14 DAY TRIAL // Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian which uses the Enlightenment desktop environment to provide a unique user experience, has just reached version 2.3.9 Beta and it's ready for testing.
The Elive operating system is a little different from what you would expect from an operating system. In fact, the expression "unique user experience" is not in vain. Unless you have installed hundreds or thousands of Linux distros in the past, it's unlikely that you've seen this kind of desktop implementation until now. You can recognize Enlightenment at work, but beyond that, it's quite different.
To make things even more interesting, different in this case also means good. When developers choose to do things differently from everyone else, they don't succeed all the time. Elive is actually a much better OS than you would expect, and that can be easily observed from the screenshots.
New Elive versions arrive on a constant basis and they seem to be popping out at one-month intervals, more or less. This rapid pace of development and the short list of changes shows us that the final version can't be too far.
The devs want your help to make Elive even better
"We need your feedbacks and reports, each version can include new things not working as expected, if is the case please contact us on our live chat or report it to from the website!Note that this development release doesn't include yet the proprietary drivers for now (Nvidia/fglrx) but the open-source drivers should detect your hardware and configure your system without problems."
"Beta versions are not so optimized as the Stable ones due to debug flags and developer profiles, you can encounter errors and incomplete things, if you want a more polished system try the Stable version instead," said the devs in the announcement.
The changelog for Elive 2.3.9 Beta also mentions that the VIM suite is provided fully configured and will have all the plugins in place. Also, the installation process has been fixed, the Grub bootloader issues have been resolved, and a fix has been included for the Bash vulnerability.
More details about this distribution can be found in the official announcement. You can download Elive 2.3.9 Beta right now from Softpedia. This latest release is a lot more stable than the previous one, but the devs had some good reasons to call it a Beta. If you want to test it, don't use a production machine for it.
