Debian & Enlightenment = elive

I was looking for something new in linux desktops. Ubuntu and it’s deriatives never really gave me what I wanted from a desktop and they always felt a bit slow on this system at least. I installed Archlinux and discovered the speed I was missing, but it’s too much tweaking neccesary really, ( Archers, please don’t kill me! I like Arch! ) but the point in bringing up Arch, it is where I rediscovered the enlightenment window manager! Installation is easy in Arch:

`pacman -Sy e17-svn e17-extra-svn desktop-file-utils`

and you’re done! Easy. But still, if you really want to enjoy enlightenment you have to check out elive. It is the most beutiful system you will ever see.

It is built on Debian testing, “Lenny”, the 2.6.26.8 linux kernel, and the enlightenment wm.

Thunar is the default filemanager, wich you might know from Xfce. It does a great job, but fails to browse network shares, as in samba. I have yet to find an replacement, I do not want nautilus eiter, so I’m stuck with sftp through the console for now.

Iceweasel 3.0.3 with the iFox theme is the default web browser, and has

Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124

Java 1.0.6

Mozilla-mplayer

Google Preview

Installed as plugins.

I removed mozilla-mplayer and replaced it with the newer gecko-mediaplayer, wich can play the movie trailers on Apple.com without any problem. Mozilla-mplayer cannot.

The installation of gecko-mediaplayer is not that easy, a simple `aptitude install gecko-mediaplayer` will not do, as it is not in the repos. It can be found, however, in the unstable, or “Sid” repos of Debian. You need to get the dependancys too:

For gecko-mediaplayer_0.9.3-1_i386.deb:

gnome-mplayer_0.9.3-1_i386.deb
libdiscid0_0.1.0-1_i386.deb
libmusicbrainz3-6_3.0.2-1_i386.deb

Install those, and the movie trailers works! yay!

So far I have been very pleased with elive. More to follow in the few days, when I’ve been using this system for a longer time.

This is the development release of elive, not the stable one. the stable download requires a small payment, but the development version is free of charge.

It comes with multimedia codecs and drivers for Nvidia ( probably ATi too ) installed by default. My nvidia 6200 was detected and resolution was correct on boot.

My pretty much default desktop:

My Desktop

Now, go GET IT!

Switching to Ubuntu, an adventure.

Found this great review of Ubuntu. AshPringle has a plan:

The plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition.

A very humoristic review too.

segmentation fault….50%

Today i got a segfault from aptitude on Ubuntu 8.10. This is caused by corrupted files in /var/cache/apt/ and is usually caused by bad hardware like harddrives and such, I discovered a bad memory module when I ran memtest.
The corrupted file in /var/cache/apt stops you from updating and installing packages, which isn’t very nice now is it? Here’s a fix for you:
run this in a terminal
sudo rm /var/cache/apt/*.bin && sudo aptitude update

Then I would suggest you run memtest86+ and check for memory errors to be on the safe side.

Thanks to Dean Lee for solving this and the guys and girls at ubuntuforums too.