Landy DeField

Downloaded the latest version of Elive --> http://www.elivecd.org/ to take Topaz for a spin liked it so much that I ended up changing all but two of my computers in my network over!!!!

First things first The Live CD/USB
The startup music completely sets the satge for a very sleek cool desktop manager.
My eeepc booted up extremely fast using the Live USB stick.Flawless
This brought my little eeepc back to life. My sound and video works flawlessly now.

I burned the .iso to CD for my desktop. I was astonished by the speed at which apps were opening and Internet surfing was happening especially considering it was a live CD. All of the hardware worked flawlessly. The only issue I had was that the boot hanged on a mdadm: device detection. A quick search of the Forums revealed that I needed to just be patient. Not an easy task for someone who has run Linux exclusively since 2001. :p I am just not used to waiting well except for every once and a great while a scheduled disk scan occurs and that is not very often. :D

I used the CD for both of the other office computers that I installed 'Enlightened.' This breathed much needed life back into both of these machines. :)

Onto The Install Experience
Flawless on all machines! No joke! Not one single glitch! In fact the live CD is so well done that I did not miss a beat on any of my work or play. I was able to have multiple browsers open while the install did it's thing.

Here was the best part of the install experience for me. I used debian Lenny previously on all but one machine. Since Elive is also based on Debian the install script detected this and converted all of the user login info and partition setup all over for me. This was true of the single Ubuntu machine that was one of the office computers as well.

I do think that it could be made a little bit more clear about having to pay to install Elive before downloading the .iso. Don't get me wrong that is not a complaint on being required to pay to install it. For those of you taken back by the thought of paying to install a Linux distro they do provide an option to write an article or articles about your experience with Elive in order to receive an install code. But before you think that that I wrote this to not have to pay for this gem of a distro think again. I not only gladly paid for each install and will do so again on the other two machines. But I will be writing about my experience about this killer Distro for many days to come.

Setup My Shiny New Elive Desktop.
I have used e16 and e17 before so I was familiar with the paradigm shift that comes with it. So the only thing I needed to do was spend a few hours tweaking my desktop just the way I needed it to be.

Conclusion
I am finding that my productivity has increased already as Elive has shaved off a few seconds here and there not having to make massive sweeps of the mouse across the desktop to access apps and configuration tools. I cannot not wait to report back at the end of the week. Once I have really found my rhythm with this most excellent of desktop managers and amazing well bundled live CD/USB - distro I will be reporting back.
To say I am extremely happy with Elive would be a gross understatement. I have been wanting to use enlightenment for some time now but really needed it to be packaged for me. I just do not have the time anymore to configure it all from SVN. Which is a good thing considering my time is taken up mostly by our work. That being said I am finding myself thinking about how I can schedule some time to be an active part of the Elive community.

Stay tuned more to come...