What do you think about Slitaz?

Love SliTaz! Forum member ADComp has put together a nice CrunchBang-influenced SliTaz remix.

I don't currently have SliTaz installed on anything, as none of my hardware is old enough to require something that light. I would definitely choose it over Puppy or DSL for ancient hardware, but not over CrunchBang/Debian/Ubuntu/etc. for capable modern hardware.

I rescued a friend's data with slitaz yesterday (he updated his ubuntu karmic). and now I just tried the new cooking version on my eee. hm. It is still impressively fast, but in the end I lost the menu-panel before I could start setting keybinds and had to hard-reset – and on my eee screen the resolution is kind of strange.. cut-off windows etc. – scrolling and doubleclick on touchpad didn't work either..

but still: nice! for old desktops with mouse, however, it is really really cool. and for having it on a usb-pendrive of course.. wlan is dead easy to set up have to figure out how to do persistent changes on the live system. seems I have to create an iso first and then put it to usb with another tool.

oh: ADcomp's version.. is it this Madbox thing? did some quick google on our forum and madbox looked nice.

Last edited by saneks (2010-03-17 22:47:46)

it is always fast and light, because it loads everything to ram (if you have enough, but it doesnt need much), so you can take out the cd and use the drive (very handy for recovery purposes)

I used to play with slitaz 2.0, tried the eee version which displayed ok, but had other issues there, but can't remember what it was – now I downloaded the new cooking with firefox (shiretoko).

Last edited by saneks (2010-03-17 23:05:19)

Slitaz is very impressive for old boxes. Desktop on a 1999 Fujitsu laptop with a 266MHz Celeron and 192MB of RAM:

Note the startup memory usage of 28.7MB! (Also most of the disk usage is my data, not the system, which was less than 100MB I think.) Leafpad, pcmanfm and urxvt popped up almost instantaneously, firefox in 30s and total bootup time was 55s - faster than Windows 98! It's not too hard to customize (openbox, lxpanel) and get rid of most of the spiders.

There does seem to be some bugginess however (on "cooking" anyway) - I had to rewrite a symlink to get espeak to work for example, and gnumeric took two installs. Maybe there are fewer checks and controls. The shell is busybox (though you can install bash) and there are no man pages. I couldn't find any Japanese support. Obviously to get a distro this small you have to leave some things out. I did try installing a cli-only setup on an even older 16MB Toshiba, but that didn't work out...

Slitaz is well worth a look I think.

Where can I get that? I was just thinking of trying to do the same thing.

(Yesterday I put #! on that same Fujitsu and of course it's much slower. Maybe a bit of pruning will help...)

Last edited by johnraff (2010-03-18 04:13:01)

http://www.ad-comp.be/public/projets/madbox_slitaz/

I was inspired by this post to do some light distro-hopping and so downloaded Slitaz for possible use on my old Acer Aspire. Wow it sure is fast!  It literally screams along on my samsung nc10 netbook. I am going to play around with it in the next few days as a fun project and see whether it could offer the same functionality of #!cb but even lighter.

My old laptop only has 195 Mbs of RAM . . . and I had the same problem with the "unpacking initramfs"  The ISO/install just hangs there.

On my main PC, via Virtualbox ... Slitax/Madbox works and looks great.
I can still use Slitaz 2.0 'cooking' on my laptop though.

I would not be proficient enough to 'graft in' AdComp's Madbox additions/scripts to Slitaz 'cooking'

that's why I won't use puppy linux.

...or that xfce rat...

Anything to get more usable touch screen space in a phone sized package is good. You could do a LOT with a second screen - more screen space for a keyboard, customizable game controls, street view on one screen with map on the other for navigation. I wish this were out now!