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Enlightenment. Linux users who have been around for awhile no doubt remember this X11 window manager. I remember using in around 1999 and 2000 myself. Since then KDE and GNOME have grown by leaps and bounds and that’s where most of my GUI usage been since then. Every once in awhile a new story pops up on the web about Enlightenment and I reminisce about using it back when few people had heard of Linux. So, with the latest Elive release announcement, I decided to give Elive a try. I wanted to see how Enlightenment stacked up against the latest from KDE and GNOME that I had recently tried.

Enlightenment?

Back in the day Enlightenment, or simply E, was strictly what is known as a window manger. More or less, that’s all it did — manage your windows so you could keep them organized. It also managed how those windows were displayed and what you could do with them (i.e. minimize, maximize, etc). It didn’t come with a bunch of applications. E was always known for having lots of eye candy and I remember browsing and exchanging E themes in the past.

Well, as time passed more people began preferring desktop environments that included a bunch of applications that looked and worked similarly. These desktop environments included a lot of extra features than simply managing your windows. It gave us things like docks, task bars, and lots of nice configuration tools to help us better manager the system.

The next version of E, 0.17 (DR17), is a complete rewrite of 0.16 (released in 2000) and has become itself a complete desktop environment. It includes a number of features and applications over its previous version such as a basic feed reader, a mail checker, and a taskbar.

Elive

Elive uses the upcoming Enlightenment Desktop for its GUI and since it has been awhile since I’ve used E, Elive seemed like a perfect candidate to see what the latest offering from the E camp is about.

From Elive’s website:

Elive is a complete operating system for your computer. It’s the perfect choice for replacing your proprietary, high-cost system. It is built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet your needs for a complete operating system while still offering the user eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements.

Turn your old computer into a high-powered work-station again, with an Interface that dazzles everybody that sees it. This is Elive’s goal.

Booting the Live CD

I’m using my desktop system to test this distribution. Just to refresh my readers, this is a self-built system with an Athlon 64 x2, 2GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800GT, and SATA drives.

After downloading and burning the elive_0.6.5_unstable.iso file, I put the CD in my desktop system and booted it up. The first thing you’re presented with is a nice boot loader screen with a good amount of options to choose from.

Here’s the Elive boot loader screen (taken from VMware Fusion Beta on my MacBook Pro, the distribution itself was tested on my desktop as specified above):

Elive boot loader

After the boot loader, a splash screen comes up to hide the kernel information. Eventually you get to a screen that asks you to pick your “Look’n'feel” for Elive. Here is that screen as well, also taken from VMware for display purposes:

Pick the theme you want to use.

I decided to take the default Elive look, since it claimed that it would reflect peace and calm. I like peace and calm, so why not?

After I chose the theme, Elive told me it detected my Nvidia graphics card. Here it gave me the option to decide which Nvidia display driver I wanted to use. The options were: nvidia_new, nvidia_old, nv, and vesa. I decided to go with nvidia_new, since I wanted the latest. I also knew that nv would result in my system freezing hard, and I felt no reason to use vesa since I could use the proprietary drivers. I must say this is a very nice touch for Elive. It is something Fedora 7 Test 2 could definitely have used when I tried it.

Then I got to pick my display resolution. It didn’t give me the choice to pick my monitor’s optimal resolution of 1440×900, so I was disappointed there. I decided to try 1440×1050 since that was the closest. I figured it might work.

Finally some extra information was displayed before we got to the graphical environment. Elive told me the user name and password for the regular user. I hit OK and the Nvidia splash screen appeared and X11 started up. I noticed my monitor was using 1152×864, but whatever.

The Elive login screen is pretty flashy looking. I chose to use E 17 to experience the latest and greatest.

The default desktop look is definitely peaceful and calming.

The peace and calm desktop

The dock at the bottom reminds me of Mac OS X. It has the same hover effects when you mouseover the buttons. It didn’t seem to (by default anyway) give you notification that a program was actually launching when you clicked on it. I started 3 Eterms accidentally because I kept clicking on the icon in the dock before anything appeared.

The included file manger is Thunar, Xfce’s file manager. (Xfce is another desktop environment in case you didn’t know.) Iceweasel and Icedove are the web browser and email client respectively. These are actually Firefox and Thunderbird, but due to some rebranding issues Debian decided to rename these projects in their packages. Hence, Elive being based on Debian, has inherited these renamed applications. Honestly I like the original names much better.

X-chat is included for your IRC needs, and amusingly enough it auto-joins you to a couple of channels on the freenode IRC server when you launch it. Everyone in both channels were idle.

X-chat and mplayer

Eterm was transparent, but not truly transparent. It only showed the background wallpaper through it, not other applications behind it. Elive would need to implement the Compiz project into its live CD for that to work.

The Enlightenment Configuration panel provided a way to edit some of E’s configuration settings. It didn’t have nearly the functionality or depth of the GNOME or KDE configuration panels, but it was functional. Elive includes its own “Elive Panel” that provides more in the way of system configuration options.

Enlightenment and Elive Configuration Panels

A number of other applications are included. For Internet applications, there’s also Gaim, Links2, Gftp, and Transmission for BitTorrent. In graphics there’s The Gimp, GQview for image viewing, GtKam, Blender, Elicit, and Xsane Scanner for scanning. Audio and video have a number of applications as well, including XMMS, Grip for CD ripping, Mplayer for video. Among the Office applications are Abiword and Gnumeric and Xpdf. There are CD burning applications and even emulators for DOS, and SNES (Zsnes).

All in all there’s a lot this distribution can do. It took me awhile to get used to using E again. It definitely looks like a next generation interface compared to KDE and GNOME. Elive is definitely fast compared to some of the other live CDs I have used. It doesn’t have to start tons of background processes compared to GNOME and KDE.

Elive and E are quite elegant. There’s no question it looks pretty cool. From Elive’s site, I gather the creators of this distro are artistic and like things to look cool. That being said, since Elive uses E, it doesn’t have as much of the coherence you get with using KDE or GNOME. The included applications are distinctly not E-like applications.

The Elive Panel does help a great deal with the system configuration but I don’t really like its interface. It tries to be too flashy. But it does work. In fact, Elive detected the wireless card I have in my desktop. That was surprising since it has been the only distribution to automatically detect and allow me to configure my wireless NIC that I’ve tried so far.

Final Thoughts

I definitely liked Elive. It is a fully functional distribution based on the Enlightenment desktop. The live CD configuration and setup is definitely among the best I have used. Giving me the ability to use the Nvidia binary drivers was an excellent feature of the distribution.

Being based on Debian makes the system easy to update and install new applications. You also know the underpinnings of the distribution are solid since it is based on Debian.

Enlightenment has all the flash that I remembered about it. The interface is essentially the same as it has been since the 0.16 release almost 7 years ago. Things have improved, though, and the dock at the bottom and a system menu make things more desktop-environment-like. The last time I tried E 0.17, about a year ago, it was really buggy. Things seem to have improved now and I didn’t notice any instabilities during my testing. I didn’t use it for long enough to make any hard claims to its stability though.

Despite what I like about Elive its feel is so different from what I’ve come to be used to that it seems somewhat tedious to use. I’m sure if I used it more extensively and for a longer period of time this would pass. It is a bit different from KDE and GNOME as far as desktop environments go, so it is simply a matter of getting used to it.

While I probably won’t use this distribution over a KDE or GNOME based distro, if you’re looking for something different, Elive could be for you. You won’t get your average desktop environment with it, and for some people that is a good thing. The hardware detection worked really good as well. I’d say if you’re curious, give it a shot. You don’t really have anything to lose other than a blank CD.

If you’ve tried it, let us know your experiences.