Elive's goal is to turn your old computer into a high-powered work-station again, with an Interface that dazzles everybody that sees it.
Elive comes with a full suite of applications for your work and leisure time needs. It offers everything from a full office suite to games and multimedia. You can enjoy watching movies or listening to music. You can even make your own DVD movies with menus, music and the works. Elive gives you the ability to make 3D animations, or compose your own movies in a real-time non-linear video editor from simple videos taken with your video camera. You can edit and manipulate audio and image files for better quality, effects, or design. And to round it all up, Elive has centralized settings and configurations in its own Control Panel called Elpanel.
Elive's main features:
Debian based: Elive is a distribution which is based on the well known Debian, Etch branch providing recent packages and stability at the same time. Elive replaces the Debian packages with customized versions if needed. About 280 packages have been added or customized.
Enlightenment powered: The Enlightenment window manager provides a desktop featuring a fast, light, very flexible environment which still offers eye candy and all the necessary resources to run your day to day applications. Elive includes two desktop environments, Enlightenment 16 for speed and perfect stability and a special version of Enlightenment 17 selected from cvs (regulary updated through Elive's test branch repository). Most of the programs built on top of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are also included.
Intuitive: Elive aims to be a confortable and easy Linux system (with high customization possibilities) but providing a maximum of power and speed to the experienced user. In a full preconfigured environment, user friendly tools are centralized in an original control panel to manage your system (Elpanel.)
Fast: One of the most important goals of Elive is to be fast and easy to use. You can control your PC like you always did or you have the possibility to work in a different way. With only one keypress you can open your desired programs or launch an action. You can also resize, iconify, move, switch desktops and more with just a keypress.