Salix 13.1.2 live CD: first impressions

I burned and booted the Salix 13.1.2 live CD so I could test its video compatibility with my Lenovo G555's ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD video chip, and my second boot — passing nomodeset — succeeded in giving my perfect video with the open-source ati driver.

That this is something eluding me in Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14 is extremely significant. It makes Salix (and perhaps by extension Zenwalk and Slackware itself) viable distributions for this laptop. I can already run Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu 10.04 with no modifications to boot line or packages, and I'm hoping for the same thing with the Red Hat-derived CentOS 6 and its 2.6.32 kernel.

Back to Salix 13.1.2. Modifying the boot line to pass nomodeset as the live CD started up was a bit different than I'm used to, but I was able to do it. The "cheat codes" for the boot line aren't as apparent as they are in the Ubuntu live CD, for instance, but a little research on the Web reveals many ways to tweak the boot line to get things running right.

Once I did pass nomodeset and got a login screen, I wasn't logged in automatically. for Salix Live, the user login name is one with no password required. I entered one in the login box and hit Enter. I was soon in the Xfce desktop in Salix. If/when you need root access, the password is live.

In the case of my current network, I get an IP via DHCP but don't get nameservers that way. While the Wicd network-management application is touted as a lighter, better alternative to the GNOME-based NetworkManager, I've always had trouble getting Wicd to work.

This time was no different. I tried to establish a DHCP connection with manually entered nameservers. I just couldn't make Wicd actually make the "new" configuration live.

I even tried manually entering my nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf.tail. I used to do this all the time in OpenBSD, and I'm glad to see this feature in Salix (and perhaps in Slackware as well; does anybody know?). This didn't work either.

Eventually I entered a fully static IP in Wicd, opened a root shell, used ifconfig eth0 down to shut down the network and then cd /etc/rc.d followed by ./rc.inet1 restart, after which my static IP with nameservers was working.

If I were to use Salix and by extension Wicd full time, I imagine I'd have to figure out a better way to make this (dhcp with manual nameservers) happen. It's supposed to work.

Anyhow, I'm a huge fan of Xfce after using it for many months in Fedora and in Xubuntu/Ubuntu before that (and Wolvix and Debian Etch and Lenny before that). The environment is very familiar to me (albeit without Wicd; I used NetworkManager in Fedora, the great utility Wolvix provides in that system and manual configuration via text files in Debian).

Thus far Salix seems like an excellent way to get a fast Xfce desktop, and I find that any distribution generally works better on its "favored" desktop environment (GNOME for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, KDE for Slackware, etc.).

Ogg audio files played out of the box, and I used the Gslapt package manager to add the gst-fluendo-mp3 package, after which MP3 files played just as well. The system defaults to the Xfce-based Parole Media Player for both. I grew to like Parole very well in Fedora. Parole uses the Gstreamer plugins, and while it's not as "quick" to do the various operations it does as is GNOME's Totem, Parole definitely uses fewer resources and works extremely well.

Flash was installed and enabled in Firefox 3.6.12, and a check of YouTube revealed that it was working fine.

The one problem I had was with volume control. The Xfce Mixer app is included in Salix Live, but you have to go to Accessories-Multimedia in the menu to get to it. I quickly put a Mixer link in the panel, but this isn't as easy to use as a dedicated volume control, which is generally available in most Xfce desktops.

My keyboard's volume controls also didn't work. I added the xfce4-volumed package, which didn't immediately work. I hope that a reboot in an installation (or using the Persistence feature) would make the keyboard volume controls work.

In fact, figuring out how the Persistence feature works is probably an excellent idea, as it would allow for configuration and rebooting to test changes in the system before committing to a full installation.

I like Salix. Anything that makes Slackware easier to install and use — and more complete without KDE (my biggest complaint about Slackware) with more packages to choose from is OK by me.

I don't think Salix allows users to easily encrypt volumes or the whole installation, and that's something I generally require, especially in laptop installations. I'm pretty sure that I could figure out Wicd and the volume-control situation.

I'm not sure how long the Salix community intends to support its various releases. Slackware is famous for keeping updates flowing to releases for years. I still see updates to Slackware 8 every once in a while. Maybe Salix intends to do the same. Or they could stick with the 13.x series and move over to 14.x when Slackware does the same. It's one of those things about many small projects — you don't know exactly what their plans are (and they might not know, either). But it's easy enough to reinstall a new system (something I've done more than a couple of times these last two months), so I'm not as hung up on "long term support" as I have been in the past.

Sure there are a few things that need setup after the fact, but Salix seems very flexible, offers KDE and LXDE ISOs for those who want them — and did I mention that it's very fast?

I would do a full installation of Salix and a fuller review after that, but I'm still getting my Debian Squeeze desktop together, and I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future while testing other distributions via live images, just like I did this one. I really need a working system that keeps doing what it does, and for now that means Debian. But Salix is definitely an attractive alternative for anybody who wants to leverage the formidable Slackware base while adding many more packages and a system that puts quickness and efficiency at the top of its feature list.