E-live is a new (for me at least) Linux distro which I found on last Software Freedom day event. I was stunned when I saw the e-live desktop for the first time. Once I saw that laptop with a cool, dark, glassy, high tech looking background, I couldn’t resist myself from walking to the guy who was with the laptop & ask him what the Linux distro he is using is.

I was really impressed by the look. It was like love at first sight. I wanted to get a copy of it & when I found a break I asked Gayal to burn me e-live. Yes it was Software Freedom day so Gayal burnt me e-live & I didn’t even pay or the blank CD.

I used e-live live CD for the first time 1GHz AMD Athlon XP machine with just 128MB RAM. e-live warned me that it won’t work well with 128MB. It’s good I ignored that message & waited biting nails to find e-live working on that machine. The performance was great for 128MB RAM.

MP3s, DVDs & everything I tried worked just fine. It identified the NTFS drives easily & let me read/write on them without any headaches. Soon I forgot that I was working with 128 MB memory. I played a little game & was really impressed with the whole e-live experience.

Once I came home I installed it on ma old 60GB hard drive which is used as a ‘data traveler’, leaving 4 partitions to be NTFS (don’t ask me why ;) ). There were no problems until this moment but my friends were amazed of the thing. The night-sky looking background is great. I can see stars glowing & sometimes meteors flashing across the screen.

e-live is debian based, comes with ‘Enlightenment’-a lite window manager. I’m really happy with the performance & find it really hard to go back to those *popular* Linux distros. If you use Linux live CDs as a recovery tool, e-live will just work fine.

Wanna give it a try? Check here. [wikipedia]