There's alot of talk recently about Enlightenment 0.17, which after three years of development, has now reached the point of usability. Enlightenment is a nifty desktop environment, not quite like KDE or Gnome, but build to impress. The resulting desktop may contains as much, or even more eye-candy than a Mac OSX desktop, so it's logic that a lot of people were waiting for the new version.


Now there's Elive, a live cd based on E17 with Debian, for you to test things out. What's even better is that the Ubuntu folks have put a page online which discusses howto install the latest cvs version compiled into deb packages on your PC, which is basically as easy as adding a line to your sources.list. I just installed the CVS beta of E17 on my PC, and must say that E17, just like E16, smokes other desktop environments in terms of eye-candy, though this doesn't mean that Enlightenment feels bloated in any way.


Unluckily, the provided debs are only for i386, which means that sparc is not supported. I'm seriously thinking about using my E3000 Sun server to build the sparc debs, though I will need to look for some webspace to host the +50 megabytes on deb packages...