SalixOS - The Miracle of Upgrading When It Actually Works

Following on from my previous post on Slackware I have to root for SalixOS here which has almost slipped out of sight over the last two years or so after a spectacular start. It handled everything I've thrown at it which is more than I can say for any other distribution. The story goes like this:

Slackel, Custom Slackware Current with Newest KDE 4

Just a few days ago I was writing about getting a newer version of KDE 4 with Porteus or from Eric Hameleers' Ktown repository, and I have also been checking Chakra GNU/Linux to see what KDE is up to. Now we have another distribution, or custom respin, of Slackware current branch on the table that's at least news for me.

Three Spins You May Not Have Heard Of

Always on the lookout for something interesting I found three more esoteric spins of major distributions and set out to give them a quick test run.
This was helped by a streak of bad luck recently which resulted in me suddenly having two partitions available.

Installing LXDE on Slackware & Salix 13.37

Slackware 13.37 is out. So what do you do if you need or want a light weight desktop environment for an old machine and LXDE is your favorite? You could wait for Salix to catch up and release their own spin as they always do because they are fully compatible and you could just pull it in with slapt-get from their repos. You could build it yourself using the scripts at SlackBuilds.org, but they need a bit additional work and you need to figure out the build sequence.

Salix Xfce 13.37-beta2 - first impressions and screenshots

On 05/04 the second beta of the Salix main Xfce version was made available, and being one of my favorite distributions I just had to give it a quick spin and opted for a basic install. First impressions are excellent.  Things haven't changed much, and except a lovely fresh new wallpaper and login screen 13.37 looks exactly like the previous two. Good for when you actually want to get down to business and not relearn the interface every few months.

Time for Slackware 'Leet' and Companions

A new Slackware release is (almost) out, and it's got a rather odd number. Slackware 13.37 proves once again it's a distro from geeks for geeks, with a healthy dose of fun and humor and not taking ourselves too seriously. What I would call old-school geekdom.
With this out it's also time for all the derivatives to churn out new releases of all their main editions and the more minor desktop managers.

Salix OS 13.1.2 "LXDE" Introduces Tool to Easily Install from Source

A few days ago I mentioned Salix OS, a Slackware-based distribution, as one of my top five distributions of 2010. Even at the end of the year they are still keeping up the momentum and have released the last remaining version of 13.1.2, this time with the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE).

A Tinkerers Top 5 Distributions of 2010

In the last few days we've had several posts about personal top 5 favorite distributions of 2010. Everybody has their own favorites, but, for what it's worth, here's my list.

Salix OS have released 13.1.2 KDE & KDE Live

On 30/10/2010 the Salix team announced the release of a KDE spin of their latest 13.1.2 offering. This is a boon for everybody whose favorite desktop environment is KDE 4, and from reading the announcement this a standard KDE SC with all the apps that normally gives you, so not much to say about that. It also includes Koffice and perhaps most interestingly has added the Kaffeine media player and the Clementine audio player, a successor to Amarok.

SalixOS 13.1 "Xfce Live" and "LXDE Live" released

Weyhey, if it looked like we´re fast asleep that´s not the case, just travelling moving, and in the process I´ve become less able to update this and test out more distributions. In due course I´ve also had the dubious pleasure to see just how ugly this site looks in IE6, which many internet cafe´s and plenty of employers are still using. But I hope by October everything will be back to normal.

A new live release of my favorite Slackware-based distro is out, bringing it in line with the rest of their traditional offerings. It´s also apparently exactly one year after their first release ever was published.

How to get Ralink 2870 wireless USB adapter working in SalixOS/Slackware-13.1

This one has taken me quite a while to find out, with bits of information here and there. Two steps only:

Blacklist rt2800usb in your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, preferably with an explanatory comment to yourself why, or at least something like #My own blacklist starts here

blacklist rt2800usb

 Then at least one place recommends to add this line to the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file

iwconfig wlan0 power off

I'm not really sure the second is required but had done it before blacklisting the module, and it works. Check for yourself if it works for you without the second entry.

That's it. Glad I finally finished a complete system upgrade without reinstalling. It's all 13.1 now and sound, video acceleration, wireless all work.

Take care. 

How to install ATI graphics driver in SalixOS

I'm not planning to copy the entire SalixOS user documentation or FAQ's, only what's of practical interest as it comes up. It just so happened that after years of not needing the proprietary ATI driver I decided to play a demo of a new game which definitely requires it.

So now that for once I'ld need the proprietary driver I'm informed on their website that my product, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, has moved to legacy support. The last driver 9.3 was released March 2009, and sure enough, my kernel is not supported anymore:

"Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version"

Damn you AMD/ATI, six years ago I paid you £130,- and you want me to upgrade my perfectly good hardware?

How to upgrade SalixOS 13.0 to 13.1

This is a short guide on how to upgrade your SalixOS to the latest version, 13.1. I'm mirroring the instructions here in case it gets lost in the mist of time and for my own perusal. Please note this was not written by me. All credits go to the SalixOS user documentation team.

Linux light - SalixOS 13.1 "LXDE"

After looking at SalixOS 13.0 in my comparison of light weight Slackware derivatives for the desktop I thought I should give 13.1 a full standalone review. This also, I'll admit from the start, because I'm very fond of it. Yes, I'm biased.
There's nothing better for me out there apart from Slackware proper, and SalixOS is the unaltered Slackware with a little custom art and a few helpful tools, like easy localization, setting the clock, for adding users, and truly one-click adding of multimedia codecs.

More reviews and areas of interest

Hello there,

both the reviews on Unity Linux and on Kongoni GNU/Linux were received quite well. Got a lot of reads and even the first comments here on this site. Thank you.

My interest is to look at the more obscure and lesser known distributions that don't get much airtime usually. So I'll slowly work myself through them over the next few years. In particular I am interested in distributions from the Slackware, Debian and Mandriva based corners of the Linux world. Also on innovative projects that are not based on anything, like Frugalware.