One I rarely see mentioned has been around for years, works extremely
well even on machines with limited resources, and has plenty of "eye
candy" as well as performance:
Enlightenment. Currently, up to version 16 in the stable release, and
17 for a beta (which many distros are already using, by the way).
There are half a dozen distros that feature Enlightenment. Two that
seem to stand out are Elive and OpenGEU. From the Elive home page:
" Minimum Requirements: The minimum hardware for running Elive is a
100 Mhz CPU and 64 MB of RAM, but the minimum recommended hardware is
300 Mhz and 128 Mb of RAM. You do not need any special graphics card
or 3D acceleration to run Elive. "
On a more powerful system, Elive absolutely rocks! It's Debian based,
so many packages are available for it. <http://www.elivecd.
OpenGEU is presently moving from being completely Ubuntu based to its
ISOs being based on Debian, for many reasons. (Note that quite a few
others are doing the same thing). That said, it will maintain Ubuntu
packages as well if that is important to you. They discuss the reasons
for this change on their website. <http://opengeu.
Enlightenment takes advantage of things like hardware acceleration and
as much RAM and CPU power as you throw at it. However, it is stunning
to experience what it can do compared to whatever you might be running
now.
If you are running a distro presently, it may well have a package for
Enlightenment in your distro's repositories. Ubuntu has E16 available,
for example. Once installed, it gives you a boot option to run either
Gnome or KDE (if you have them installed otherwise, of course!) with
their own window managers or with Enlightenment, as well as a full
Enlightenment desktop. I often run KDE with Enlightenment, as I have
said here before, since it is faster and a bit lighter on resources.
So--if you're playing with various distros and haven't checked these
out, I suggest you might find it extremely interesting to do so. As
the name suggests, Elive has a "live CD" version--although I run it
from a USB key loaded through unetbootin personally.
David
No comments:
Post a Comment