Elive is a non-commercial Linux distribution based on Debian and uses Enlightenment as user interface.
Elive was born in Belgium prior to 2005 as a private experiment by its founder to customize a Knoppix Live CD running the Enlightenment and with the designs based in the Evil Entity distro, it was called Tezcatlipotix, since the result was better than expected the desire to create a public version started. Two months later the first public version with the name of Elive appeared publicly, appearing directly in Slashdot.
Elive has access to online repositories of Debian (Wheezy) and uses its own repositories with more than 2500 packages that includes own specific software for Elive, extra software, or packages that replaces the default ones provided by Debian, improving the overall system and integrity. Elive comes with a complete set of included software to fit any needs for example free programs as: LibreOffice, Chromium, Iceweasle, Icedove, VLC media player, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Skype, Virtual box, Avidemux,...Elive has 3D effects without need of an accelerated graphic card.
Elive offers images specifically built for Enlightenment.. The latest development release of Elive, Elive 3.7.14 BETA features a customized version of Enlightenment Window Manager.
Elive is a very light and fast system which makes it a very good option for old computers. The minimum system requirements
- Beta version: 500 MHz CPU with 256 MB of RAM
- Stable version: 300 MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM
- Older versions: 100 MHz CPU with 64 MB of RAMFor a better and complete experience, suggested requirements are Pentium 4 with Hyper-threading, 512 MB of RAM and any Graphics Card with Hardware acceleration capability.
Elive releases live install images for CDs, DVDs for the stable releases and USB thumb drives for beta, for IA-32 architectures. These Live images allow users to boot from removable media and run Elive without affecting the contents of their computer.
Although the name suggests otherwise, Elive works best installed on the hard drive rather than used as a live distro, so it's claimed to be good for a daily used basis. The installation of Elive in your computer is initiated from the Live environment. This is required to have an optimal configuration of the specific hardware which is due by automated tools that guide the user in the Live mode, then a clean installation can be proceeded with the system correctly configured.
Prior to Elive 2.0 (Topaz), the only way to get Elive installed on the hard disk was through a small donation. Although it still had free alternatives for those who couldn't afford to donate. Elive got the false reputation to be a commercial distro. Elive is developed mainly by only 1 man so to keep it running funds are needed to keep Elive alive. In 2017 Elive decided to remove this limitation by promising to release the 3.0 version entirely cost-free .
Package management operations can be performed with dpkg on the lowest level command or for administering packages the apt toolset is used.
dpkg provides the low-level infrastructure for package management. The dpkg database contains the list of installed software on the current system. The command can work with local .deb packages files, and information from the dpkg databases, but doesn't use repositories.
An Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) tool allows administering an installed Debian system to retrieve and revolve packages dependencies from repositories. APT tool share dependency information and cached packages.
All the sources codes including the new one are moved to Github repositories.
Two branches of Elive (also called releases, distributions or suits) are regularly maintained:
- Stable is the current release and targets stable and well-tested software needs.
- Beta or testing is the preview branch that eventually becomes the next major release.Other branches in Elive:
- Old these are old versions available the Elive Museum page. These are CDROM versions and aren't supported anymore but the site of Elive kept them available to download for old computers that require very light systems.
- Compiz was in the versions of 2009 an experiment with E17 and Compiz. But since 2.9.0 is included by default as a stable option.
