Sidux, a Great Alternative to Ubuntu - page 4

First Impressions

The custom hard drive installer is a wonderful, polished tool that lets you make all the installation choices at the beginning, and then walk away while it does its job. But don't go far--on my Thinkpad it took five minutes, twenty-seven seconds. The only reboot needed was to exit the LiveCD session and boot into the hard drive installation.

Just like in the LiveCD session I had to configure networking and sound, but of course only once, since it's a permanent configuration. Sidux uses some kind of super-duper compression; a 470-megabyte CD image expands to 1.5 gigabytes on a hard drive.

It took a lot longer to tell about all this than it did to do it--downloading took a couple of hours, and after than it was 45 minutes from burning the CD to booting to the new hard drive installation, and that includes time spent reading the manual. Come back next week to learn how Sidux holds up to real-world use.

Resources

• Sidux
• Debian release information

Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the newly-released Linux Networking Cookbook, and is a regular contributor to LinuxPlanet.