Submitted by Elive, the distribution dedicated to E16 and E17, has reached the magical 1.0 barrier. “This version is ready for the end-users and not just hard core testers. It is a more intuitive easy to use and more efficient system. It has better integration of the file-manager and the mime-types, a nice kernel especially for multimedia and big processes loads, a light weight foot print, much better compatibility with your (possible) Windows system/software, more hardware supported, better graphical recognition, and many more things that you can find in the complete changelog.”
– If you don’t care about the future of Elive, and you really think its possible to live off nothing, or you just can’t possibly make a minor donation, then you can download Elive from a slow server.
Sorry the slow server is down for upgrades, but I will be back up soon
I always get uncomfortable when I am asked to give money to try out a live CD…
Understand, but a modest donation is all that’s needed. They are a small bunch of people, its one of the most original and creative distro projects there is. I usually just download live trials, but this one, they deserve something for reaching 1.0. If ever people deserved some support and recognition, its them. Mostly because of creativity!
Not connected with them in any way, don’t even know them, just greatly admire what they’ve done.
They should offer a free liveCD only, and ask for donation for another liveCD one with an installer.
Anyway, don’t get me wrong, I’m not shocked. I’ll just wait until the slow servers are up again, try it out, and if I like it enough to install it to my HD, I’ll give them something. Giving that it’s debian, I don’t see why I wouldn’t like it, it’s my fav distro.
The OS is installable to hard drive from the LiveCD, and always has been. It’s plainly posted on their website.
Yes, I agree.
A simply “Donate” button with a one or two-liner would be more than enough to get those who want to donate.
But instead the download page feels like a sleazy used car salesman.
After reading that page I decided I don’t want to have anything to do with elive.
Funny, I put 0 into the donation box and it still opened a paypal payment page.
Secondly, e17 is really taking too long to reach stable status.
If they don’t have enough people then that’s understandable but if they’re like Mplayer, having eternal beta status then that’s bad for attracting users.
Most serious users will not use a beta package, especially on production machines so it’s important to have a stable release.
And it’s important to have a stable release at least once a year.
If it’s longer between releases then it makes people nervous as to the status of the project.
Is the project dead, is it reliable, is it going to be around in 6 months when an update is needed? Wil it provide security updates?
I’m not so sure about the ‘eternal beta’ or any of that: Given that they’re building all of their toolkits (almost) from the ground up (and doing quite a good job of it too, I must admit I’m jealous of some of the ideas), three years isn’t a very long time. And I’m not sure how something can be in beta, and have people complain about a stable release, when there hasn’t even been an official release yet.
I want to see a stable E17 as much as the next person, but I can also appreciate withholding until it’s done – especially since desktop icons were only recently added. They’ll get there in time, and I suspect when they do, they’ll make stable releases as often as they do of E16.
Edited 2007-07-07 01:00
Well, correct me if I’m wrong. But was there any stable releases between 2003 and 2006?
Seams to me that e16 was abandoned for about 3 years and then couple updates done on it this year.
And e17 is now in devel for what, over 2 years?
What are people supposed to use in meantime?
You can’t stop development, start a new development, and release nothing for 3 years.
And it’s not a whole OS, just a desktop so devel should not take that long for at least first stable release.
Well, it doesn’t matter, people have to use something meantime, so most moved to KDE, Gnome etc.
E17 overdeveloped itself into irrelevance since it take s a lot to get people and companies to change their destop environment they’re used to.
0.16.7.2 – 2004-12-13 23:36
0.16.8 – 2006-02-08 12:06
Actually, it was only a little over a year and two months (according to the releases on SF.net), not quite three years. Even in the meantime, there *was* work to move from 16.7 to 16.8, so I wouldn’t say that “development stopped”.
I won’t bother arguing with the rest, since I suppose it’s a matter of personal preference whether you prefer buggy software (and baked-in hacks to ship before a release is truly ready) or a long development cycle. The long development cycle has certainly worked for Code::Blocks – some people I’ve encountered swear by it, despite the fact that only nightly builds have been available since the plans to make RC3 were scrapped.
Edited 2007-07-07 02:47
I agree shapeshifter, begging for donations won’t ever pay the bills for them, purely because people in general are bombarded daily with people asking money for things, begging will only keep them an underground geek project.
I think the PC-BSD and Ubuntu models of companies backing up the distros financially would work better than a few hundred dollars from a few geeks IMHO.
Mod me down if you will; the Elive forums look like an after thought compared to PC-BSD and Ubuntu, this is only constructive criticism if they want to hit the mainstream users and if they want a bigger ground swell of user rapport.
“I always get uncomfortable when I am asked to give money to try out a live CD…”
I always get uncomfortable when people expect others to give them everything for free. High speed bandwidth costs money, creating elive eats into their unpaid, free time.
Just live with the slow downloads, donate or stop whining.
Actually, I don’t have a problem with the way they do things…they are very upfront about it and there is no commitment. They don’t even put a minimum price on the donation. I tried some of the early build and it really is quite impressive, especially on olders systems.
To be honest, I think it wouldnt hurt me if more groups did this. I would rather spend $1 to download something of quality, than have a endless stream of really low quality work coming down the pipe. It’s a LiveCD + Installer, with no minimum donation…..
I will probably download if just for general purposes tonight, and donate a few bucks just to support a group that does a good job…I think if more people ACTUALLY donated to projects, we would see much higher quality software brought to the table over time…but thats just my $1 worth.
I’ve been running linux for over 10 years now so I’m no newbie and I have to say that these guys are really on to something here. I have been wondering for years why noone ran with E back when 16 first came out as it really was way ahead of it’s time. Now, someone finally has and they have done it right to boot. This distro is an absolute pleasure to run on my laptop and I constantly have people looking over my shoulder out at hotspots when they see the eye candy. I always get questions like “what version of Mac is that?” Which is pretty funny and something I hadn’t considered before several people asked. Anyway, great to see these guys reached 1.0! Highly recommended!
yanik try to download Elive 1.0 iso file from this ftp server if you don’t want to use slow and free Elive server:
EDITED OUT
good luck
Edited 2007-07-06 13:28
I love enlightenment. I can remember one of my windows enthusiast friend just fell on the floor after seeing e16 and that’s only last year just before the release of Vista. e17 is really great compared to e16.
However, e17 is even not a beta yet, right! Then how can ELive be a stable one. I don’t understand. Anyway, I am going to download it, at least for use as a live cd.
Great work guys, keep it up!
If you read the link page then you will see (if I’ve got it right) that they have only some of the E17 features implemented, and if you want the rest you can get them from “testing”.
Near the bottom of the top text block.
elive is absolutly the bestprebuilt ‘desktop’ distro out there. and being built from the ground up to be debian compatible makes it everything that thouse other desktop distros should be.
i donate to them every now and then and i dont even use it on my main box, im to much of a debian purest to switch, but i still love the distro and have talked several of my friends into using it.
I tried it – including the dontation, I did feel a little uncomfortable donating to something I hadn’t tried yet. It installed OK, but after a couple reboots the hard-drive disappears – grub says it can’t find the partition. I did it twice with EXT3 and ReiserFS. Both times the same problem. I put back DSL on the laptop, no problem.
My point isn’t to file a bug here, but to vote with those who say you shouldn’t expect people to pay for something unseen. Especially for me, it leaves me with a useless product (btw, the checksum was fine on the download).
However, I only donated $5, so I’m not out that much. I’ll keep following the project, because it seems very promising. I’ll try it out on a few more machines to see how it goes.
for those interested, there is a direct “official” download link at http://www.distrowatch.com that isn’t slow or requires donation.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=04334
i am running the livecd now and although it does look really good and although it is really very fast and responsive, it feels more like a beta or rc then a final release.
I am having some issues with it, but then again E17 is still pre-alpha so it isn’t a real surprise that there might be some bugs.
the thing that is keeping me from installing it on my optiplex gx270 or my precision m65 is the kernel bug that plagues (mainly dell) pc’s in the 2.6.28 series. Booting takes really long, it waits for 2×30 secs with the ata1 and ata2 ata_piix error.
i found (wireless) networking a bit difficult to configure and somehow themes/walls/icons from the internet did not take, but that might be due to the fact that i am running it from the livecd.
Some fonts were inconsistent (large) but i found a fix for that on the ubuntu forums.
the animations in icons and wallpapers and so on are really well done, stylish and subtle and i prefer it to the over the top not very practical bling from compiz-fusion. I do wish that the whole package was a little more consistent, not all dialogues are looking the same nor are the fonts.
the load of my desktop, even running from cd is very low 0.02 ( a joke compared to sabayon with beryl) and apps startup lightning fast even on my optiplex. I did not encounter any crashes or anything yet.
It does appear to be really stable, my livecd has been up for 5 days now and no memory leaks or freezes.
I have been told however on the forum that elive might not always be 100% compatible with apt-get install/(dist-)upgrade for upgrades to new versions or the installation of apps that are also offered as cd-packs, that would be too bad.
i am thinking about installing it to my harddrive if i could fix at least the ata_piix thing, or i might use ebuntu (for now ubuntu feisty x64 server edition with gdm, xorg and E17) which runs equally fast has a bit more modules but does not look so “finished” as Elive.
SvR
I had a problem with that also. I could manually configure WEP from the command-line, but the GUI wouldn’t take. It was kinda funny. The text field for the WEP key required me to enter the key (56-bit) as follows:
1234-5678-9a
Previously, all text entry fields for WEP expected the key either as 123456789A or 0x123456789A. This was the first time I had to manaully put dashes after the 4th and 8th number. That could throw a few people off.
I found it rather amazing what stuff E17 can pull off graphically with no slowdown or apparent cpu usage, as compared to stuff like compiz. Would have been nice to see their approach become more mainstream as opposed to out current opengl dependent solutions. Compiz has come a very long way, and should only get better, but it’s mileage may vary alot depending on hardware compatibility. With E17 hardware doesn’t really matter much at all it seems.
I used to have the same trouble with the booting, it was annoying. Try this and let me know if it works for you:
http://fak3r.com/2007/06/22/failed-to-set-xfermode-solved/
i’m glad that enlightenment has been getting some attention recently. e17 looks pretty svelte. i’m glad there are finally some usable themes. i started using enlightenment on and off way back in 2000 or 2001. my biggest complaint was always the window decorations. everything was just over the top and garish. otherwise, enlightenment has always been snappy and a pleasure to work with. not a resource hog at all, yet still very eye-candy laden if you so desire.
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
This really shows how much even a small group can acomplish with a good idea. Makes MS with all the resources fade away in my humble opinion.
Elive has rightfully so brought Enlightenment into the spotlight and made an example that hopefully gets picked up by the larger distro bakers.
Kudos to the developers of Elive on 1.0 release. The world would be a better place if people appreciated others good work. The best way to express gratitude (imho) is to have some donation to have the project rolling and it works both ways, thanks guys. Good work should not go unappreciated.
Highlight
– Engage, the superb OS-X-like animated panel. (Note that, by default, the XFCE panel is used, not Engage).
Lowlight
– Elive will not load on my Via-based laptop.
– Elive is not just a live CD, but a distro with its own repository on top of Debian Etch.
– Elive borrows heavily from XFCE and Gnome. It is a showcase for the E17 window manager and desktop environment, not for E17 applications. By default it uses the XFCE panel and file manager (thunar), numerous Gnome configuration tools, and the urxvt terminal emulator.
– Elive is reliable, but lacks polish. The default settings have room for improvement: better (free) fonts, and more appropriate font sizes, could be used. My attempts to increase font sizes did not work. There is a lack of documentation. Even the project wiki is read-only.
– Some E17 tools are provided but are not started by default; they can be found if you delve into the packages and use the command line.
– The authors are entitled to ask us to pay for their work, but bear in mind that you can get a much more polished desktop distro for free. The people who will be most interested in Elive will be those who want to try out E17. I think that that the charging policy is short-sighted because the Elive project would benefit by attracting more contributors.