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Salix OS Xfce Changelog

What's new in Salix OS Xfce 14.2

Aug 30, 2016
  • The first thing you will notice, is that when booting one of the iso images you don't get a boot prompt anymore. What you get is a boot menu and the menu offers options to install Salix in several different languages. So you can now install Salix, not only in English (both US and UK), but also in Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish (both for Spain and Costa-Rica), Swedish and Ukrainian! Many thanks go to our translators who have made an amazing job with these.
  • The menus that the iso images boot to are provided by syslinux on systems equiped with BIOS. On UEFI systems, the 64-bit iso now boots using elilo, in place of grub, and it provides similar menus to syslinux. The minimum architecture for the 32-bit iso has been bumped from i486 to i586 now and the boot menu in the 32-bit iso now includes options to boot either the i586 non-PAE or the i686 PAE kernels.
  • We also have two new GUI system tools, both developed in-house. The first one, GUEFI, is a graphical boot manager for UEFI systems and therefore is only available on 64-bit installations using UEFI. You can use it to create/delete/edit/rearrange UEFI boot entries and I don't think there is any other distribution out there with anything similar. Then, we have gtkreposetup, which is the GTK counterpart to the console reposetup tool, and which you can use to select your preferred repository mirror.
  • With respect to other software included in this release, Xfce has been upgraded to 4.12. The main browser has been changed back to Firefox. The Firefox package now also includes langpacks for the most popular languages too, so it will most probably also be presented in your native language without having to install anything extra. Also, network configuration is now handled by NetworkManager, instead of Wicd, which would also help people connect using their mobile 3G/4G connections. Pulseaudio is now controlling the audio output by default, which should help a lot with bluetooth speakers, HDMI audio etc. Other than that it's mostly the same as in previous releases, with LibreOffice, Claws-Mail, Gimp, Parole, Transmission, Viewnior, Zim etc. Everything has been upgraded to their latest release at this point. Of course, the usual collection of Salix System Tools is included, so you can still use Gslapt and Sourcery for managing packages and SlackBuilds and also the usual tools for managing Users, System Services, the System Language and Keyboard settings etc.
  • The Linux kernel used in this release is 4.4.19 (part of the 4.4.x series that is going to receive long-term support from the kernel developers) and it comes along with glibc version 2.23 and the gcc 5.3.0 set of compilers, while LLVM and Clang are also included. Also, following Slackware, udev, which is now part of the systemd project, has been replaced by the alternative eudev device management system.
  • Another huge improvement over previous releases, is that we now have a new repository available, that already includes thousands of packages! This new repository, named "extra", is enabled by default, and includes packages built from SlackBuild scripts available in the slackbuilds.org repository. Work on this repository is ongoing and it will be filled with even more packages soon. The repositories are now more rich in software than they have ever been before!
  • The artwork has been updated too ofcourse. There is a new beautiful but simple default background and the default widget theme is now Adwaita.

New in Salix OS Xfce 14.2 RC1 (Aug 11, 2016)

  • First of all, we have two new GUI system tools, both developed in-house. The first one, GUEFI, is a graphical boot manager for UEFI systems and therefore is only available on 64-bit installations using UEFI. You can use it to create/delete/edit/rearrange UEFI boot entries and I don't think there is any other distribution out there with anything similar. Then, we have gtkreposetup, which is the GTK counterpart to the console reposetup tool, and which you can use to select your preferred repository mirror.
  • The installer has been fully localized to several languages by now, thanks to our translators. So, this release can be installed using the installer in English (both US and GB), Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish (both Spain and Costa-Rica), Swedish and Ukraine. Other translations that were only partially complete were removed at this point, but of course will be included in future releases if they be completed.
  • There are some things that were also removed compared to the last beta. First of all, the autoinstall option is gone from the installer. I realized nobody was using it. In fact, it has been completely broken in the beta and nobody reported it. Also, lilosetup has been removed from the iso. This tool was written by a member that is not active anymore and has fallen back on updates. Since it is more crucial to the SalixLive releases, I expect it will receive some love before those are released...
  • Other than that, all software has been updated to newer versions, translations to all Salix tools has been updated and hopefully all bugs found in the beta have been resolved.

New in Salix OS Xfce 14.1 (Mar 5, 2014)

  • The final release is the same as the RC2 release, so if you already have that, you can just rename the ISO.

New in Salix OS Xfce 14.1 RC2 (Feb 27, 2014)

  • Adding a printer now works (users need to be in the wheel group).
  • gst-plugins-good1 has been added and parole doesn't crash before installing codecs anymore
  • The 64bit kernel was upgraded to fix a security issue
  • Flash is once again part of the iso
  • ibus and related packages has now been removed from the iso
  • Some more security updates in several packages (flash is one of them)
  • Minor bug fixes in slapt-get/slapt-src/spi

New in Salix OS Xfce 14.0.1 (Jul 17, 2013)

  • There have been a lot of updates in the 14.0 branch, including several security updates that prompted this new release. Salix Xfce 14.0.1 is based on Xfce 4.10 and comes with an updated 3.2.45 kernel that fixes several security issues, LibreOffice updated to version 4.x, java security updates, an update to Midori, our main browser to version 0.5.2 along with an updated webkit engine that includes a lot of stability fixes plus a lot more security updates to several packages like flash-plugin, pidgin, perl, Xorg etc. A couple of minor bugs that were also present after the original 14.0 release are fixed now.
  • Also, the screensaver is disabled by default now, as it seems there were a few cases with some graphics cards acting up with certain 3D screensavers. So, this is probably the safest way to avoid any crashes. Any users that want to enable the screensaver can certainly do it from the respective entry in the Settings menu in Xfce

New in Salix OS Xfce 14.0.1 RC1 (Jul 6, 2013)

  • Compared to the Salix Xfce 14.0 release from last November, this one has an upgraded 3.2.45 kernel, provided by Slackware, that fixes several important security issues, LibreOffice updated to version 4.x, an update to Midori, our main browser to version 0.5.2 along with an updated webkit engine that includes a lot of stability fixes, plus a lot more security updates to several packages like pidgin, perl, Xorg etc. A couple of minor bugs that were also present after the original 14.0 release are fixed now. There are no other major changes since 14.0.
  • Users that have installed 14.0 and have kept up with package updates do not need to replace their installations with this one, but new installations should be made with this iso, to spare the user a lot of package upgrades (including a kernel upgrade) after installation. Of course installing for the sake of testing this release would be great.

New in Salix OS Xfce 14.0 (Nov 27, 2012)

  • Salix Xfce 14.0 is ready! With Xfce 4.10 being the centerpiece of this release, iso images for i686 and x86_64 architectures are available for immediate download.
  • Apart from Xfce 4.10, the software that comes installed includes Linux kernel 3.2.29, Midori 0.4.7 is the default web brower, Claws-Mail 3.8.1 is the application to use for accessing your e-mail accounts, LibreOffice 3.6.3 for all your office needs, Gimp 2.8.2 for everything that has to do with image editing and manipulation, Viewnior 1.3 is the default image viewer, Parole 0.3.0.3 is the default movie player, Exaile 3.3.0 is the application to use for managing your music collection and more. Additionally, the Salix repositories already hold a great number of software packages that can be additionally installed using the Gslapt package package, or slapt-get from the command line, in a Salix or even a Slackware 14.0 installation. Yet even more software choices are available in the form of SlackBuild scripts and users can have automated access to these SlackBuilds using either slapt-src from the command line or our own Sourcery graphical management tool.
  • The number of changes compared to the previous 13.37 Xfce-based release are numerous. Xfce itself has been given a bump from version 4.6 to version 4.10, bringing along many great new features and bug fixes. In packaging terms, the most important change is that the huge single Xfce package has been split in several small packages, which will make it easier to furthter customize an Xfce installation and install separate Xfce applications in non-Xfce environments.
  • One of the most obvious changes is that the default browser is now Midori, a webkit-based browser that is very light on resources and very fast, while being feature-rich and as standards compliant as any webkit-based browser is. Midori also happens to be the browser that is suggested as default by the Xfce project, so it fits very nicely in our Xfce edition. Midori might not have the number of extensions that Mozilla Firefox has, but the functionality that it provides out of the box is certainly superior; it is already translated in many languages without the need of separate language packs and it comes with lot of bundled plugins that can be enabled by the user at any time. There are plugins for cookie managemenet, ad blocking, even for keyboard shortcuts that make it function in a similar fashion to the popular Vimperator Firefox plugin and more. Other than the webkit engine having been much improved during the latest releases, the most important reason behind dropping Firefox for Midori, is that the development model used for Firefox continually introduces incompatibility issues and constant changes to the way settings are supposed to be stored are being applied with every new version. In any case, Mozilla Firefox is still available through the package management for anyone still wanting to use it.
  • Other important changes to the default selection of applications were dictated by the fact that we had some GNOME applications in the default installation and now these applications require GTK+3. As Xfce still is a GTK+2 environment (and hopefully, with the mess that GTK+3 is, will continue to be in the future), we have decided to stay only with GTK+2 applications for the default installation and GNOME applications have been replaced by their MATE and Xfce counterparts. So, file-roller has been replaced by mate-file-archiver (engrampa) and evince by mate-document-viewer (atril), while Brasero has been replaced by Xfburn. GTK+3 itself plus some GTK+3 applications, like Brasero, are available as software downloads from our packages repository.
  • Another change is that the 32-bit iso image only supports CPUs following the i686 architecture or newer, which also include support for PAE. The decision was made due to size constraints. It was decided that the benefits of keeping the iso image inside the CD size limits while also keeping the release feature complete are more than supporting those very old CPUs. However, other future editions of Salix 14.0, that are smaller in size, such as the LXDE edition, will keep supporting even those very old CPUs, by also providing the Slackware non-smp non-PAE i486 kernel.
  • A full installation of Salix now includes support for 3G mobile internet connectivity. Sakis3g, a versatile script that makes connecting to the internet with mobile broadband as easy as possible has been included for that purpose. Wicd is as always the graphical configuration tool for local wireless and wired network connections.
  • OpenJRE 7 is included in full mode installation and OpenJDK 7 is available through the repositories for people that want to develop Java software. The icedtea-web browser plugin has also been included, so Java applets can work inside the browser without a problem.
  • With this release, the number of programming languages that are available in the repositories has grown considerably and we're making it a point to have Salix as a stable development environment for programmers. The C and C++ compilers provided by the GCC project are already installed by default, along with Python 2.7.3 and Perl 5.16.1. But many more options are available as software downloads from the repositories, including Ruby 1.9.3, Python 3.3.0 (which can be installed alongside Python 2.7.3), Go 1.0.3, the D programming language, Haskell, Vala, Fortran, Objective C, Ada...
  • Our mirror of the slackbuilds.org repository now includes limited dependency support. It uses only the data in each SlackBuild's .info file and these are written with the assumption of a full Slackware installation, so some dependencies may be missing in some cases. Software that is already present in either the Salix binary repositories, or the Salix SLKBUILD repository, will not be visible through our slackbuilds.org mirror to avoid confusion with same packages being available in both gslapt/slapt-get and sourcery/slapt-src (although the respective scripts are there for anyone that wants to download them manually).
  • The installer, as always, provides the option of installing Salix in Full, Basic and Core modes. The default and recommended Full mode installs all available software in the iso, which includes one application per task and should cover most users' needs. The Basic mode installs only Xfce, along with the Gslapt package manager, the Salix system tools and the Midori web browser. It is intended for advanced users that would like to customize their own Xfce installation to their own liking. The Core mode, is intended only for expert users and installs only a command-line environment, that is however feature complete and should provide a nice base for people that want to install Salix on their servers or install a graphical environment of their own choice on top of it.
  • The default filesystem is now XFS, but as always, users doing a manual install, instead of selecting the autoinstall option, can choose between Btrfs, ext2/3/4, ReiserFS, JFS and XFS filesystems.