The following review is of the live CD version. I have left in here because I don't know whether the problems mentioned still exist. I have since tried the ordinary version (LXDE) with great success. Read my review of that and, if you want to try Salix, avoid the live CDs.

The installer was simple and very fast, up to the final point where the Lilo boot-loader should have been created; it then failed, with no real explanation. I was dumped into a CLI where nothing seemed to work, including init and shutdown, so I had to reset the computer.

Since I was installing this alongside another distro, I was able to launch it from grub. The single CD had managed to provide a good range of software, even OpenOffice and Gimp. The result was impressive. The package installer worked well. Media codecs could be installed with one click and the player (Parole, new to me, and very nice) played all the formats I tried perfectly. Of course, if I had not had another distro already installed, I would never have seen all this!

A further problem arose when I discovered that I had an American keyboard installed. The xfce keyboard tool had no effect; or rather it did set the keyboard (as revealed by setxkbmap) but it was being overridden by something else. The users forum revealed that this could be cured by editing two files in /etc and re-running hal. At this point I decided that I'd wasted enough time.

The forum has just 480 members; like a number of small distros, Salix clearly suffers from having too few developers. If they test it, it will work, but there's no guarantee that they will.