COMP 3000 2011 Drhill's Report: SalineOS 1.4

Background

SalineOS is a lightweight and fast open source operating system built on the Debian GNU/Linux repositories and uses Xfce as the desktop environment. The keyword here is fast. Saline still seems young, and its exciting to see how it will grow.

“The primary goal of the SalineOS project is to deliver a fast, lightweight, clean, easy to use and well documented operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. “

Their tagline, repeated several times on their website, is “because speed and stability matter”. And from a speed standpoint it is a pleasure to use. It is based on Debian Linux, and so has access to their well stocked repositories, as well as adding a few repositories that don’t fit into Debian’s strict free-software guidelines. Essentially they take Debian and make it “more complete out of the box”1, adding Wine repositories, as well as a script to install patent encumbered multimedia codecs, among other things.

You can obtain the .iso from their website, www.salineos.com, in the downloads section. It is roughly 931 mb in size.

They also have a server edition, intended for use in a personal server, not really suited for large commercial servers. It lists its possible uses as a torrent seedbox, or an ftp filesystem, among many other uses. For the purposes of this report I will be focusing on the desktop (laptop) application.