Vlogcanic

While the Enlightenment windown manager makes for a really cool desktop environment, it doesn’t really do the whole trick. It lacks a bit of features and funcionality to be a fully fledged and self contained desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME. That’s the gap that OpenGEU aims to close.

Conceived and started in Italy by Luca de Marini (who, oddly enough, is an artist and designer and not a code writer) OpenGEU, formerly known as Geubuntu, is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with Enlightenment as the default desktop and window manager and quite a bit of extra work by the distro’s developers that fills the holes in E17 by using some tools and programs from the GNOME desktop –the whole point is to have the best of both worlds available in one single distro.

So far, OpenGEU has released two versions: Prima Luna (based on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04) and Luna Nueva (based on Gutsy Gibbon 7.10). Both are available as installable LiveCDs but, alternatively, you can turn a standard Ubuntu system into an Enlightened one (with OpenGEU’s extras) by installing and configuring a set of .deb packages.

OpenGEU is in active development aiming to improve and perfect the way in which GNOME and Enlightenment 0.17 get along in Ubuntu. It’s community based.