Salix Forums

Hello. This is my first post here, as I discovered the distro just a few days ago. I wanted to mention what got me excited about the latest release and Salix. I happened to see the release announcement on Distrowatch and noticed that booting to (u)efi is supported - that is what hooked me to check out Salix. I used Caldera and Slackware back in the mid nineties and later a bit of red hat. I left the linux world about 10 years ago and now am taking classes towards my RHCE (slowly) though truth be told, I just don't care for rpm's. Salix seems very attractive as a distro because it seems geared towards simplicity. I like the idea of one app, well maintained and carefully chosen, for each task. I also LOVE the idea that you are promoting Ratpoison (though I favor i3 personally) an hope to give it a shot with the idea of maybe becoming my main manager. But ... the EFI boot is that main thing. I have three Mac laptops and would like to be able to boot without needing to use reFind, just for the simplicity of it ... and as much as I appreciate Mac OSX I would like to single boot a linux distro on on of them. The simplicity of that, and the choice of that very much appeals to me.

So I have my fingers crossed that this will be the first distro that I can manage to have boot by itself on a Macbook, and if I do succeed ... much good karma to the Salix developer! The Ratpoison Salix will get a home on my underpowered Netbook, the machine with the worst trackpad buttons ever built. If that works and if I can get the hang of Ratpoison, it will likely make a useful machine out of the Aspire One netbook. Wish me luck. It feels like luck that I found Salix.

Welcome to Salix!

I've moved your post here which may be a better place to introduce yourself.

We would be very interested to hear how you get on with that Mac laptop, if you do decide to go ahead. The EFI boot needs as much testing as possible in different situations.

Ratpoison is an excellent choice for a slow laptop, because it uses the screen space efficiently as well as being, well, fast. Do check out the Ratpoison chapter in the Salix Startup Guide if you haven't already (link on main page).

Salix xfce 14.1 has just been released, and the Ratpoison version shoudn't be too far behind (though as they say, it takes as long as it takes ) Meanwhile, the latest is 14.0.1, which doesn't support (U)EFI.

Please don't hesitate to ask for support on the forums. Ratpoison has a steepish learning curve just at first, but it's great fun.

Just be careful to not install a boot menu entry with ELILO. Apple hardware can be severely broken by that. You get that warning during installation, but I'm mentioning it just in case.