Sidux

Ok, I stumbled across this distro today, and I am immediately enamored. I have seen it tossed around with fairly positive reviews, and I decided to take the plunge. I finally got my new (old) computer up and running (Athlon 1ghz, 704mb ram, all like 6 years old at least), and I needed to find the right OS for it. All the usual suspects were too slow, so I started exploring. I still have the Fluxbuntu disk bodhi.zazen pointed me towards (and I swear I haven't given up on it... just want to wait until the Feisty version comes out), but that didn't tickle my fancy... this computer's not THAT old ;-). So I gave Sidux a shot.

Upon boot I was met by a sharp dark theme. I have always loved the dark themes, so this is a definite plus. In fact, while I am very picky about my wallpaper, I still am using the default. I went ahead and installed. I noticed there was LVM support (a very nice touch, and if I wasn't being lazy I would have used it... the drives on this computer are 10 and 4 GB's, so to tie them together would have been nice). I installed to the 4 GB drive, as Linux Mint was taking up the 10 GB one and working OK. The installer was very easy. I would have liked a few more options with package install, but the base is so trim its not really a big issue. The tabbed layout was a great touch, I wish more installers would take this approach. After the install I had the option of installing some meta-packages (among them were fluxbox (w/ rox), fvwm-crystal, Xfce, etc.). I added fvwm-crystal and fluxbox, but stopped there as I was concerned about HD space (turns out I could have tried more... even after installing a bunch more stuff I'm still only using 61%).

Configuring the system was really easy. I quickly glanced at their forums (always start by browsing a distro's forums... best place to find easy answers) and found there was a script, built into the OS, that could do some configuring for me, and possibly even install the graphics drivers. Ever curious, I checked it out. I can't remember the exact command, but it certainly did all it purported to do... and then some. Imagine the Envy script, parts of Automatix, and parts of adept-updater rolled into one. And then some. This script dist-upgrades your system to get the latest from Debian Sid (including the newest kernel if you want). Then it gives you the option to clean all the junk that has accumulated (apt cache, excess language files, all sorts of other stuff I would never have thought of). Then it allows you to install many commonly used apps. I pretty much skipped through here, but there was a non-free section where I got Opera and some msttf fonts. Finally, after everything else was done, it installed and configured the NVIDIA drivers for my 6600GT. With my new drivers I decided to try beryl. Again to the forums, a quick search found an SVN repo that has semi-stable weekly builds. I decided this was my best choice (with something as volatile as beryl best to stay a half step off the cutting edge), and found the install repo to also offer extra plugins. This is great news for those who don't want to compile these things. Amongst many others, the wallpaper plugin is once again found... a different wallpaper for each side of the cube!

Not only is this distro sharp looking, it performs at an extremely high level. This old beast of a machine boots in under 30 seconds with Sidux. By comparison, the new Sabayon 3.3 took about 3 minutes to boot. Even Linux Mint and Fedora 7 test2 took close to a minute, maybe more. Running beryl feels snappy as well, more so than other distro's felt without it's drag on the system.


It was not all fun and games. Since this is basically pure Debian, you get Iceweasel. While many of you are probably expecting me to rant about the Iceweasel/FF split, I am not. The issue is purely with the use of a GTK based browser in a KDE distro. It looks awful, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Why can't we just have Konqueror as the browser? And h2's script gets Opera installed quite nicely, which is qt based, for those who need more features in a browser. FF/Iceweasel just look bad and perform poorly in a KDE environment, so please get rid of it.


I would highly recommend Sidux, but not to everyone. It is, in its very nature, about as cutting edge as a distro can be. As such, undoubtedly packages will break at times. If you want stuff to just work, and that's your vision of what an OS should do... avoid distro's like Sidux (and the afore mentioned Fedora). But if you want an OS that has the latest and greatest, and don't mind it being a little work at times, then Sidux is a great choice.