First impressions of Saline OS 1.0

“Saline is a fairly new distribution to the Linux scene, having
just reached the 1.0 mark in January. The distro is based off
Debian Squeeze which, at the time of writing, is due to become the
official Debian Stable branch any day. The Saline website is small
at this point, featuring some information on the distribution,
support forums and screenshots. The ISO for the 1.0 download weighs
in at 886 MB, pushing it into DVD-size territory. Given the large
download it may be surprising to learn Saline’s live disc boots
into the light Xfce desktop environment. I found the appearance of
the desktop very appealing. The quick-launch bar at the bottom of
the screen and the application switcher at the top are done in dark
colours with a pleasant high-contrast. The wallpaper is a blue
underwater view and there are a few icons lining the left side of
the screen. The icons include links to browse Saline’s file system,
an installer and a user’s manual.

“I feel the manual deserves special mention as it’s nicely put
together. It’s presented as a PDF document and covers available
software in the live environment, how to install Saline to the
local hard drive, restricted multimedia codecs and proprietary
video drivers. There’s also a section on WINE for people who need
to run Windows applications. There is a short section on LAMP
servers and the manual concludes with a list of common command-line
programs with a brief description of what each one does. Each
section is short, but covers the basics and will be a handy aid to
Linux newcomers.”

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