desktop, Elive took 8 minutes do some fine-tuning.
After installation of Elive 1.0 Gem, I configured network devices (Broadcom ethernet, ipw2100 wlan adapter, and Netgear's WG511T with atheros chipset). The ipw2100 built-in wlan card and the Netgear's pcmcia wlan card with atheros chipset worked out-of-the-box with wep encryption protocol. However, Elive 1.0 Gem did not support wpa-psk encryption protocol out-of-the-box. Elive 1.0 Gem should have supports for ipw2200 and ipw3945 wlan but I haven't tested them.
Package management is via synaptic. Below are the default repositories. Besides the
repositories from Debian Etch, you have repository from Elive 1.0 Gem itself.
Below are the extra theme for E17 that you can download from the repository.
Conclusion. Summarizing, Elive 1.0 Gem's strenght is actually it's graphical/animative prowess. Since Elive 1.0 aka Elive Gem is based on Debian Etch, I am not surprised at all that it is a very stable Linux distro. Package management (handling of DEB packages) is very easy with synaptic. I dislike the sounds.
I took me one or two days in getting used to Elive 1.0 Gem as I have never used Elive before. My first impression was that of non-intuitiveness. However, it managed to capture my heart after a few days of playing with it. I wrote this review using Elive 1.0 Gem. Two things that annoyed me when I used Elive 1.0 to write this review were:
i) When I maximize the application windows, the IBar would also be eclipsed. ii) When I launched the Elive panel, it would eclipse my taskbar at the left upper corner of my desktop. The worst was that I couldn't even drag it away from the left upper corner.
The good thing was, nothing crashes so far. Good hardware detection. Wifi worked out-of-the-box with the exception of bcm43xx and ipw3945 wifi adapter. However, ipw3945 wifi adapater worked out-of- the-box only when you fire it up in an installed Elive 1.0. It won't work while in Live CD state. Not in my case! Last but not the least, I hope that Mr. Samuel Baggen will produce a KDE or GNOME version of Elive. With E17 or E16, I think Elive will look and feel appropriate on a media center or gaming console. Another Sabayon quality!
Thank you for reading my review. Please email suggestions/comments to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
By Michael Shee Choon Beng.
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