The Salix Startup Guide is now part of our documentation site. You can find it at docs.salixos.org/guide, as the first section in the documentation menu. A bit of history first. Back in 2014, we had to rewrite the guide in a new format, because Publican, the tool we were using before, would not work on Salix anymore. I wrote about it in a previous blog post. We switched to txt2tags, which could produce HTML, as well as LaTeX for a PDF version, from the same source files.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I first started working on it five years ago! A bit of history first… When we were trying to build the Salix presence on the web, we knew we had to have at least three things: A main landing page A support forum A documentation project For the forum, we had settled on phpbb, which seemed to be the most feature-rich option.

We now have our own capsule on Gemini! But what is Gemini and what is a capsule? Gemini is a lightweight, text-based protocol for sharing content on the internet. It’s designed to be simple and efficient. It’s similar to the http(s) protocol, but with many restrictions that limit its functionality. These restrictions were included in the Gemini protocol on purpose, so there’s no chance that the Geminispace (the collection of all Gemini pages) will ever become the mess that the modern web is.

Neofetch is a command line tool that shows some information about the running system. It is not very detailed information and it is not a very useful tool, but it is fancy. Here’s a quote of its description from its homepage: The overall purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screen-shots of your system. Neofetch shows the information other people want to see. There are other tools available for proper system statistic/diagnostics.

Even during the development phase of Salix 15.0, more than a year ago, I was getting questions and comments about which the default (GUI) text editor would be. I still get those questions in my inbox. So, Salix 15.0 came with Xfce 4.16. And Xfce’s default text editor is Mousepad, but we elected not to include it in the default app selection for our release. Instead, we included L3afpad, which is essentially a GTK3 port of Leafpad, the default editor in all our previous releases, including at least Salix 14.