On sidux 2008.02 Xfce

I like to share good work. I am fond of saying that one of Linux's greatest strengths is it's adaptability. The ever growing number of distros is a testament to that.

I don't know that I have a single 'favorite' distro. I have a 'short list' instead. For different situations and environments, some distros are better suited than others, I have found.

Sometimes it's by design, that is to say, the developers intended to focus on that area specifically. Sometimes it's lucky coincidence that a distro happens to suit a situation that I am working on particularly well.

I do not ever 'close' my short list. It is always open to amendment as I continuously investigate distros and releases. Some distros change their target market, some just come out of the blue, a nice surprise. Others sometimes are discontinued by a lack of development and sadly others, to be brutally honest, just fail to achieve.

So the search never ends, Though I do stick to the short list pretty closely, I love to see new distros released, others evolve and because I am a notorious tweaker, I am willing to give most any distro a fair crack. I'll try just about anything once.

Which brings me to my presenting of sidux 2008.02-erebos-xfce.

I gave the kde version a try last week and was very happy with the results. As I am a well established fan and user of Xfce, i was going to dive in and play with that, but was clued in by someone on the IRC channel ( I ALWAYS visit distro forums and channels to see how well they have documented and interact with users, established and new.) that the xfce version was due anytime and if I would be willing to give it a shot, So, I waited.

In just a couple days after that, there it was in the mirrors.

So I fired up the old ftp app (I use fireftp or gftp for day to day stuff) and in short order, I had the 408 mb ISO downloaded,burned to a handy cd-rw and running on my trusty laptop,

While I am a loud and fervent fan of Xfce, I am NEVER impressed by the 'stock' presentation of it. I love it when a distro shows creativity by 'making it their own'.

To be fair, the kde version is also pretty 'stock' and I shouldn't have been too surprised. It's a fairly trivial point and Xfce is easily customized, so I can get over it without losing any sleep.

My laptop uses a Broadcom wireless card, and I needed to download the driver before it could be configured. Happy accident that I played with the 'meta-package installer' app first, showing me the various metas and repos available, including the non-free and drivers section.

By the way, 'Ceni' is a marvelous tool that once my driver was downloaded, had the old wifi up and connected in no time flat.

After that, I was only an 'apt-get install' away from Synaptic and I was on a roll.

If I am not online as "bigbearomaha' then I am using my 'work' tag of 'the-lan-man', I dug in and installed samba and fusesmb, as well as NFS. I live to play with networks.

For those unaware, sidux is a livecd version of debian, and I LOVE livecd based distros ( it is a great way to give clients a 'try before you buy' preview ).

My overall impression so far has been a good one. There have been no major hangups. No overwhelming lack of performance. It performs as well as I can ask any Linux distro. Due to that, this release has moved sidux ( Xfce version, of course ) into my short list.

You can click the link to see my quick 're-mixx' on my sidux Xfce.

If anyone is interested in trying and using this really solid distro, please visit the sidux website for more information and the list of mirrors.

Job well done sidux team.