SEEING THE LIGHT

Three humble developers of Bodhi Linux enlighten Jonni Bidwell on the ways of Zen and the art of distro maintenance.

- Jonni Bidwell

We’re almost as guilty as some of our readers when it comes to hoarding old hardware. If it ain’t broke don’t throw it away, we always say.

However, tracking down a distro that runs on older hardware can be a challenge, and finding one that holds its own against mainstream desktops seems very tricky indeed. But it needn’t be this way. Bodhi Linux will run on anything with 512MB of RAM and will occupy less than a gigabyte of its precious storage. There’s even a 32-bit version that will probably run on your dusty old Pentium III. Not only that, but Bodhi is pretty much unique in that it offers a fully configured Enlightenmentbased desktop out of the box. This means you get speed, usability and a unique style.

For those unfamiliar with the lore, the Enlightenment (E for short) toolkit was for a long time a rival to GTK and Qt, and in many ways was ahead of both of them. It’s still around today, now at version 25, but is used more by embedded offerings (for example, Samsung’s Tizen) rather than Linux distros. Bodhi’s Moksha desktop was forked from an older (and lighter) E-release, but a special E25 BodhiDev release is available.