Available SolusOS 2 Alpha 9

Do you remember SolusOS? Yes, that distribution of the speak at the time until exhaustion to the point, that many users were upset because he talked about it all the time, and some even said that he was going to die.

Well, SolusOS has not died, on the contrary, it has evolved and the Alpha 9 with interesting changes and improvements. Of course, this release is for developers and users who want to test and report bugs.

There is something that strikes me very much. SolusOS in its beginnings it came with GNOME, then they tried to create their own Desktop environment called consort, and now this release comes with XFCE4.10.

Since I have lost track of this distribution, I did not realize when the change occurred, but reading a old item written by Manuel de la Fuente, I found out what the cause is:

Still does not come with consort but temporarily with a minimum installation of Xfce. The goal is to focus on the development of the base system and move on to polishing the desktop afterwards (you can see the development of consort en bitbucket).

But apparently they have not finished with the base and Xfce is still present. And this is not the only change.

SolusOS Alpha 9 comes with it Kernel 3.11 using compression LZ4 allowing better performance and improvements in kernel decompression time, Firefox 24.0b9, glibc 2.17 and GLib 2.37.3, that is, it is quite updated.

It also brings us a renewed installer, based on which ikey wrote previously for LMDE and it is good to clarify at this point that, although SolusOS Alpha 9 it is installable, it still has many errors to correct, for example, that only one partition can be selected in Ext4 and another for Swap.

Known issues

The XFWM composer is not enabled by default, however, it is possible to enable Composing through the Xfce4 Preferences, and it will work without any problems.

You will be asked to enter a password to shut down or restart your computer from Xfce. One possible solution is to close the session and then shut down from the Session Manager, another is to modify the file sweats.

PulseAudio has not been fully integrated yet, so ALSA will be used. This issue will be fixed very soon after the GStreamer packages have been completed.

The graphical server takes a long time to start.

gpk-app and gpk-update-viewer are bypassing the password prompt. Polkit-gnome is included by default, and is known to work.

PiSi (yes, SolusOS doesn't use apt) will not work properly as a normal user. The log file cannot be written. You can remedy this with the following command:

sudo chmod a+w /var/log/pisi.log

Botton line

Much work remains to be done, but SolusOS still in development and I honestly believe it promises. It has a very neat appearance and when using XFCE, we know that it can be an excellent option for machines with few resources.

There is much more information in the Release Notes.