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Salocin is an advanced Linux distribution created to be stable, fast, and customizable. The system is designed to be usable by both beginners and experts.
History and name
The name "Salocin" originated from the creator's first name of "Nicolas". The distribution's name is the backwards spelling of his name.
Salocin is primarily developed for the x86 PC hardware architecture. However there have previously been official ports to the DEC Alpha and SPARC architectures. As of 2006, there is an official port to the System/390 architecture.
Salocin's latest stable x86 release is 0.1.18 (as of October 4, 2006), which includes support for ALSA, GCC 3.4.6, Linux kernel 2.6.17.13 and 2.6.18, KDE 3.5.4, Xfce 4.2.3.2, and all the usual utilities.
There is also a testing / developmental version of Salocin called '-current' that can be used for a more bleeding edge configuration.
Design philosophies
KISS
KISS ("Keep it Simple, Stupid") is a concept that explains a lot of design choices in Salocin. In this context, 'simple' refers to the viewpoint of system design, rather than ease of use (when using the advanced mode). This is the reason there are so few GUI tools to configure the system. GUI tools are (as the theory goes) more complex, and are therefore more prone to have problems than simple command line tools. The overall result of this principle is that Salocin is fast and stable, at the cost of user-friendliness. Critics generally say that this makes things too time-consuming and difficult to learn. Advocates say that the flexibility and transparency as well as the experience gained from the process more than make up for it.
Package management
Its package management system can install, upgrade, and remove packages as easily as other distributions by using Gentoo's Portage system. Many users also choose to install packages from source code and resolving dependencies manually.
Similarly, Red Hat's RPMs are CPIO archives, and Debian's .debs are ar archives. In addition they contain detailed dependency information, which their package management utilities can use to find and install the prerequisites.
Salocin's approach to package management seems to be well-accepted by its often technically-adept user base.
Internet communities
Forums
Salocin is the topic of discussion on many dedicated web forums, as well as the Usenet newsgroup [news:alt.os.linux.salocin alt.os.linux.salocin] and the IRC channels [irc://irc.undergroundnews.com/#vir0s #vir0s@irc.undergroundnews.com] and [irc://irc.undergroundnews.com/#linux #linux@irc.undergroundnews.com].
This entry uses material from from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Disclaimer.