SMALL but perfectly formed... no, not me, this new Linux distribution I've been playing around with (though I am, by modern standards, fairly short at 5ft 9ins!).
Salix OS 13.0 made its debut on the Distrowatch Weekly 'New Distros' list recently and immediately caught my attention because of its natty desktop featuring a silhouetted bonsai tree.
Anyone who read my last post about Zenwalk 6.2 will know by now that the team behind Salix were formerly part of J.P Guillemin's team of developers, but have now branched out on their own project.
So, from the Salix homepage:
Salix is a linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast and easy to use. Salix is also fully backwards compatible with Slackware, so Slackware users can benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an "extra" quality source of software for their favourite distribution. Like a bonsai, Salix is small, light and the product of infinite care.The name 'Salix' intrigued me - hey, I'm the curious kind - so I'll go out on a limb (limb...geddit?) and posit that the name may have something to do with willow trees.
Salix weighs in at a healthily slim 511MB and comes with three installation options:
Full: Everything that is included in the ISO is installed, including Xfce desktop environment, Firefox, Claws email client, a complete OpenOffice.org office suite, a Java Runtime Environment, Totem media player and Exaile music manager, gslapt package manager and several other applications.
Basic: Only installs Xfce desktop environment plus Firefox and gslapt. Ideal for advanced users who would like to install their own choice of applications.
Core: Only the minimum essentials for a console system to start are included - there is no graphical environment. For experienced users only, who want customise their installation.
That'll be the full version for me, thank you, and as I'm down to my old Compaq desktop PC for testing and reviewing, I was banking on Salix's Slackware heritage and lightweight, Xfce desktop environment to get the best out of the old girl (900MHz Duron processor, 512MB RAM, 10GB HDD, 19inch Relisys LCD, DVD drive).
If you've installed Slackware or Zenwalk, then installing Salix will seem very familiar - it's text-based and utterly straightforward, especially if you go with the 'Install everything and set up the HDD automatically' option, which I happily did.
And what a quick installation it turned out to be - somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes on a machine that's powered by two hamsters running 'round an old wire wheel. Honest.
The post-install configuration routine is equally familiar to Slackware/Zenwalk fans and within just a few more minutes you're dropped into the rather pleasant looking Salix login screen, which uses the same image as the desktop wallpaper.
Equally pleasing to me was the fact that my wired ethernet connection was automatically up and running - I love it when that happens.Like its Zenwalk cousin, Salix follows the 'one app per task' routine when it comes to its software selection. Here's a quick, though not complete, run-through:
Development: Geany
Graphics: GIMP, Ristretto, XSane
Media: Asunder, Exaile, Totem, Xfburn
Network: Claws, Firefox, Pidgin, Transmission, Wicd, gFTP
Office: OpenOffice.org 3.1, Orage, ePDFviewer
Gslapt handles your package management, Thunar manages your files and there's Ndiswrapper on board in case you have problems with wi-fi setup.
And then.. hang on, what's this? In the main menu there's an entry to 'Install multimedia codecs'... intriguing and, bearing in mind my next task was to run through my usual post-install multimedia tests, definitely worth investigating.
What this link does first is throw up a brief warning about the legality of installing said codecs - if you're happy, click OK and off it goes installing... something or other.
At no point before, during or after the installation does Salix tell you what it has just installed, so let me enlighten you - it's the full set of gstreamer multimedia codecs, plus their dependencies.
How do people know they're happy with the legality of the installation if they don't know what's being installed? This is something the developers need to address for the next version of Salix.
That said, the installation certainly did the trick because Salix sailed through my multimedia tests with just one fail - on the Apple movie trailers website (a common thorn in my side).
Other than that I was able to play MP3s and an audio CD in Exaile, AVI movies and a commerical DVD in Totem, and YouTube and BBC iPlayer videos in Firefox. Plus, my USB memory stick and external HDD were both automounted and Thunar displayed their contents.
Managing your Salix system requires a little more knowledge than some of the more newbie-friendly distros: There's no Salix control panel, for example, so you have to rely on the Xfce-based system/settings tools.And then there's Gslapt which, while being perfectly capable of installing and uninstalling software, isn't exactly the most sophisticated package manager out there, presenting just an alphabetical list of applications rather than a categorised list to choose from.
In the week or so I've been running Salix I've had a couple of issues which, I suspect, are more to do with the age of this PC than anything being wrong with Salix.The first problem is that when shutting the system down, it freezes at the console message 'System Halted' but doesn't actually shut down. I'm pretty sure this is an issue with ACPI and that it's just a question of editing the LILO boot menu to turn off ACPI.
The other issue relates to my mouse cursor - when it's motionless, it's fine, but as soon as I move it it flickers repeatedly. This, I suspect, has something to do with the vesa driver which was selected by default during the installation.
I posted queries on both of these issues on the Salix user forum and received prompt, helpful replies from developers gapan and thenktor, so kudos to them for their hands-on approach.
I'm genuinely impressed by Salix, although I have to admit that it doesn't seem greatly different to Zenwalk in either use or construction.
Someone commented on my Zenwalk 6.2 review that one area where it differs is in its approach to the source code for its packages. Here's what gapan said on the subject:
The full sources for the Salix ISO release are included in our sources DVD ISO: https://sourceforge.net/projects/salix/files/13.0/salix-13.0-source-dvd.iso/downloadSalix OS homepage and downloads: http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
The sources repository in http://download.salixos.org/i486/13.0/source/ offers all sources that are available as binary packages from the salix repositories. bash, the kernel etc are in fact not available from the Salix repositories as binary packages so it would make no sense to offer their sources there.
So, everything we distribute as binaries is also distributed as full source code in the same way: If a binary is in the ISO, you'll find its source in the sources DVD ISO. If a binary is in our repository, you'll find its source in our repository.

























