14 DAY TRIAL // Elive 2.3.4 Beta, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has been released and is now available for download and testing.
The Elive developers have been working for some time on this new branch of their distribution and they have already released a number of Betas. Each new build brings new changes and improvements and it's likely that we are getting closer to a stable version.
“Elive is extremely fast because it consumes minimal resources and it is highly optimized. You can even run Elive in your oldest computer transforming it back to a powerful workstation, so imagine how fast it will run on your newer computer!”
“We use for that the most lightweight combination of applications, libraries, and techniques to build a very responsive and optimized system. You need to satisfy your needs at the speed of the thought, not to wait for them to load,” say the developers on their website.
According to the changelog, a “Send-to Dropbox” option has been added to the File Manager, right-clicking on a Movie in the File Manager will now provide options to get the subtitle for that file, the applications menu has been redesigned and it's now more intuitive, the laptop Wi-fi switch now works properly on re-activation, and the keyboard hotkeys for volume and mute control are now configured automatically.
The developers also explain that the proprietary drivers for NVIDIA and AMD haven't been included by default in the distribution, but future releases will most likely make them available from the start. Until then, users will have to rely on open source drivers. That doesn't mean that you can't install the actual driver packages or that you can't get them from the repositories.
The makers of Elive also say that the Beta versions are not so optimized as the Stable ones due to debug flags and developer profiles, so it's very likely that you will encounter various bugs and problems.
More details about this distribution can be found in the official announcement. You can download Elive 2.3.4 Beta right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. It's recommended that you use a virtual machine to test the OS, like VirtualBox for example.
