14 DAY TRIAL // Liquid Lemur Linux 2.0 Alpha 1, a distribution based on Linux Mint 17 Xfce, has been released and is available for download and testing.
You might think that the name Liquid Lemur Linux is a strange one to have, mostly because it doesn't make any sense. The moniker does convey one thing in particular, that the OS is different from what you can already experience.
When someone says that their distro is based on Linux Mint, you immediately picture something akin to that desktop version, but Liquid Lemur Linux is extremely different from it. In fact, it's pretty different from anything you've tried, or at least from all the major Linux OSes out there.
What the dev is saying about it
Liquid Lemur Linux is the work of one man, so it's understandable that the development of the OS might go a little bit slowly. The goal is to have a distro built from the ground up, but for now he settled on Linux Mint.
"This release is based on Linux Mint 17 Xfce 64bit. Liquid Lemur is only available in 64bit. Linux Mint was used to reduce development time and because it worked out of the box with my Hybrid desktop. My goal is to build it up from scratch (like I did with the original Liquid Lemur) at some point."
"Liquid Lemur uses bits and pieces from Xfce and Window Maker to create a Hybrid desktop of sorts. Tools are included to Morph it into a standard (Legacy) Window Maker look. There is also enough of Xfce installed that one could actually run Xfce instead. Going forward, all Lemur releases will be based on the Hybrid desktop model. There will be no Xfce releases as before," notes the developer.
He explains that some of the problems in Linux Mint might also be present in Liquid Lemur, the installer is not complete, the Morpher and Themer tools are still experimental, the Control Center is not complete, and the first-run welcome app doesn't start automatically.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Liquid Lemur Linux 2.0 Alpha 1 from Softpedia. This is a Live CD, but you might have a problem running it from a USB drive. We managed to get it working in VirtualBox, and that's a really good place for testing an Alpha release.
