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Linux Distro Elive Emerges Alive After 8-Year Hibernation (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

Designed to run on minimal hardware, Elive is very much a passion project of its leader, Samuel F Baggen. Based on Debian, the first version took a bow in 2005. The second stable version made an appearance in 2010 and it has been a long eight years for the third stable version to become available. The Register: Elive has an impressively low bar to entry, with hardware requirements for the distribution coming in at 256 MB RAM and a 500 MHz CPU, meaning that some very elderly silicon is theoretically going to be able to enjoy the highly polished Enlightenment desktop. "Theoretically" because after The Register took Elive 3.0.0 out for a spin on a relatively low-powered laptop, we'd frankly baulk at running it on anything much slower than a 533MHz Core 2 with at least 512 MB RAM. However, the Enlightenment UI is undeniably an attractive desktop, particularly if a macOS-alike dock is your thing, and runs at an impressive lick even on hardware that lacks graphics acceleration.

At its core, Elive is based on the Debian 8 distribution (aka Jessie), using the 3.16 kernel and version 0.17.6 of the Enlightenment X11 Window Manager. It comes replete with a full set of applications, including the ubiquitous LibreOffice and Gimp, along with a variety of productivity and entertainment tools, some of which are Elive's own. Unlike the previous version of Elive, 3.0.0 removes the requirement of donating to the project in order to install the thing locally (although Baggen was quick to tell The Reg that cost-free alternatives existed, but often with annoying processes).

5 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. it has no purpose that is already met by iggymanz · · Score: 2

    plenty of low memory/disk Linux distros out there for i386...

    And there are the BSD too, OpenBSD desktop can work with 32MB of RAM and 250MB disk, just as example.

    1. Re:it has no purpose that is already met by commodore64_love · · Score: 2

      My favorite "tiny" Linux distribution is "Puppy" because it's just so cuuuute ;-) And only needs 64 MB and a 486 CPU. Of course for actual real work Lubuntu is my preferred lightweight system.

      - I had to laugh when the article said "we recommend 512 MB". I'm still running an ancient Pentium 4 with XP on that exact amount of memory. I figure: Until the power supply or hard drive dies, I'll just keep using this ancient unit to watch youtube, read Gmail, etc.

      It's almost twenty years old! (Although my Sears TV has that beat... it surpassed 40 years a few months ago. I used to play Atari games on it!)

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. Article is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article claims Elive 3.0.0 is based on Debian 8. This is incorrect. Elive 3 is based on Debian 7, which is several months past the end of its end of life date, even for the LTS repo. This means Elive users will not have any security updates. It is not a good idea to install this OS.

  3. Ready for Robot Chicken guest open ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

    It's Elive!

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  4. Browser by markdavis · · Score: 2

    The real problem comes when you try to use a modern web browser with such a low-powered system. Some web sites might fare OK, but the current main web is such a crapzone of intense and unbelievably big javascript, forced video, HUGE images that it forces the client to scale, transparencies, fly-outs, mouse-overs, stupid animated transitions, hooks into a zillion other sites, that ANY browser that CAN render it halfway decently is going to gobble up all your memory and CPU resources with just a single, terribly slow page.

    So although such a system might work fine for some types of projects, but as a desktop, it would be pretty bad.

    Ironically, I just updated my browser, and have 5 tabs open half-screen, with ads blocked, and is doing NOTHING, yet it is consuming 50% of an entire core (hasn't done THAT before, but has since the update two days ago, it pretty constant). Top shows one of the processes at 50% CPU, yet about:performance says NOTHING about anything using resources. The tabs are 4 static/old forums, Slashdot, Hotmail, Youtube. And the Youtube one is just sitting on a listing of videos with nothing playing and no animation. If I close that tab, wham, back to a very low CPU, except it didn't work this last time I closed it. Annoying on a powerful 6 core system... but it would be crippling on a old/weak 1 or 2 core system.