I tried out the Elive cd today. Those of you who know me the longest know that I used to be a big fan of the Enlightenment desktop on linux. Well thanks to Elive I was able to try it again after a couple of years having just tried it on Mandrake.
Well, the CD had issues. It tries to load the Linux 2.4 kernel which should be ok but on my PC it spat out a lot of errors and they set it up to load up a spanish keymap by default so I have to hit F3 or F4 during startup and put in options to boot with the Linux 2.7 kernel and with US as the language.
But there is a problem. It doesn't seem to support USB keyboards which is what I have my old keyboards are PS/2 but they are my families broken ones I really should throw away. So I'm unable to do much and I wasn't able to get it to load E17 only good ol' E16 that I used to try to emulate on Windows.
Since my mouse worked I did muck around a bit launching things and what not and I find that Enlightenment just doesn't have as much polish and solidness as Mac OS X has. They also have replaced the default theme "Brushed Metal" with a theme that has titlebars that sort of Ape Aqua a little but the titlebar buttons and rest of the theme are just so blah. I mean just
look at it. What where they thinking? They need a theme to impress and show what E can do loading by default. Yeah I know you can easily change it but still an alternative desktop needs to make good first impressions.
Maybe if the next version of Elive has USB keyboard support I might be able to get it to load
E17 which is the cutting edge E that I am wanting to try out.
Ok I got the keyboard to work and I found "Entrance" which is the E17 login window but no other thing of E17 that relates to it's desktop shell seemed to be present.