TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Slitaz is one of an increasing number of distributions that came to me out of the blue via a random suggestion. These are quickly becoming my favorites because very often I'm pleasantly surprised by them.

At just about 25 megabytes, Slitaz qualifies for the "ultra-lightweight" division. Its peers include Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. Like most ultra-lights I tested this one in a virtual machine first.

I must note that this was done on a beta version of Slitaz. The last stable version was some time ago, and since I didn't see any major bugs when working with it I decided to rant on this release.

Install:

After the initial boot I was asked by text menus to choose my language, keyboard layout and screen resolution. Interestingly, using the "en" boot option didn't work as intended. Rather than choosing an English keyboard (as the splash says) it just kept me at the boot prompt and cleared the boot options.

I logged in with the default user and was brought to a desktop. I'm comfortable with GNOME and GTK+, so the desktop for Slitaz put me at ease immediately. Slitaz has easily one of the most pleasant-looking desktops of all the ultra-lights I've tried.

The installer wasn't much to write home about. It was basically a set of GTK dialogs that asked where I wanted to install (empty text box for partition name) and whether I wanted to format it using EXT3. That's it.

Reboot sent me through the same initial configuration questions and brought me to the same desktop as the CD. I immediately went about trying to tweak things.

The VM I tried this on had internet, so I played some with the Slitaz package manager. It was relatively self-explanatory. The "mirrored" tab gave me more install options, but apparently the only server it contacts is tuxfamily.org, which doesn't have a very large selection.

The configuration tab gave me the option to set up more mirrors, but neither the "Setup" or "Add" buttons seemed to do anything. I would have preferred access to the Debian repositories like Damn Small Linux.

I had some trouble getting another user set up on the system. The default is "hacker" with a password of "root". It was easy enough to change the password for "hacker" but not so easy to create a new user account.

There were no obvious user managers and "useradd" just set the password. "Adduser" was not available. When I tried to log in using the account I created I got an error that Slitaz couldn't execute the login.

Anyone wishing to use Slitaz on a desktop would apparently have to be okay with the username of "hacker", but they could change the user and root passwords on the system to their liking (which I would highly recommend).

An audio application was installed (alsaplayer) but it didn't have MP3 support. There was no movie player as far as I could tell. With no GCC out of the box I had no joy on my Nvidia drivers. Ndiswrapper also didn't exist, so no internet on the desktop.

Software Selection:

Whereas Slitaz is surprisingly robust in some areas (internet apps), it's sadly lacking in others. The games menu has only a Sudoku client by default, and there was no office software to speak of. I guess tradeoffs have to be made somewhere.

Firefox 3 release candidate was installed, which surprised me. At 25MB I didn't think a full-featured browser was an option. The space used for Firefox is apparent considering what all else is missing.

There was one odd application called "Desktop Launcher," which organizes your applications into tabs, similar to an ASUS EEE. I couldn't find a way to close it once it was open and ended up logging out and then back in.

Slitaz did offer a program to help me create my own LiveCD, which was cool. However I'm not sure I'd necessarily want to go to the trouble with this distribution. If it offered Debian compatibility, perhaps.

Conclusion:

Although the visual appeal of the distribution had me excited at first, my excitement all but evaporated once I tried to tweak the system to something I could use.

The package repositories used by Slitaz are small and particular to the distribution. The default package selection is very slim and I can only assume it's to make room for big apps like Firefox. I'd much rather see a smaller browser and more useful applications.

In the end I could see very little that would persuade me to keep a CD of Slitaz in my laptop bag instead of something like Damn Small or Puppy. Perhaps in future versions this will change.