A Complete Linux OS in 25 Megabytes? No Way! SliTaz Review
SliTaz GNU/Linux is a new member of the Linux mini-distro family. This newcomer has joined the market, currently dominated by the “major” minor (pun intended) distributions, such as Puppy Linux and of course DSL. These distributions are focused on older hardware, and the main goal is to basically find a balance between low system resource usage and optimal productivity power.
Slitaz running E17Â
I’ve taken SliTaz for a spin, and I must say it is a pretty formidable OS.
Much smaller than both Puppy and DSL, SliTaz automatically detected my hardware and DHCP, booted in warp speed, and loaded the default JWM with a nifty panel in almost no-time. The only thing that bothers me was the decision to not include more keyboard maps for X, (which means no Slovenian xkbmap). Although I suppose this problem can be solved with the tazpkg package manager included in the distro, I didn’t have the time to figure it out.
In conclusion, if you’re looking for a fast, stable and small distro, SliTaz would be first on your ‘try’ list. If you like it, you can install it on your hard disk directly from the LiveCD. SliTaz’ main goal is to see what productivity can be squeezed into a 25 mb LiveCD. Evidently it’s more than I expected.
Thanks for the news, i love linux and open source news. Best regards. And please keep us informed with the latest news.
Slitaz really _is_ impressive. Good thing that you reminded me – I think I’ll make a little review of it for one of the Danish sites.
This is a great distro. It runs like a dream on an old dell latitude. So well in fact that I installed it to the hard drive. In a meeting I had my old machine with Siltaz and a friend their new $1500 laptop sporting windows vista. I could surf the net twice as fast as he could. While it is not designed to compete with any full fleged OS (windows, linux, or others)it can make that old computer that you have been using as a door stop live again. It now serves as an internet browser at my house. Very cool.
I’m using it now via VirtualBox and it runs like the wind. Plenty of memory and resources left for XP (1gb system) – so I can keep working with this all day.
Few distros running in virtualization would allow me to keep them on standby like this. I’m getting full performance from both OSes.
As an fyi (and for those wanting to test this b4 installing)… was not able to get this running on Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 and QEMU required way too much in terms of resources. VirtualBox on XP – a great combo.
What’s interesting about this OS vs all the others I’ve been looking at lately is that it makes me want to learn Linux. Reminds me a bit of my first DOS system and staring at the command line for the first time and thinking, ok… what’s next? After looking at so many distros over the years, I’m finally excited about one.
You have enough to get started via the GUI but alot of tasks need to be done via the CLI. What is available via the GUI really does a great job in preparing you for the command line. Since there aren’t many packages installed (what is installed are great, low-resources packages) – I was able to get a pretty good sense of the system in about 30 minutes. I learned more about Themes, Packages, viewing processes and a few other things in the first few minutes than I have on other larger distros just because of the way this system is put together.
Despite the raves this OS is receiving, few sites even mention that a server is running with PHP installed. It even has a Wiki available via localhost. There’s DB support through ListPatron and SQLite. Good slection of filemanagers and a bunch of utilities for burning ISOs, creating your own mix, etc…
There’s a nice text-based package manager shell with clear instructions on handling local and mirror packages. Not many, I’m afraid – but like I said… this OS really makes me want to learn Linux so I’m on the hunt to figure out how it works and see if there’s a way to get packages from another distro.
Hackerish, command-line fans as well as technically oriented folks from all OSes should take a look at this system. It accomplishes so much for such a modern OS in such a small size – this alone makes it worth a look.
Cheers, Pax.