Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

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Akuna
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Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by Akuna »

After a few months of development, the long awaited RC1 version of Salix Live is finally ready for extended testing. This 32 bit Xfce Live CD will serve as a base for all other versions of Salix Live, namely KDE, LXDE and Fluxbox, both 32 bits and 64 bits, whose production can now start.

As you may know, the reason for this delay is because we are using a completely new set of scripts called SaLT (for Salix Live Technology) developed in house by JRD in order to build Live CDs in a more dynamic fashion with very little modification from the host system.

As you can imagine, writing such a new system from scratch was a huge undertaking and required much trial and error process as well as countless hours of refining and debugging. Our set of Live Tools (the Live Installer, LiveClone and the Persistence Wizard) has also been upgraded consequently.

It is probably still not completely perfect and we expect to be able to squash the last few bugs with your help. Please post your findings on this thread.

Download:
http://enialis.net/~jrd/salix/salixlive ... 32-rc1.iso
http://enialis.net/~jrd/salix/salixlive ... c1.iso.md5

Extra initrd for those who want to boot the LiveCD through PXE:
http://enialis.net/~jrd/salix/salixlive ... -32-rc1.xz
http://enialis.net/~jrd/salix/salixlive ... rc1.xz.md5

Note: For those who experience some display problem during the boot process you can try adding the following cheatcode with this procedure:
  1. Reboot
  2. At the Grub launch menu, type 'e' when the desired line is selected.
  3. Go to the end of the command line that contains 'linux etc....'
  4. Add a space and the word 'nomodeset'
  5. Then hit 'CTRL' + 'X' to launch the boot process
Enjoy! :)
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jayseye
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by jayseye »

Thanks for all the hard work. 8-) First got hooked on Salix through working with the Live Xfce Alpha. One question re testing ISO images:

Could a Loopback.cfg file be provided, to allow downloading an .ISO image file and booting it directly from a Grub2 command line? Or is this technically incompatible with the new SaLT architecture?
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JRD
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by JRD »

Oh...I didn't know this initiative. Actually, Shador has already add such a script to the ISO, but didn't test it. Maybe some things have to be improved, it's not working ?
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mimosa
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by mimosa »

@ Jayseye

See 'Useful boot parameters' section in 'Advanced boot options' (5.1 in the draft Guide for 13.37) for how to do this. I haven't tried it, but it looks like it will do what you're asking about :)
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mimosa
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by mimosa »

I've just downloaded it for the second time, and got the same md5sum:

0575e483d9834a2a5447b75919108c13 salixlive-xfce-13.37-32-rc1.iso

but this is different from the sum in the link above:

0e23abe5eebfaf0b8635d22774f5d76d

EDIT

Just checked and that directory includes a link to the correct md5sum file (sum as above). The one linked in the post above is for beta.
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Akuna
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by Akuna »

mimosa wrote:The one linked in the post above is for beta.
Oops.. Link corrected, thanks.
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mimosa
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by mimosa »

Looks good so far! Some initial comments:

The feature to stick with your language and keyboard settings is good. But is it necessary to ask explicitly if the user wants to skip the language choice screen? I wondered for a moment if that meant to skip changing the default ... surely someone who had decided to do this (as anyone will want to do for private use) doesn't need to be asked again if they really want to. OK, I suppose a family where different languages are spoken ...

I can't remember for sure, but doesn't choosing the system language also appear in the principal menu, anyway? That should cover it.

Persistence setup describes possible mountpoints with some confusing internal stuff prefixed to them. Could this be stripped off as far as /dev? For the case where they are currently mounted, they appear as /media/foo, which is ok I suppose, though I think I'd still prefer /dev/sdXY.

Was there a choice of filesystem for persistence before? The default choice here is ext2. Is this better than xfs? Anyone who doesn't really know (like me :) ) can just choose the default; but perhaps it would be reassuring to have a message (as seen in Lilosetup when the mouse hovers in certain places) to say if in doubt, ext2 is a good choice? Choices that the user doesn't understand are bad for the Linux learning curve.

Gmountman looks like a mounted object. Fair enough, but maybe it would be better to differentiate it somehow ... maybe by making the icon smaller or superimposing some text on it, such as 'GM'.
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by gnomic »

Posting from RC1 live on a Dell Latitude D610 (pentium m 2 GHz, 1G RAM, ATI X300 grfx). Wifi is working ootb with Intel 2915. One thing I observed, on trying to look at the Startup Guide, evince complains it doesn't deal with 'file type plain text.' This both from menu entry and desktop icon.

Also ran live on an old laptop, NEC Versa E400 with 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 mobility, 224MB RAM available, SiS grfx which appear to use 32MB of main RAM. Machine is from 2001. This trial failed, after booting to a desktop machine froze after about 10 minutes, and neither Firefox or LibreOffice writer would run. The machine did run passably with a recent Puppy release for old machines, the 'Wary' variant. RAM is probably the main problem in this case.

Will try to test on a couple of other machines and report results.
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jayseye
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by jayseye »

Thanks JRD, I can confirm that loopback.cfg is present inside the RC1 .iso, and that SuperGrub2Disk finds it. However, the boot fails with these error messages:

Code: Select all

syntax error 
Incorrect command 
error: unknown command 'loadsettings'. 
syntax error 
Incorrect command 
 
Press any key to continue... 

The link in my previous post details how grub.cfg must be modified for use with loopback.cfg and this page describes how to create a SuperGrub2 Boot Disk for testing.

I'm available for further testing / debug if that would be helpful.
JRD wrote:Oh...I didn't know this initiative. Actually, Shador has already add such a script to the ISO, but didn't test it. Maybe some things have to be improved, it's not working ?
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Re: Salix Live Xfce 13.37 RC1

Post by Shador »

jayseye wrote: The link in my previous post details how grub.cfg must be modified for use with loopback.cfg and this page describes how to create a SuperGrub2 Boot Disk for testing.
Actually I implemented and tested that file by that "standard definition". But possibly since then something changed in the other grub config files. I'll recheck.
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