Salix Forums

Did anybody try it? I used only 9.04 for long, it was quite allright (of course Salix is much better ), 9.10 was useless (that forced me to change to Slack and then Salix), I'm really interested in this one, although I surely won't use it.

It's downloading now, but very slowwww.....

HAPPY EASTER!

I installed it on a spare partition.
Summary:
installer:
still no "don't install grub" option
Canonical still isn't interested in what do you want to install on the computer
shortly: nothing changed

startup:
amazingly fast; it's even faster than shutdown

stability:
well, I know this is a beta... but it's the most buggy beta I've ever seen. Synaptic crashed 3 times, user setup didn't start at all. I was continously getting messages about mysterious kernel errors, Firefox threw exceptions on every close. If they really want a "bugless" OS (as they declared), they should hurry a bit (deadline is 29. April)

hw:
64-bit version, without any application running, ate about 700 MB RAM. In comparison, my Salix with Opera running is about 440 MB, my old Slackware with LXDE sometimes went down to 200 MB and even Ubuntu 9.04 needed just 450 MB. This may be because of the new Gnome and because compiz became the primary wm.

look&feel:
this edition is extremely ugly. The background is purple the icons are orange and the window borders are black (and the buttons somewhy had been put on the left).

other:
there's a new (?) system tool called "computer janitor". It's used to keep the system clean. Unfortunately, I couldn't try it, because there aren't enough packages to make a really big mess yet
a movie editor is included in the installation
the sound system is good, I've some files which are very quiet under Salix
suspend & wakeup is very slow

In conclusion:
I'm not familiar with the development procedure of Ubuntu, but I think a system should be more mature less than a month before release(, however boot is really lightning fast)

lipk wrote:look&feel:
this edition is extremely ugly. The background is purple the icons are orange and the window borders are black (and the buttons somewhy had been put on the left).

Screenshots please

lipk wrote:I installed it on a spare partition.
Summary:
installer:
still no "don't install grub" option
Canonical still isn't interested in what do you want to install on the computer

It sounds like you only tried the graphical installer. Download the "alternate" desktop CD and try the ncurses-based installation. You can set the debconf level to make the install as fine grained and customized as you want, to the point that it can end up very much like a Slackware install.

My experience with 9.04 and 9.10 was very different that yours. With the Intel chipset in my netbooks 9.04 was an unholy, buggy, virtually unusable mess. Fixes almost made it tolerable. For me 9.10 was flawless in every respect except for my usual complaints with network manager. Once I ripped out nm and installed wicd I was happy with what I had.

Regarding betas: Ubuntu betas are always buggy. No surprise there. 10.04 is an LTS release so there will be a 10.04.1 and so on if they don't get it quite right on release day. Ubuntu works with a fixed, firm release schedule so it will be out, ready or not. Again, this is a very different philosophy than Slackware or SalixOS. 8.04 (the last LTS release) was stable by 8.04.1.

Yes, they've got the fast boot technology down. Slackware is a bit behind the times there.

Regarding memory consumption and bloat, you really have to remember that Ubuntu has a very different target audience than SalixOS or Slackware. Ubuntu is designed with the non-technical user and the Windows/Mac new convert in mind. Ease of use for a newcomer trumps everything else. Having the ability to buy mp3s from your media player like you can on a Mac is a big deal for Lucid Lynx. Somehow I don't ever see that as important to Slackware

As always, YMMV...

It sounds like you only tried the graphical installer. Download the "alternate" desktop CD and try the ncurses-based installation. You can set the debconf level to make the install as fine grained and customized as you want, to the point that it can end up very much like a Slackware install.

You're right, I've never tried alternate install... on the download page it was described as "an installer for those who has to install first and just then can get X to work" and the very few screenshots I saw didn't show anything else than the GUI installer options in blue and black. But next time I'll try it

My experience with 9.04 and 9.10 was very different that yours. With the Intel chipset in my netbooks 9.04 was an unholy, buggy, virtually unusable mess. Fixes almost made it tolerable. For me 9.10 was flawless in every respect except for my usual complaints with network manager. Once I ripped out nm and installed wicd I was happy with what I had

.

This ensures me in my opinion that Ubuntu is suffering from Windows-syndrome. Too many users, too many configurations, the same system can never be stable for everybody.

Regarding memory consumption and bloat, you really have to remember that Ubuntu has a very different target audience than SalixOS or Slackware. Ubuntu is designed with the non-technical user and the Windows/Mac new convert in mind. Ease of use for a newcomer trumps everything else. Having the ability to buy mp3s from your media player like you can on a Mac is a big deal for Lucid Lynx. Somehow I don't ever see that as important to Slackware

Of course, it isn't a problem if an OS feeds a few hundred mbs to fancy features. But I saw only the same apps&services as in the previous releases, consuming much more memory.

AND I don't say Ubuntu is a bad distro, simply Slack/Salix is better (at least for me)

I have been playing with it some. I like the quick start up time thanks to HAL being taken out but I'm more interested in the server version though. I will say that the new branding scheme is nice, well then again anything is better than the old brown. Still not sure what to think about the control buttons on the left of the window but who knows. I took Lubuntu for a spin as well and I liked it alot but it only comes in 32bit version so I really can't use it.