When a Gnome reaches Enlightenment

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What is OpenGEU?

OpenGEU, previously known as Geubuntu, is a complete and fully functional Operative System based on the popular Linux Distribution Ubuntu. OpenGEU, a project started and designed by the Italian artist Luca D.M. (aka TheDarkMaster), is perfect for any Desktop, Laptop PC or even for a Virtual Machine. OpenGEU mixes the power and simplicity of Ubuntu and parts of the Gnome Desktop with the wonder and astonishing eye-candy of Enlightenment DR17.

OpenGEU will be a new experience for any user trying to run a stand-alone E17 Desktop in the past. To know exactly what Enlightenment is, we suggest you visit the Home Page of the project. On the user side, E17 appears as an incredibly nice looking Desktop Shell, composed of a Window Manager, a full set of libraries, a Desktop and a collection of modules and applications. In this stage, Enlightenment alone is not enough to make your desktop fully functional. The Enlightenment team itself has no plans on having Enlightenment become a full Desktop Environment like Gnome, KDE or XFCE.

That's where OpenGEU comes in. OpenGEU completes the missing parts of the E17 Desktop Shell and WM with a certain number of tools and applications from the Gnome Desktop.

In OpenGEU you can find a classic Ubuntu set of applications mixed with those provided and created from and for E17. Since this would not be enough for an easy integration of Gnome and E17, OpenGEU introduces a number of new E17 modules, applications and configurations specifically designed by the OpenGEU Team for you to enjoy a new and easier desktop experience! You'll discover a finally usable and productive Enlightenment 0.17 Desktop, even if you are a beginner!

Performance and advantages

Enlightenment is a light weight Desktop Shell, so your computer will run at a very high speed with incredible 2D effects, such as animations, fading, shadows and much more. E17 doesn't need a 3D card for all of its effects to run properly, since it can use Xcompmgr and the E17 module “Bling”. Thanks to the OpenGEU configuration tool, you’ll be able to easily activate and deactivate these desktop effects with a mouse click! What’s more exciting about our Desktop Effects is that they run properly on any kind of hardware, even on Virtual Machines!

Our Goals

OpenGEU is designed to become a completely community based OS, with the goal of providing you with the easiest E17 Desktop ever seen in the world: that’s why we are creating new E17 modules one after the other, as well as new configuration tools for gnome and E17. We need programmers, coders, hackers, anyone able to modify certain aspects of this distro so that it can be a better and less confusing User experience. OpenGEU will always be there to have E17 become easier and much more complete for any user trying it out, even starters. A great number of experienced users love and use E17 every day but OpenGEU brings to each user the ease of use typical of a normal Ubuntu distribution in an E17 Desktop Shell, filling some E17 faults with various Gnome tools. As time passes and E17 becomes ever more complete, OpenGEU will just integrate less and less parts of Gnome in E17: this will just speed up your system even more!

My name is Luca De Marini and I'm an Italian designer, I'm not a coder. OpenGEU is a strong idea I and InTiLinux Projects believe in. This idea is now become a reality thanks to the new Luna Crescente release (based on Ubuntu 8.04 the Hardy Heron). Every new-comer will be welcome, as long as he can help somehow the project! For that reason too, if you’re not a programmer, click on the Contribute link to know how to help OpenGEU anyway or if you've got questions / problems, feel free to use our forums.

InTiLinuX Projects

OpenGEU is a project hosted and hatched by the great Italian initiative: InTiLinux Projects. In its space OpenGEU finds the hosting services for this Website, plus its forums, Wiki and Blog, Svn repository, just because InTiLinuX believes in us. The OpenGEU project therefore thanks InTiLinuX so much for its great and constructive initiative.

InTiLinuX Projects has been created by the popular Italian Blog InTiLinuX and provides for free many vital instruments for Open Source programmers out there, such as an svn and trunk set. If you’ve got interesting Italian programs needing the instruments to grow or if you just have an interesting and innovative idea to apply in the Open Source and Gnu / Linux community, than don’t hesitate and visit InTiLinux Projects.

Design

OpenGEU will always come in two flavours, the Sunshine Edition and the Moolight Edition. The core will be the same for both versions, only graphical themes and design aspects will change from a flavour to the other. Enlightenment, after all, is a creation from artists to artists, so the design aspect is one of the most important one in a distro based on E17. Starting from Luna Nuova, only one OpenGEU Live CD will be available, with a default Sunshine version in it. Any time, while you're running the Live CD, you'll be able to change the look and feel of the distro from Sunshine to Moonlight by using our OpenGEU themes manager :)

With the great OpenGEU themes manager you’ll also be able to download and install automatically fantastic OpenGEU themes, set them, save them and customize them as you please. You are no more only limited to Moonlight ans Sunshine :)

Warning

E17 is Beta software, it's still in development, so it may segfault for no apparent reason at any time even if it's much more stable than before now and since it is being hard developed it will become ever and ever more stable. This won't make your entire system freeze or shut down, after all. You'll almost always be able to recover E17 (it never happened to me not to be able to recover it), so your work will be relatively secure and OK, but always rember that E17 is still a beta, so it's impossible for OpenGEU to provide a 100% stable version of this distro until a stable release of E17 happens. We all hope it will be any time soon but keep in mind that E17 is in an unstable stage since years now, so we can only try our best to compile for you an as much stable as we can version of E17, while still keeping it updated.

Please be sure to download OpenGEU 8.04.1 - Luna Crescente

from official Torrents and Links only!