Sidux Wins Again

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Almost two years ago, I wrote a post about an ancient (and very broken) laptop. Of the various Linux distributions that I tried on it, I really liked Sidux the most. I wrote about it in my In Praise of Sidux post.

I ended up trashing that laptop when the unreliability was more annoying that the brief moments that it would actually work (entirely a hardware issue, not a Sidux problem!).

A while later, I loaded a number of distros under VMware Player on my old XP laptop. Of course, Sidux was one of them. Unfortunately, I had problems getting X to work at greater than 800×600 (don’t know if it was a VMware problem, or a Sidux one, but as I noted in this post, I didn’t need it badly enough to track it down).

I’ve recently written about Virtualbox and how I got it to work with a multi-boot USB drive. In that post I mentioned the two main reasons that I boot Linux in a VM. I left out a use that is perhaps better, though I haven’t been disciplined enough to actually do it frequently. It’s almost the ideal way to surf to potentially dangerous websites, in particular, if you’re using a Live CD iso image to boot from. There’s simply nothing to infect on the part of the bad site!

Given how many malicious sites there are out there, it’s something I considered doing more often. In preparing, I decided that I wanted a tiny distribution, since I didn’t need to do actual work in Linux (e.g., I didn’t need an office suite, etc.). That said, I wanted two things:

• Latest Firefox
• Ability to build the VirtualBox Linux Additions

Both of those conspire against using something like Damn Small Linux (DSL, which I like), because it tends to use Firefox 2.x. I read a bunch, and Absolute Linux (12.2.1) sounded pretty good. I got it running quickly, and was even successful in getting the VirtualBox additions installed. I ended up giving up on it reasonably quickly for two reasons:

• I couldn’t get the resolutions to be as flexible as I wanted, even with the additions installed
• Package management was quite sparse and I wasn’t interested in going down the path of building tons of packages from source

In the past, I had success with Puppy Linux. I downloaded 4.1.2 and liked it instantly, much more than the 2.x and 3.x series that I had used before. Very attractive, very fast (booting and running). I really liked the unionfs filesystem. After trying reasonably hard to make this one work, I gave up (also for two reasons):

• I couldn’t get Xorg to work under VirtualBox, but Xvesa worked flawessly
• When I booted Puppy natively (from a USB drive), it couldn’t handle my Intel 5300 (a/b/g/n) wireless card (though NAT worked under VirtualBox perfectly)

Xorg worked flawlessly in native boot. Not having it work under VirtualBox meant no seemless mousing between Linux and Vista, a non-starter for me. VirtualBox couldn’t even find Xorg. 🙁

I hesitated to even look for Sidux, because I didn’t want a DVD-sized ISO file. Reluctantly, I went to the site anyway, and found that the 2008.4 release had multiple versions, including a 395MB CD ISO with Xfce instead of Gnome or KDE. That was very attractive to me, as I’ve liked the simple and clean interface of Xfce on other smaller distros, and I didn’t have a need for a more complex framework for multi-app work.

I downloaded the ISO and booted it in VirtualBox. Everything worked perfectly, instantly. When I say everything, I mean everything. I wrote a post a while ago about how Ubuntu worked out-of-the-box under VMware Player, and I didn’t understand how. Now I do. The VirtualBox additions are already built in with Sidux (or, perhaps, VirtualBox recognizes Debian, and supplies the correct drivers to fool the operating system).

The point is that I could definitely run Sidux as a Live CD if I wanted. Pretty darn cool. But, I decided to install it to a virtual disk anyway. This way, I could have a customized installation with my SSH keys, aliases, plugins, etc. It would also make it less painful to upgrade to the latest versions of packages (instead of waiting for the entire distro to be updated on a new CD).

So, I installed it, and the VirtualBox additions (because I wasn’t sure whether the latest version, 2.1.0 was there by default). It’s simply fantastic. I can copy/paste across Vista and Linux. I can move the mouse seemlessly between the desktops. I can change the resolution if desired, including going to a full 1920×1200, going full screen, making the machine appear to be a native Sidux Linux one (Vista simply disappears completely). Then, without rebooting, I can just change the resolution back to 1400×1050, which fits nicely within the Vista desktop.

I have shared folder support (which I mount at will, so a virus can’t infect Vista since I only mount if I need to move a file from one environment to the other). I have full USB support to the virtal machine (so I can read/write from a USB stick from Linux). Like I said above, it all just works.

So, while I am glad that I learned a bit about some other distros (in particular, Puppy 4.1.2 which is really great), Sidux wins again for me. It’s simply a fantastic distribution.