14 DAY TRIAL // The Elive team has just announced the release of a new development version of Elive, mainly with a testing purpose. Elive is a GNU/Linux Debian based distribution using the Enlightenment desktop environment instead of GNOME or KDE.
Enlightenment (commonly known as E) window manager has a rich feature set that includes a good extensive support for advanced graphics. Even though it works very well with any desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE, E can also be used alone, substituting a full desktop environment. The classical features characterizing Enlightenment are: a virtual desktop concept allowing the use of a grid of workspaces called virtual desktops; the fact that it benefits from the ability to put windows into groups so that they can be resized, closed, have the border changed or completely removed a.s.o. As you can see, this window manager is designed to be as configurable as possible.
The new development build of Elive still has mirroring problems, but it brings new significant changes compared to the previous version. The most interesting improvement in this new release could be the DVD autolauncher, which benefited of enough work and bug-fixing so that now it's compatible with any hardware configuration, thus this time should work properly on any computer. Other features, such as the fixing of the message on File-Manager or adding the 1440x900 resolution should also be mentioned.
Highlights:
- automatic news reader included - GIMP can now print -cdrom now ejects when you close the liveCD system - Debian ETCH was used instead of the testing repositories - French or German variants for the Swiss keyboards in Elpanel->keyboard configurator - AMSN now supports webcams on MacBook computers
There are also some bad things that are still waiting to be corrected such as the fact that E16 cannot work on this version of Elive, unless you update the package of E16 for it.
You can download and test this release right now from Softpedia.