The latest gadgets and gizmos for your Penguin

Confess! You’re a sucker for eye candy, especially on your desktop. Well, feast your eyes on a new distribution that delivers one heck of a first impression. Based on Debian and powered by Enlightenment, Elive (http://www.elivecd.org/, pictured) is definitely eye catching, and a nice change from the standard KDE and GNOME desktops. Elive’s default theme is absolutely gorgeous.

Focusing heavily on multimedia applications and customization, Elive is targeted at the home market. If you don’t want to install Elive, take a test run using the live CD. Just don’t forget to wipe the drool off your keyboard.

Every once in a while, an open source project just smacks you in the face with it’s coolness. Chin up — here it comes.

Cleversafe (http://www.cleversafe.org/) allows you to create a distributed grid to store backups. Data from a designated machine is sliced up and spread out across the grid, which can vary from one machine to dozens, with no specific requirements. While each independent slice is worthless, a majority of pieces can be used to recreate lost data. Yep, if crazy penguins steal four of your ten backups machines, you’d still be safe.

And let me answer that pressing question that’s on your mind: yes, you need a distributed backup grid. You’re a power user with power data, so check out Cleversafe today.