greetings and kudos to all the Salix devs

[gaucho]

Hi, everyone,

Just thought I'd take a few moments to introduce myself as a new Salix user / explorer. I would also like to say "Thanks!" to all the developers for their hard work. The past months have seen me becoming more of an Xfce user (although I also use KDE 4 and GNOME), so I try to keep abreast of Xfce news. I saw some mentions of Salix OS, read a few (positive) reviews of it, and decided to attempt installing it on a spare partition. Wow! Salix is very nice and I'm impressed with it so far.

I guess I would classify myself as an intermediate Linux user -- not a total newbie, not afraid of the CLI when necessary, but definitely not a guru who understands how all a distro's components fit together and interact with each other. This is my first time to use a Slackware-based distro, so I'm in uncharted waters and will probably be asking some stupid questions here in the forum ...

If I understand your project's goals and philsophy, I appreciate what you're doing: trying to remain true to Slackware while adding some tools / utilities, etc. which will make Slackware easier for an average computer user. My impression (perhaps incorrect) was that Slackware -- along with Gentoo and Arch -- was a distro for Ubergeeks. Fast, stable, nice but unless you were an Ubergeek, you could never hope to install it, configure it or maintain it properly.

I used the Install CD and found the text-based installer to be less difficult than expected. (I had first prepared my root and /home partitions with GParted). One thing I found confusing during the installation:

The Installer identified my preconfigured ext4 partitions as ext3. However, I decided to continue with the routine anyway, and things turned out OK.

The installation also was surprisingly fast; I wasn't prepared for that and thought something might have gone wrong.

Once the installation completed, as I was fiddling with the GRUB Legacy which controls my MBR, I was confused by the fact that I could not find any initrd file. I encountered some problems getting Salix to boot, but I found a post by gapan in which he mentioned that the initrd file is not necessary for the boot process. (I searched just now and couldn't find it quickly). That might be something else which would be good to include in the Wiki ... Just a suggestion.

I found helpful info on the Wiki and in the User Forum. The "Salix Startup Guide" was also good. I had to hunt for it some, so maybe you could consider mounting it in a more prominent spot, or publicizing it.

In case this is helpful to anyone else in a similar situation, here is my GRUB Legacy stanza which finally allowed Salix to boot successfully:

Code: Select all

title Salix 13.1.2
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.33.4-smp root=/dev/sda8 ro quiet vga=788

(I have Pardus 2009.2 installed and its GRUB 0.97 controls the computer's MBR. I installed Salix on a root partition (/sda8) of 13 GB and a /home partition (/sda9) of 12 GB. I chose to install LILO on Salix's root partition, sda8).

Thank you again. Happy Holidays to everyone,
=david

Salix OS 13.1.2 Xfce

[Akuna]

Hi gaucho and welcome to Salix.

Thanks for the kind words and feed back. I'm sure it will be useful for some other folks.

Thanks for your suggestions as well. The Startup Guide is in the process of being completely overhauled and upgraded. When that is done, we'll put it somewhere more in view. Originally it was only meant to be part of Salix Live CD editions, while it will now be a continually updated online edition.

Regarding the wiki, feel free to add any articles you think would be useful, it is community powered.

[pwatk]

Personally I prefer the traditional installation disc's (old habits die hard) but it might a good idea to start promoting the livecd's on the download page as the beginner friendly solution to installing Salix.

[gaucho]

Hi, Akuna,

Thank you for the welcome. One of the things that impressed me about Salix was the friendliness of the User Forum. I always consider that as a factor when deciding whether to try out a new distro.

The Startup Guide is nicely done, in my opinion. It appears to be targeted more towards beginners but the sections on Installation and Package Management are helpful for experienced Linux users also. (For example, since I'm new to the Slackware way of doing things, I'm not sure I would have quickly figured out [from the menu alone] that Gslapt is the GUI tool to use for package management. But the Guide clarifies that, and once someone sees Gslapt in action, they will realize that it's not that much different from Synaptic or Yumex).

I will keep your suggestion in mind about adding articles to the Wiki. For now, however, I think it would be best if I hold off because I don't know enough about Salix to contribute anything worthwhile. I would not want to add something, only to have it be misleading or totally wrong.