Raiden's Realm: Elive The Age Of Enlightenment

Elive The Age Of Enlightenment (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lawson
Posted on: Oct 01, 2008 at 03:48pm
Section: Reviews
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ELIVE is a live Linux CD showcasing the Enlightenment window manager/desktop shell. The Belgian project's slogan, "Where Debian Meets Enlightenment", provides us with an early hint that here is a Linux distribution built on very strong, very deep foundations. It is always reassuring to know that a distribution is based on a parent which is famous for running one of the largest package repositories around.

So, now that we are happy that all the packages we are ever likely to need will be available to us in Elive, what about the thing that makes it so different - Enlightenment.

Well, Enlightenment is available in two flavours, the stable E16 version, and the unstable E17. Both versions offer one of the most artistic, creative computer working environments currently available anywhere. Enlightenment prides itself on its unique style, from the twinkling stars of its desktop wallpapers to the default, drop-shadowed windows and dynamic Ibar panel. If you like your desktops simple, minimalist and functional, you had better look elsewhere.

Each of those attributes is perfectly attainable in Enlightenment - but it would be like buying a Porsche then driving everywhere at 30mph... I mean, why would you bother? To get a feel for Enlightenment (beyond the default screenshots included with this article) I would encourage you to do a Google image search for Enlightenment desktops - and marvel at the creativity of its users. The Elive project recently released version 1.9.02 (Unstable) but by the time it appeared on Distrowatch, I had already downloaded and installed version 1.8.8 (Unstable) - and by the way, I will return to this 'Unstable' issue later.

For the purpose of this article I was using Elive with a Fujitsu Siemens 3.4GHz Pentium 4 machine with 1024MB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce 9500GT Super graphics card with 512MB of dedicated RAM running an Acer AL1912 1280x1024 CD, a DVD drive and separate DVD+RW drive and wired ethernet broadband. My initial tests were in a live CD environment - Elive can be installed to the hard drive, of which more later - and I was very impressed with it. Enlightenment is a lovely environment in which to work - check out the default desktop screenshot here - and once you get used to its idiosyncracies you can be highly productive.

Elive is reasonably well equipped to handle multimedia. Bearing in mind I was running it in live mode, my sound was automatically configured and I was able to watch YouTube vidoes in Firefox and listen to BBC Radio 5 Live streams, although it did falter over movie trailers on the Apple website. After rooting around in the Firefox plugins listings I discovered the Mplayer plugin pre-installed, along with a Java plugin and Flash 9.0 - not bad.

One other nice surprise was the Google Preview 3.11 add-on, which presents small website previews of your Google search results. My commercial DVD film would not play, however, in either Xine or Mplayer, which was somewhat disappointing. My USB memory stick was detected and the file manager, Thunar, launched, allowing me to access the contents.

Given the hardware I was using, I expected the live CD to respond quickly and it did not disappoint, helped along by Enlightenment which is often touted as a good window manager for much lower-specced machines than mine. Elive's default software selection is very good indeed.

Here is a sample -
VirtualBox / Wine / Firefox / Abiword / Gnumeric / Mplayer / Xine / Xmms / Gimp / Blender / Cinelarra / Acidrip / Skype / Transmission / Brasero / Synaptic / a wide selection of Games / gFTP / gtKam / aMSN / Xsane.

Not bad, for starters.. and then there is that Debian repository. There is certainly enough here to cover most of the major bases should you decide never to install Elive. Ah... now to the installation. I should warn you that there is little documentation immediately obvious in Elive - the only hints you get are some browser links to the user forum (not that well populated, from what I could tell) and the project's wiki (which appears to be dead).

No matter, I decided I would try the installation on my 80GB test partition. The Elive installer starts with three simple options:

Novice - "mostly automatized"
Easy - "Without ask much questions"
Advanced - "You can't skip any questions".

Those comments in direct quote marks are by the developers, by the way, not me - I will not criticize their English because my grasp of Flemish is non-existent. If you choose the 'Easy' option you do get a helpful idiot's guide to installing Linux which covers the various procedures and terms you are likely to encounter.

Because I did not want a bootloader installing in my MBR (Linux Mint's GRUB already lives there and I chainload my test partition), I guessed the Advanced mode was most likely to give me the control I required. I was correct. Elive uses the Reiser filesystem, so first I used the included Gparted program to format the test partition accordingly.

Once you are done sorting out your partitions and the install actually begins, Elive offers you Elitaire - a solitaire card game - to help pass the time... nice touch, that. The OS prober detected Linux Mint on my main partition and once Elive's GRUB was installed to the Elive root partition, I was pleased to see a Mint entry included - I could boot backwards and forwards all day with this kind of setup!

Elive's initial post-install boot was painfully slow but once I got to the ultra-cool login screen things quickly picked up speed. Your initial boot into Elive includes something I have not come across before in all my time testing Linux distributions - a message telling me that my system required some fine tuning. Once the root password was entered, a terminal launched and DebConf ran, with Auto, Manual and Expert options.

I chose Auto and Elive stopped and then re-started all the necessary services - ACPI, GPG keys, bluetooth, DHCP, hald etc. It only took a couple of minutes to do its thing and, frankly, I am not altogether sure that anything useful was done in that time. So, there I was staring at my brand new Elive/Enlightenment desktop.. and staring.. and staring.. and staring. The reason for all this staring is the fact that the desktop fonts in Elive (and, come to think of it, OpenGEU, which also uses Enlightenment) are ridiculously small.

Why so small? I really don't know, but I guarantee you will need to do something about them. And speaking of changing things, Elive/Enlightenment is a tweaker's paradise.

It is easy to add or remove things to the Ibar panel running along the bottom of the desktop (which, incidentally, has so far been rock solid stable, unlike the frequent crashing version I experienced in OpenGEU). If you took up my little Google images challenge earlier you will already know just how customisable Enlightenment is, so go ahead and fill your boots.

The only serious glitch I have so far found involved adding a new Enlightenment theme - I downloaded a nice Apple-style theme from the internet, only to find that when I switched to it, no text was showing in any of my left or right-click mouse menus. Otherwise, I have found no real reason for concern over this distribution's 'Unstable' tag - it is infinitely more stable than its Enlightenment stablemate, OpenGEU. Elive's system maintenance tools are quite good - the ElPanel is where most of your administration work will be done.

While it is a nice piece of individualistic design work (see screenshot), the lack of clear labelling - you click on an icon and get scrolling digital text in the bottom window - makes using it a bit hit and miss. Package handling is a dream thanks to the inclusion of Synaptic - I added the Claws email program from the repository without any major dramas. To conclude, I recommend Elive for anyone wanting to learn more about Enlightenment.

It is a solid, full-featured OS in its own right, thanks to its Debian heritage, with Enlightenment making for a particularly tasty, if somewhat exotic icing on the cake.

Further information:

Get Elive here
Learn more about Enlightenment here
The Elive project's documentation is here
The Elive wiki is here
And finally, the Elive forum can be found here.

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