Hello Everyone! Today is the day I review Elive 1.0 codenamed GEM. As with all the reviews I have written so far since June 1st 2008 I have put these standard specs for testing out distros in virtual machines:
- 512mb of RAM
- 8 GB hard drive
- 8 MB of video memory
and very little else. This time how ever I will not be installing it as I have very little space and time is limited since I am in Post-Secondary now.
Background on Elive
Elive is based off of Debian Linux with the E-17 and E-16 Desktop Environments. E stands for Enlightenment-#
When I first wanted to try ELIVE 1.0 I had to go jump through hoops to get it. It was either use an unstable or donate. I finally decided to buy a CD from a vendor in France. I got it about a month later. Two days after I had probably put it down or given it to my friend Tom Dryer. So I decided that I was going to download it again… I finally gave up with looking for the unstable versions download as I find the site confusing. I finally “donated” $5 CAD so that I could use this software. It was either that or 5 USD, 5 EUROs or something like that. I really do not have that much money so I decided to go with the $5 CAD plus hey I live in Canada.
So I downloaded the ISO image a couple of days later when the payment went through and I just decided I wanted to test it out rather then install it.
For the Web browser ELIVE 1.0 has IceWeasel. It is very nice and has the graphite firefox theme. Yes I know IceWeasel is somewhat based off of Firefox. There are a lot of applications but most of which I would never use anyway.
This is a distribution that has Enlightenment 17 but also comes with Enlightenment 16 which I have tried both.
For the login I have to login with a username and password. If I wanted to have a password on a Live CD I would just install it and get the password for my own account.
I sometimes spend a bit of time in the CLI. Unfortunately not many of the commands are the same. For example: ifconfig which usually is the command to which you can see your IP Address is no longer ifconfig. So I tried ipconfig seeing that it may have switched to the MS Windows command. That was not it either. So I just started typing ip and accidently pressed enter. That was the command to see the ip address. Talk about crazy! I spent almost 10 minutes looking for the command.
Overall I really like the Desktop Environment, ease of use and some of the applications but on the downside I really do not like how the commands are changed and how much time I have to work on figuring them out.
Rating 3/5 (On a generous day… which is today.)
Ryan Orser.
2 responses to “Elive Gem (1.0) Distribution Review”
[…] Elive Gem (1.0) Distribution Review When I first wanted to try ELIVE 1.0 I had to go jump through hoops to get it. It was either use an unstable or donate. I finally decided to buy a CD from a vendor in France. I got it about a month later. Two days after I had probably put it down or given it to my friend Tom Dryer. So I decided that I was going to download it again… I finally gave up with looking for the unstable versions download as I find the site confusing. I finally “donated” $5 CAD so that I could use this software. It was either that or 5 USD, 5 EUROs or something like that. I really do not have that much money so I decided to go with the $5 CAD plus hey I live in Canada. […]
It is pretty irritating to have to pay for a Linux distro before I can even try it out. Sure, I could try the unstable version, but the website practically claims it will end all existence as we know it if I dare install it on my machine. Thankfully it wasn’t that hard to find a copy of the .iso out there in darker waters of teh internets, but the next version is supposed to hold you up for a donation during the install process. It’s actually a nice distro, it might even replace MEPIS as my favorite lightweight distro. But I have to say, holding up a Linux user for a handout is going to sour them and I don’t see this distro going anywhere in the long term.
I’ve supported Ubuntu by buying merch and literature, and I’ve spread it around by word word of mouth. This distro won’t ever see a dime from me (I’m not going to reward those types of tactics), and I can’t really reccommend it over free distros either.