Linux Mint Forums

I took a look at Sidux Xfce yesterday. Sidux is known for being cutting edge Debian and Sidux Xfce was something new and interesting. I installed Sidux Xfce on a test machine to really see what it could do.

Test machine

AMD Athlon 1800+
Biostar VIA Mainboard
ATI Radeon 7200
17" LG flat screen monitor
VIA Rhine onboard NIC
VIA Vinal 97 onboard sound

The install was simple and quick, 4 minutes and 37 seconds! Boot time was very quick although I did not time it. The custom kernel really got my attention, if you run the Live CD on a duel core processor you will see two penguins appear at the top of your screen, if you use the CD on a system with a single core one penguin appears. It is very obvious that a lot of skill went into building the Sidux kernel.

Sidux uses no Splashy or Usplash, both can cause problems with some hardware and Sidux completely avoids this problem. The entire look of the system is clean and polished. All of the artwork is consistent and attractive. The GDM theme that was used was very impressive. The GDM was custom made and I have never seen one made so well and interesting. I tested all of the default applications and noticed a couple of problems. The system had a "screen lock" shortcut but it just made the screen flash for a second. After a little checking I discovered why the screen lock was not working, no screen savers were installed! Oops!

Sidux Xfce is strictly FOSS, so it has no real multimedia capabilities out of the box. A bit of tinkering quickly solved that problem! The system was very quick and stable. The main thing I waned to see with Sidux Xfce was how pure Debian compared to Ubuntu's fork of Debian. As far as speed and memory use, Xubuntu is no match for Sidux Xfce. I am starting to understand why people are so interested in Debian.

Also, all versions of Ubuntu and it's variants give the test machine I used a black screen until the log on appears, Sidux did not have this issue. The GDM problems still present in Ubuntu 8.04.1 are not present in Sidux. All in all a very interesting experience. If you are looking for something interesting and cutting edge to play around with Sidux Xfce will keep you entertained.

Thanks for the info, Xfce is becoming my prefered DE, and have been trying out numerous Xfce distros as of late. I will have to give this one a look.

Very cool. I'll definitely test drive it out of curiosity. I have tried the main distribution in the past, but it never really drew me in.

I always come back to Sidux as my second OS (after Mint, of course!), because of its unmatched speed.
Have you tried the fantastic smxi script? You have to install it first (the commands are in the Sidux manual). Here's the smxi homepage:
http://techpatterns.com/forums/about736.html

It does a million things and keeps your system healthy. Sidux's scripts are really awesome!

I am having a weird problem with sidux. I have installed it in a virtualbox 2 times, both times when i try apt-get it tells me i need to be root. I try to su to root and it says authentication failure. The first time i thought maybe I typed in my password wrong during installation, and so I reinstalled and made sure I put the password in correct, and again it tells me authentication failure. I did notice that both times on first boot after install there is an error while everything is loading, and it restarts, then it goes past where the error was, but I did not catch the error either time, which I know would definately be a help. Any Ideas?

Ok I reinstalled a third time to see what exactly the error was and it said-

/dev/hda5: Superblock last write time is in the future. FIXED.
/dev/hda5 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
/dev/hda5 has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced
/dev/hda5: ***** REBOOT LINUX *****
/dev/hda5: 73481/259584 files (0.1 % non-contiguous), 346025/1038192 blocks
fsck died with exit status 3

I found this thread in the ubuntu forums and it says to change the bios date, but i dont' know if you can do that in virtualbox.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3223134

*edit to add
aparently the third time is the charm, I rebooted and logged in and it worked fine, go figure