Grr..First GNOME, now KDE getting on to my nerves..No matter what I try i just cant get enough juice out of them..Yesterday I decided I will try E17 but couldnt quite do it because of the time needed to compile all the dependencies one by one..Luckily theres a live cd distro called elive 0.5.2 which attracted my attention. The screenshots were stunning and I could see why the developers were calling it a work of art.

Installer was quite buggy in the sense that you get only Ok and Cancel buttons, the latter one doing the job of the ‘No’ button. Also from time to time the time interval between two successive dialogs were quite freaky especially during the partition part. That said, the speed of installation is the fastest I have evr experienced..

After Installation the initial boot up time though small was extended by the post-install configuration and after that I was greeted by a very cool login manager called as entrance.

Elive offers two themes by default Elive and Lukas, a light and a dark theme respectively. By the way, eye candy was totally awesome with some sexy animations and effects. All this and my card doesnt even support direct rendering!! E17 is a really light desktop ‘shell’ but amazingly beautiful…

All said the desktop does require some bit of playing around. I took around 2 hours to get used to it. But let me assure you, its worth it. Now my desktop is less cluttered and sports a clean look..And this is the first distro I have used which has flash, java and win32 codecs out of the box.. Go get elive at Elivecd.org More about enlightenment at Get-E A detailed review here

Heres a screenshot of my desktop showing the snazzy elive panel. Note that everything moves in E17…too bad I cant show them. Check them out yourself :P