 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at the recently released Salix version 15.0. Salix is a Slackware-based Linux distribution, and I've never actually covered it on the channel before, which kind of shocked me because I had assumed I've taken a look at Salix in the past, but apparently I've never actually done so on camera. I've taken a look at Slackware and several Slackware-based Linux distributions, but for some reason, Salix has slipped through the cracks, so we're going to fix that problem today. I'm going to take a quick first look and installation of Salix 15.0. I'm going to be installing it inside a virtual machine. So let me switch over to this virtual machine here, and in the boot menu, you have a choice of various languages to select for the install process. I'm going to choose English USA, and we come to a command prompt, and you can see, you may type the word setup to start the installation. So let me type setup, all one word. All right, welcome to the installation of Salix, the Banzai OS. Before you proceed with the rest of the installation, you might want to select your keyboard map, your key map. Your current key map is us.map, which is correct for me, so I don't need to change that, so I'll just hit enter here. Next it says you may now proceed with the installation by pressing the enter key if you want to exit the installation and drop to a Linux console, select exit installation. Of course, we want to continue, so I'm just going to hit enter here. Next up, we come to our partition editor, so we need to partition our drive. Now they do have an important note here. It says if you are planning to use the butterfs file system, well, Lilo, the default bootloader for Slackware and the Slackware-based distributions will not be able to boot that, so in that case, you will need a separate slash boot partition with another file system. For me, I'm going to choose probably extend for for the file system, so I should be okay here. So let's select a drive to actually do the partitioning on. Now in this virtual machine, there's only one virtual hard drive, it's VDA, so I'm just going to go ahead and make sure my cursor is on VDA and if I hit enter, it says there don't seem to be any Linux partitions on this machine. You'll have to make at least one of these to install Linux, either select auto-install from the menu or select install and use the partition editor to create, okay. So it gets us back to a previous screen about three screens ago, so once again, select install, select the drive, maybe I need it to spacebar. I've got to put the cursor inside those parentheses, so once the cursor is there, hit the spacebar on your keyboard to select it and then hit enter and now it launches. This looks like CF disk and from here we can go ahead and create our partitions. In this virtual machine, I'm going to do a legacy BIOS installation because this particular virtual machine I'm using is not set up for EFI, so I'll choose a DOS partition table and now I'm going to go ahead and create a new partition, it's going to ask the size and just for sake of completeness, I will create a swap in this VM even though I really don't need one, I'll create a one gig swap, so not a very big swap. So let's go ahead and create that, I'm going to go ahead and make that primary and then let's go ahead and change the type, so I'm going to move the highlighted cursor over to type and it changed that from type 83 which is a Linux file system to type 82 which is a Linux swap, so that's very important because that's going to be the swap and now free space here because we still have 24 gigs of free space, let's go ahead and use the entire 24 gigs for another primary partition and this time it's type, it defaults to Linux which is correct, that's a Linux file system, that's going to be my extend for file system, so from there we are good, I should be able to write, now are you sure you want to write the partition table to the disk, type the full word yes and hit enter, it says the partition table has been altered, now we can go ahead and quit out of the CF disk program and get back into here and from here you can see now I have slash div slash VDA1, so there is actually a partition on the drive and it is detected that it was typed Linux swap, so it knows that is supposed to be the swap so I'm just going to hit OK, now it's asking do I want to check the swap partition for bad blocks, I'm going to skip this, typically this is not something you need to do, if you want to you can but just for sake of time I'll skip that, next is showing me the entry for slash div slash VDA1 how it's going to appear in the slash etsy slash fstab file, so that's your file system table configuration file, everything looks fine here, so I'm just going to hit OK, next we need to do something with our big file system partition which is slash div slash VDA2, so I'm going to hit enter on that, next it's going to ask about formatting it, yes we do need to format it and of course we need to choose a file system, it defaults to XFS which is a fine file system, typically I use extend for file systems in my machine so I'll just choose that and hit OK, once again it's going to show us the entry in the fstab, everything looks fine here so I'm just going to click OK, now next up source media installation so are we installing salix from a USB stick or CD or DVD or you know some other methods such as over a network, now in this case I have attached an ISO to this virtual machine but I'm not sure how the virtual machine is going to recognize that, is it going to see that as a USB stick plugged in or it might see it as a CD or DVD that's been attached, I'm going to assume that we'll probably see it as a CD or DVD so I'm going to choose number two and if that doesn't work then I'll go back and try one of the other options, make sure the salix disk is in your CD, DVD drive and then press enter so let's go ahead and hit enter scanning for CD, DVD drive and it does say a drive was found, next it says select the installation mode so there's three different versions I guess to install, there's full which installs everything all the programs right full graphical environment with a full suite of applications then you have a basic mode which is installs a minimal graphical environment so it does have Excel organ, it comes with a desktop environment probably but not much else and then you have a core installation which is just the command line right you get a base install essentially of salix but you still don't have Excel organ or any kind of graphical environment at all I'm going to choose the full installation and away it goes I'm not sure how long this will take I'll pause the video and that portion of the installation took about four or five minutes to complete next up is installing the bootloader which is Lilo and it says do we want to do the simple installation which is installing it automatically the expert installation which is a setup menu using a config file and then of course we could skip installing a bootloader which is probably not a good option unless you have a real reason not to install a bootloader but for me I'm gonna go ahead and choose the simple option next up it says configure Lilo to use the frame buffer console it looks like it's setting the resolution size for the console or basically our TTY do we want it to be 640 by 480 which I think is little fault that's really small it looks bad especially in these VMs right I'm going to actually choose a slightly bigger console frame buffer I'm going to do 1024 by 768 next up it says some systems might require extra parameters to be passed to the kernel if you're one of these people that need to pass an extra parameter you need to enter that here for me I'm okay I'll leave this blank I'm gonna hit okay next up it says Lilo can be installed to a variety of places so where do you want to put it it looks like it's going to default to the master boot record so I'm gonna go with the default option in this case and it's installing Lilo next let's set the hardware clock it is asking is your hardware clock set to coordinated universal time if it is select yes here if the hardware clock is set to the current local time and it in parentheses it says this is how most PCs are set up then say no here so I'm assuming I need to say no here so I'm gonna go with that next up select your time zone configuration so here you would need to know your time zone in relation to UTC I actually I'm not sure what mine is are these the only options or should I do it the traditional way which is going through the list I typically do America slash Chicago so I'm gonna scroll up here it passed Asia and then into America let me find the C's and there is America slash Chicago which is in the central time zone in the U.S. I'm not actually in Chicago but that is the correct time zone for me so I'm gonna click OK on that next let's set the current locale English U.S. is my locale and that's what it defaults to so I'm just gonna hit OK here next it's asking about num lock do you want to have the num lock enabled or disabled on boot now I actually don't have a num lock key my keyboard I've got one of these ergo dock moon lender keyboards I don't even have one of these keys mapped to num lock so I'm actually just gonna disable it because if it for some reason does enable num lock I have no way to disable it next it says you will now be presented with some dialogue so that you can create one or more user accounts so this is creating you know our user account and probably setting up our sudo account as well so let's go ahead create a new account and the name for this account DT will be the username and now we need to enter a strong and complicated password for the DT user so DT DT it says that your password is too short six characters minimum please try another one I hate that I hate it when they put these safety mechanisms because sometimes you're just trying things out for example in virtual machines right or just on test equipment and I know they're doing this for security but many people are just testing distributions out and having these kinds of minimum password links I really find annoying but as the password fills the dictionary check it is too simplistic or systematic I guess one two three four five six it doesn't like that as well I'm just gonna create something and I'll remember it for this recording but I probably will never remember that password going forward so it's probably gonna be a situation where after I make this video I'm gonna have to delete this VM because I'll never remember the password for it that's why I hate these password requirements sometimes so we have a DT user our home user and we need to create a new account advance mode no modify account properties well let's see this lists all the accounts on the system but really we only have one account we created the DT account if I go into properties let's see he is already a member of the wheel group so we should have sudo privileges that's really all I wanted to check everything else is fine so let's go ahead and go back and back and I think we're done here so let me exit user setup next up is selecting the repository mirror it says the country code of where the mirror is located is shown on the right your selection will be applied to some configuration files I'm just gonna go with the default here looks like slackware.uk that's in the UK surely they have something that is in the US I better look through the list see if I can find something closer to me yeah there are a couple of US mirrors here I'm gonna choose the first one here since the salix installation is complete reboot now so let me go ahead and do that so we're at a login manager now I hope I can remember my truly strong and complicated password I remembered it so we're logged in let me go ahead and get a proper 1920 by 1080 screen resolution for this VM so they open a terminal and zoom in you guys have seen me run the XR and R command X Render command many times it lists all the available monitor resolutions now in a VM some of this will depend on the video driver for me I typically use the vert IO drivers video drivers and my virtual machines and vert IO does have a proper 1920 by 1080 screen resolution available so now let me run the X Render command X Render space dash S space and then give it one of the available screen resolutions such as 1920 by 1080 and now this virtual machine should hopefully remember that we want a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution now every time I come back to this VM now first things first aesthetics I really like the look and feel of this desktop environment I've only been in it just a few seconds and it has a really classy kind of classic feel to it as far as you know a light GTK theme the menu system looks good I like the icon set with these blue icons they're kind of a flat in color it's really again it's a classic kind of feeling desktop environment it's not trying to to do anything out of the ordinary and I kind of like that let's go ahead and see what is installed out of the box in salix now remember I did the full installation so we should have a full suite of applications available to us so let's go category by category if I go into accessories we have our application finder we have the bulk rename tool catfish file search you know standard XFCE utilities the character map the clipboard manager now the clipboard manager is it already enabled or do I have to launch it yeah when I hit enter now I have a clipboard down here in the system tray I see which clipboard they are using if I go to about that is clip man probably the most common clipboard manager that you see on Linux these days if I go back into accessories we have in grandpa that's a archive manager as standard XFCE archiving tool so that's for zip and unzip you know extracting things like tar GZ and things like that getting back into the accessories category we have calculator which is one of my favorite GTK based calculators it's very simple as far as you know in this basic mode it's just a standard calculator but you've got all of your scientific modes and paper modes and things like that really nice little simple calculator that doesn't have a ton of dependencies or anything so that's the calculator that I typically install on my systems also under accessories we have leaf pad which is a plain text editor leaf pad was the plain text editor for the old LX DE desktop environment that is now dead I'm kind of surprised they went with leaf pad here because XFCE has its own plain text editor called mouse pad but I guess they decided to go with leaf pad instead then we have notes not sure what this is obviously it's a note taking out but I'm not sure what the program is if I go to about notes one dot nine dot oh so it's actually named simply notes and it is an XFCE application and it looks like when I close the program out there is something sitting in the cis tray yeah so I can that's pretty cool yeah pretty neat I never use any of these note taking applications on Linux but I know many people find them useful and that looks like a very easy and simple application to use then we have our screenshot utility our task manager then are of course is the file manager the default file manager for the XFC desktop environment if I go to about this is then are four dot sixteen dot oh getting back into the menu let's go to the development category the development category has a much better text editor than leaf pad and this is genie genie is really an IDE but it's a plain text editor as well and it's a fantastic plain text editor I've actually done a couple of videos in the past on genie it's one of the text editors that I've used primarily as my text editor of choice in years past before I discovered things like VIM and emacs but still I can use genie genie actually has a pretty okay VIM mode to it it's not a great VIM mode it's not like evil mode in emacs but the VIM mode in genie is passable also under development you had meld meld is a way to compare two different files you can think of it as a diff application so I open it it's going to ask for two different files and it's going to compare them line by line and give you the diff right you know how they differ under the graphics category we have gimp which is our free and open source image editor you can think of it as a free and open source alternative to something like adobe photoshop gimp is actually what I use to create all the artwork on my channel is what I use to create all the thumbnails for my channel gimp is a truly fantastic piece of free and open source software also under graphics we have our image viewer which is ristretto under internet we have firefox is our web browser let's see what version we're on and let's go ahead and make firefox full screen here and let's open the menu go to help and go to about firefox this is firefox 102.2.0 ESR so this is the extended support release version of firefox that's what the ESR on it means firefox of course the free and open source browser of choice for many millions of people around the world a matter of fact when firefox first exploded on the scene about 20 years ago for a while firefox was actually the most used browser on the planet as far as market share it was the biggest browser until of course google chrome exploded on the scene and kind of took over the browser market share but still firefox is still around and it's still typically the default browser on most linux operating systems also under internet we have claws mill for an email client most people don't have a need for a desktop email client these days and honestly claws mill is not really great nobody really uses it it's it's if you're going to install mozilla firefox for your browser you should probably install mozilla thunderbird for your email client there's just no reason to go with some weird alternative like claws mill that's just my opinion but I think most linux desktop users would probably prefer a full featured email client like thunderbird to some of the cheaper alternatives and then you have pigeon for instant messaging client nobody really does I am anymore so you could probably just not even bother with that putting that on the ISO anymore transmission is your bit torrent client and if you hit agree you know you go find some some bit torrents on the internet many linux distributions the way they the way you grab their isos typically is through bit torrent just because it saves on bandwidth typically many distributions you can either download their isos from their web servers but remember you're using their servers their bandwidth it's better if they offer a torrent download go grab your linux isos through torrenting that's just a lot easier on those distributions under the multimedia category we have a CD Ripper called asunder I've actually used asunder many many years ago these days nobody really uses music CDs nobody has a need for music ripping so excel is our music player now I don't know too much about excel I've launched it a few times in VMs but I've never actually used it as my primary audio player but if you've seen one audio player you've seen them all right they all as long as they play your music you're okay right and then you have install multimedia codex so that's probably something as a desktop user you're gonna want to do and of course you have to have sudo privileges to install software so let's go ahead enter my sudo password install multimedia codex and I'm gonna click next so this gives us all the multimedia codex we need to play all formats of music and video your DVDs and blue rays and things like that because most of that stuff is proprietary software most of it is stuff that I guess the distribution doesn't want to ship installed out of the box they kind of make you install it although they give you a very easy way here's a link click on this hit a password right for legal reasons they don't want to take that responsibility and install it out of the box for you anyway here's a list of everything that will be installed I'm gonna click install and I don't know how long these installations will take I'll wait a couple of minutes here for this to complete and it says codex installation was completed would you like to remove the codex installer from your system well now that they're installed yeah I don't need that link to install them still on the system so let's go ahead and remove it and now if I go back into the multimedia category yeah that's no longer an option we have parole media player this will be of course your video player also under multimedia we have the pulse audio volume control and we have XF burn XF burn is a CD DVD burner it is one of the standard apps in the XFCE suite of software let me close that out there is an office category and it does contain the entire Libre office suite we also have at role as our document viewer that'll be a PDF viewer is what that is and then of course a settings category and a systems category this will have a lot of your standard XFCE settings stuff we don't need to take a look at that we have our XFCE terminal if I go back into the favorites category here they've got some applications already pinned for us because they assume these will be the most common things a user will look for the browser the email client the file manager the terminal and our package manager which is G slept so let me go ahead and click on that and enter my sudo password my strong and complicated sudo password and it says permission denied because I don't remember I knew this would happen can't remember the password I think that one was it yeah all right and now we get into G slept and G slept is a graphical package manager right it's very reminiscent to like the synaptic package manager for those of you that have used Debian or Debian based distributions synaptic package manager has this similar kind of like two or three pane layout where you go and you can just tick on applications to install or you can do a search for example is H top install let me search for H top and you can see the blue box here meaning H top is already installed so I don't need to install it although I could market I think for uninstall yeah I could market for removal but I like H top so that is how G slept would work now let me go ahead and open the terminal I'm wonder if control alt T opens a terminal it does very nice say let's guys I like having standard key binding so I always know how to get to a terminal when I need it since H top is installed let's check on system resource usage now there are a couple of programs that are running that weren't running on a cold boot remember the sys tray it still has our note application so let me go ahead and remove that we also have our clipboard manager let me go ahead and quit out of that that does reduce the RAM usage actually not by much maybe 10 15 megs of RAM but 437 megs of RAM of the 6 gigs of RAM that I gave this VM so very lightweight right and almost no CPU usage going on right now which you would expect we're not doing anything that requires CPU at the moment so that is the beauty of X FCE it's a very lightweight desktop environment it's really good for older or underpowered machines let's go ahead and see what version of the kernel we are on so if I do a you name space dash or we're using kernel version 5 dot 15 dot 63 one thing I want to check is slack where I know does not use system D it uses a older fork of the old sys via net I'm not sure about salix because it does obviously differ from mother slack where so I'm gonna do a where is system D just to see if system D is installed where's the binaries and libraries and yes you can see there is system D there is user lib system D and user lib 64 system D so it apparently they are using system D so if I do a system CTL status says a system CTL command not found so they may not be actually using system D yeah so apparently they have some components of system D install probably for compatibility reasons with certain pieces of software that have some dependencies on some components of system D but they're still using the the standard and it system that slack where uses so I did a where is a net there's the binary for a net but that doesn't really give me much information either on that let me go ahead and clear the screen let's go ahead and exit out of the terminal let me go ahead and right click on the desktop and I'm gonna go to desktop settings and let's go ahead and check out the wall papers let's see what kind of wallpaper pack this ships with and yeah I like that it's very plain as far as minimal as far as like a blue gradient going on with the salix logo and then of course we have some penguins as well some more duck like penguins actually in that one some more salix branded wall papers actually these are really good I actually really love these wall papers that they're shipping with here's is a map of the world in the shape of some penguins as well yeah these were really really nice and these are not bad I like the purple yeah I think I could get down with that so that is salix 15 dot oh just a very quick cursory look at the recently released salix 15 dot oh with the XFC desktop environment XFC if you've seen it once you've seen it a thousand times XFC really doesn't see a fast development it never really has major changes that's why a lot of people like it it's always got that familiar kind of look feel that familiar workflow that almost windows 7 like workflow that so many of us probably are comfortable with overall I think salix is a great slackware based distribution with an installation that's not very difficult just a standard in curses installer but it's a not a hard installer to use anybody should be able to get through an installation of salix and once it's installed you've got a full suite of software you've got a graphical package manager you've got everything you need as far as using Linux as a daily driver on the desktop now before I go I need to think a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Dustin Gabe James Matt maximum in it Michael Mitchell Paul West why you bald homie Alex Allen armor dragon Chuck commander angry die okay Dylan Greg master I'm very on Alexander Paul peace arching for door polytech realities for a lesser-ed profit Steven tools deviler and Willie these guys they are my highest tier patrons over on patreon they are the producers of this episode the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux brand open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace