E-Live CD -- Little Report Here

[DIBL]

Someone recommended elive a week or so ago, and I was intrigued, so I tried it. You get it here: http://www.elivecd.org/

Since I bothered to put in 5 or 6 hours playing with it, I thought this would be a decent place to share the results. Here's the good, the bad, and the other. Please bear in mind that everything I know about unix and linux would fit in a thimble and leave room for Lake Superior ....

Good -- The live CD runs great on my system, configured my Nvidia Ge7900GS perfectly at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, configured my audio, and was playing streaming radio before I ever touched the keyboard. When I decided to install it, I used GParted (from a live GParted CD) to partition and format a spare hard drive, and then elive installed from CD slick as could be, with zero problems. The E17 enlightenment desktop is very nice -- both the default elive theme and the "night look" themes were great. Unfortunately, the audio did not configure itself as well on the real install as it did from the live CD, and I had some fiddling to do to get streaming radio to work again. But, the Synaptic package manager was functioning fine, I got the OpenOffice.Org stuff all set up, and the utilities were great. It even put up a Solitaire game (called "Elitaire") for me to play while the installer was running.

Bad -- This is more "looks bad" than "really bad", I suppose, but they have it arranged on the download site so you can either pay money to get a reasonable download speed/bandwidth for the ISO image download, or else get the free download from a "slow" server, which translates to between 36 and 40 hours at 4.9 kbps. So I let it run for 2 days to get the free version, but I wasn't impressed by that little arrangement. OK, now for real issues -- "cat /proc/cpuinfo" revealed that it only saw one of my CPU cores. "uname -r" indicated that it is running the 2.6.15 debian kernel -- I think you have to get to 2.6.16 or .17 to get dual core support. Kubuntu Edgy (2.6.17) has it for sure. Another bad -- when I installed "hotplug" to get USB pluggable devices supported, it somehow decided something critical had to be removed, and the next reboot didn't.

Other -- the guy in Belgium who writes elive apparently has a bad case of "we hate Bush" going on. I really don't care what his politics are, but the Firefox browser comes pre-configured with a number of "27 reasons America should surrender" sites, that I really wasn't looking for. Oh well, I guess that's what the "delete" button was made for ...

Conclusion -- They say elive will make older hardware perform better than it ever did. I can believe it -- it's really very fast. Unfortunately, the converse is also true -- it's not ready for new hardware such as mine.

Now you know.

[Wile E]

Hey, thanks for the mini review. E-Live was one of the distros I was thinking of trying out. Guess I'll avoid it for now, at least until it's more up to date with the current hardware.

[Zedicus]

im getting ready to use elive on my main comp. ive been running debian and deb based distros for a while now. elive can be updated via debian apt so u can run whatever kernel u can find. so dual core will work. also udev controls USB etc. now so u do NOT want to install hotplug. your USB wpuld have prolly worked fine before installing hotplug.

by all means give elive a try, i recomend E17 and the night theme in it. symply beautiful. when im running bedian pure i usually use blackbox so the E series isnt a big stretch for me.

also i recomend grabbing the developement build. its basically stable and has lots newer apps in it. last one i brab was 6.3. and it was amazing to say the least.

[DIBL]

Ahhhhhhhhh -- thanks Zed! It would appear I have been a victim (once again) of my own noobishness.

Is that Debian apt process something like the Ubuntu apt-get? Can you point to a "how-to" source? I didn't realize there was something more than Synaptic to use for finding and installing things in elive.

Thank you for this! I think maybe I'll start the 2-day clock on a download of the development ISO, just as you suggested.

[Zedicus]

just install the version u hav and change the apt-conf file to point to the dev sources... umm, that sounds complex... gimme a night an i will type up a quicky how-to based off of debian. i will do it from a terminal perspective so itl work on anything debian based.

(by the way, everything in ubuntu, everything ubuntu can do. it all came from debian.)

[DIBL]

Originally Posted by Zedicus

just install the version u hav and change the apt-conf file to point to the dev sources... umm, that sounds complex... gimme a night an i will type up a quicky how-to based off of debian. i will do it from a terminal perspective so itl work on anything debian based.

(by the way, everything in ubuntu, everything ubuntu can do. it all came from debian.)

Thanks Zed -- but save your energy. I found the debian.org site and there's an entire "how to" manual on apt. Now all I need is a little time and focus.

Thanks!