elive was the last stop on this little four-day distro-hopping junket for the ugly little laptop, and to be honest, I only tried it because someone suggested it on one of the other reviewlets. Unfortunately, some real-life issues intervened yesterday, and I couldn’t spend more than an hour or so with it.
I’m glad I took a look though: This is a very impressive desktop. I’ll let the screenshots off the home page do the talking (mostly because I never set up anything different).
From the live environment, this has to be the most impressive setup I’ve seen thus far, even if it does step outside the XFCE boundaries I had drawn earlier this week. You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful setup, particularly on a machine that was intended for Windows 98.
Desktop effects are a top priority, and it shows. Animated sparkling wallpaper and shimmering mouseover effects. A throbber bar with a follower, in addition to an animated right-click menu. Embossed miniature windows in the workspace switcher. Even the bootup menu is more beautiful than most of the systems I build by myself. I’m ashamed.
And from a performance standpoint, it’s not the drag I expected it would be. The live CD booted in a matter of minutes, and in general there was no insufferable lag while it accessed the CD … or at least no more than I anticipated.
Like I said, I didn’t install this one (which is why I don’t have my own screenshots), partly because it’s a development release, and partly because I’m keen on getting a complete and stable system in place before my weekend starts. I also don’t like the idea of criticising a development release. (I hate it when people complain about installing alpha versions of Ubuntu when, in most cases, they shouldn’t be messing with prerelease software anyway 
)
But it’s definitely made me curious. It’s unusual enough and beautiful enough to warrant further inspection, either this weekend or in the immediate future.
For now though, I need to dig out my 7.04 alternate disc. 
Try downloading the stable version from a torrent (is it linux tracker?). That said, if you’re on 0.69, I found it very stable for the three-odd months I used it. And with Gem, the only problem I’ve had so far is encoding my dvds.
Elive looks nice, but I dont like the idea of usees ‘enlightenment’ as my main DE. Also, I think its a little querr that the distro manager makes you put in a donation to use the stable version…..
A good linux person would say: “Here is my distro,try it. If you like it and would like to see its development continue, please make a donation”
I noticed that too, and to be honest, that’s another reason I picked the development version over the stable release CD. I’ll admit it’s a turnoff, but so long as the newer version is somewhat stable, I’m doing my best to forgive it.
I looked at it back in 2005 and I was kinda impressed with the shiny, eye candy stuff back then. I think I hated the default file manager, and being on a laptop I missed the 3rd button and the scroll-wheel to fully utilize the enlightenment environment.
The donation thing is very odd. It’s like saying: here, use the buggy, unfinished version to form your first impression of our distro. And if you like it, you can have one with older software bundle, and less functionality but without bugs for this low price…. Hmm….
SAM Linux?
It’s an XFCE based pclinuxos.