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.

Installation/Startup

SalineOS was installed in Oracle’s VirtualBox in a MacOSX environment. The virtual environment was set up with approximately 20 GB of hard drive space and 2GB of ram, of 4 GB available. I also did an install on my HP laptop.

Saline itself is booted off of a live CD (or in this case a CD image). The live CD took less than a minute to boot up in this virtual environment. The install took just over 5 minutes. The install went well … mostly. There was one problem encountered, something of a Garbage-in, Garbage-out problem, but still not something you like to see. I tried to abort the install at one point, as the codecs were taking too long, by hitting cancel. I thought it had aborted, but there was simply a delay until the next window. In the meantime I had clicked on the install icon a few times as it was unresponsive (and I am impatient). I wound up with 3 separate installs running at once, none of which I was able to abort. Hitting cancel provides null or blank to the whatever the current question or input is and then continues the install. I had to shut down the virtual machine and start over. There was also another instance while installing on my laptop where my son mashed the keyboard and started a second install. In that particular case I let the second install hang and finished the first install and things worked out fine.

So typically things go quite smoothly, with no problems encountered, but if you are impatient or have kids or some other Murphy's law is at work, be wary during installation. I did manage to abort on one occasion, just before it wrote the boot sector on the hard drive. It asked if the information was correct; I clicked ‘no’ and it aborted the entire install without issue.

These issues, however, are not a serious impediment to installation, as it is fairly easy to reboot and try again. Hopefully the future versions will have this sorted out.

One of the nice features of Saline right off the bat is the ability to make a boot-able USB stick using a graphic interface, Remastersys usb creator (there was also backup and grub restore). Its really simple, and great if you have a USB and want to try a bunch of different distributions. So I made a boot-able Saline stick, and went to do the full install on my other laptop (which currently runs Linux Mint). However, upon booting up the live environment it was unable to detect my home network, or any of the dozen or so networks in my neighbourhood. I plugged in an RJ45 cable from my router and was able to access the internet that way. I researched and tried a few suggested solutions, but nothing would bring up any networks. From the forums this problem sounds quite common, and they may switch from Wicd to Gnome Network Manager in future versions.

Some of the people on the forums had solved it, so I went ahead with the install anyway, and then downloaded network-manager-gnome from the repositories using Synaptic. However, that did not work either (and yes, the physical switch is turned on). So to this day its wired internet on the HP or nothing, but to be fair most of the other people seem to have it licked, many by simply supplying “wlan0” as their default wireless connection, others by going with gnome network manager. Also it could be that my HP is having issues, as I also had no wireless in Fedora. (Things work great in Linux Mint, however.)

The VirtualBox on my mac supplied a virtual wired connection, so there was never a problem there.

Basic Operation

It runs the Xfce desktop environment, whose goal is speed.

Since speed was the name of their game, I decided to test them out a bit. I used 3 different timers (from the Lab 2): I had a CPU timer, which did only CPU calculations and then output the time, I had a file timer (writing and then reading a file from the hard drive) that allowed the files to be buffered, and I had a file timer that flushed the buffers after every read and write. I tested 4 different Linux distributions, basically Saline against the 'big guns', all running in virtual machines with the same spec. The results were somewhat interesting:

Header 1	Header 2	Header 3
row 1, cell 1	row 1, cell 2	row 1, cell 3
row 2, cell 1	row 2, cell 2	row 2, cell 3
row 3, cell 1	row 3, cell 2	row 3, cell 3

File timer (flush) 17.17 sec 21.35 sec 47.70 sec 34 sec 29.51 sec File timer (no flush) 1.92 sec 1.33 sec 2.41 sec 2-3 sec 1.31 sec

	MacOSX(host)	SalineOS	Mint	Fedora	Ubuntu
CPU timer	7.69 sec	7.74 sec	10.94 sec	7.66 sec	7.05 sec

All the values are an average of three separate tests.

With respect to Fedora, something was not working with its internal timing (the first timer reported itself done in less than 1 second, while in reality it was closer to 7 seconds), so I timed it best as I could using an external clock. It lacks some of the accuracy, but I still think we get a fair sense of where it stands. Another note on Fedora, Gnome 3 was not working so it was in a fallback mode, which may have affected the results also.

The result? Saline does quite well against the competition, and gives the host a run for its money. Second only to the host OS, and only when you flush out the buffers. It is uncannily quick.

I can't account for the slowdown in Mint, except to say I ran the tests multiple times, making sure to minimize interference from other programs, and these are the (abysmal) values I got. (Though I still think Mint is a top distro and a lot of fun.)

I did the tests on my HP laptop (running Saline only) as well, but it was significantly slower across the board, almost certainly due to less powerful hardware. However, just in case anyone is interested:

CPU timer 18.02 sec Filetimer (flush) 38.84 sec Filetimer (no flush) 4.44 sec

With nothing to compare to it is more or less meaningless.