I recently downloaded the most recent eLive LiveCD (eLive Topaz). The website caused me to believe that it might be advantageous to me both because it involved a window manager that I had been interested in back in the early days of Linux and because it appeared to lack PulseAudio. I was well familiar with downloading and burning .iso images to disk and, indeed, had no problems with it.
Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, June 5, 2010) I took the opportunity to boot into the cd to see what it had to offer. It looked good. Crisp, clean, fast, configurable, and it was based on Debian, so I was assured of being able to get programs that I wanted without any trouble. I spent some time playing with it, getting a good feel of it, and felt comfortable with the way it behaved. So, I decided to install it.
And that’s when I ran into some problems, not that I knew it at first. Normal procedures seemed to proceed normally – Select language, keyboard, etc., pick where I wanted to put it (manual partitioning) – and then it happened: a box popped up that caused me to seriously wonder about the mental state of the developers of eLive. The small window indicated that I needed to go to a particular URL and enter a particular code (no copy and paste available in the box, which meant that my poor, tired, old eyes would have to be absolutely sure that I entered the code manually exactly as it appeared in the box). Upon entering that code and paying an unspecified sum of money I would be emailed the actual installer.
Um . . . pardon me, but there is a small problem with that. Well, actually, there are a number of problems with that, and they aren’t small:
- I’m in the middle of an installation procedure. My email program is on a different partition. Which means that I need to drop out of the installation after supplying the information and money, reboot into the other partition, bring up the email client and save out the installer.
- I have already partitioned the particular area of my hard drive where I intend to install eLive, an area that had held a previous installation which I no longer wanted but was the LAST installation that I had done. Needless to say, Grub was screwed – I could no longer boot into the active, stable partition that held the email client.
- At no time had I been informed as to the actual amount that eLive expected me to pay them for the installer. It simply stated that it was a small amount or write an article praising eLive in order to obtain an invitation. (see http://www.elivecd.org/codes ) Well, that’s just hunkie-dorie. I’m supposed to agree to pay an unspecified amount in order to obtain an installer for something that, though it looks good, I’m unsure as to it’s actual suitability? Or write an article about a product praising it when I’m not sure it will even fulfill my needs? Can anyone see the absurdity of this?
- In addition, this comes perilously close to violating the GPL by applying additional requirements on top of the specified license.
However, that’s not the worst. The worst is the lack of intelligent planning on the part of the developers:
- Expecting one to obtain an email on a partition which has no email client installed and configured. Therefore
- Expecting one to drop out of an installation and go to a different partition to obtain the installer, when
- Grub has already been destroyed by the part of the installation already completed, and in addition
- To PAY for this round-robin of absurdity.
Were this a paper in a Logic class, I would immediately give it the following grade:
