Solus 2017.01.01.0 Live with the Budgie desktop.
Image: J.A. Watson
I have heard from a number of people recently suggesting that I take a look at Solus Linux. Since I have not tried a completely new distribution in a while, and I don’t want to get bored or stale, I decided this would be a good time to give it a try.
A quick perusal of the Solus web page seems promising. I like the fact that Solus is built from scratch, not just another Ubuntu (or whatever) derivative. I am also impressed by the fact that the Solaris team has developed the Budgie Desktop to suit their own needs and preferences. I think that says a lot about their competence and ambition.
The latest Live Image is Solus 2017.01.01.0 (no prizes for guessing what the release date was), and the Release Announcement makes for some very impressive reading. Lots of good information about what is new and improved, both in the operating system and the Budgie and MATE desktops. Lots of pretty screen shots, and a very extensive Full Changelog.
The ISO images are available on the Solus Download page. The standard version has the Budgie desktop, and there is also a Solus MATE version available. For purposes of this post I will only be looking at the Budgie version. The download files are just under 1GB, and they are hybrid ISO images so you can either dump them to a USB stick or burn them to a DVD to produce a bootable Live image.
Solus supports both MBR and UEFI firmware, but not UEFI Secure Boot. Booting the Live USB stick brought up the Budgie desktop shown above. There is a relatively typical looking panel across the top of the screen. The first icon at the left end of that panel is the Solus Installer.
It looks like Solus uses their own installer (at least I don’t recognize this one offhand). I don’t want to bore everyone (and myself) with a long-winded step-by-step walk through the installation process, but there are a few points that I would like to mention. So I will show screen shots of each step, and just comment on the most important, different or interesting bits.
- The next screen is more interesting, it offers to determine your location automatically. If you have an internet connection, it will try to get your location from that. This is purely a convenience, to save a bit of time and trouble in the following screens for the keyboard layout and timezone. If you don’t have an Internet connection, don’t worry you will be able to enter the necessary information manually.
- I had a wireless network connection for this installation, and the automatic location determination correctly found my location in Switzerland.
- These three screens are the heart of the installation process: the disk layout.
- The usual options of installing alongside existing systems, erasing everything and using the entire disk, or manually specifying the partitions and mount points.
- As usual for my multi-boot installations, I chose the manual partitioning option.
- The manual partitioning screen is pretty typical, but it does not have any way to create new partitions so if you are going to take this route, you have to create the layout you want before running the installer.
- This installation was on a UEFI firmware system. The installer will find an EFI Boot partition and list it here. My system has two EFI partitions, but I could never get the installer to let me choose between them, it just found one that it liked and that was it.
- The installer now has all the information it needs, so it shows a summary
- You get one last chance to confirm that you really want to install
