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.