Damn Minuscule Linux: A First Look At SliTaz 1.0

25MB... surely this is a mistake?
A Linux distribution which includes Firefox, an audio player, a CD ripper/encoder, email, FTP client and lots more... with a 25MB ISO footprint?
Someone’s having a laugh, aren’t they?
Er, actually, no they’re not, although I guarantee – yes, guarantee – you’ll be smiling if you try this amazing little live CD.
SliTaz uses what I’d call a ‘fringe’ desktop manager, JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) which, while being super-quick, isn’t as easy to manage as more popular WMs.
Still, it gets the job done and, anyway, it’s always nice to play around with a new working environment – that’s a large part of what makes Linux so interesting.
Once you run the live CD (get I here) that 25MB ISO expands to a root filesystem of around 80MB.
SliTaz is designed to run from RAM on any machine with 128MB or more (my test machine has 1024MB) but with the addition of a [slitaz-loram] boot cheat code you can get by on just 64MB.
Before I cover my first impressions of SliTaz (which, incidentally, has French roots so although English is available, French is its default language), let me run you through what’s included in more detail.
It is based on the latest Linux kernel 2.6.24, glibc 2.3.6, X.Org 7.2 and GTK+ libraries. On top of those solid foundations you also get:
The lighttpd web server, SQLite database, IRC client, SSH client and server via Dropbear, gFTP, Ghost In The Mail, Transmission, Geany IDE, Mozilla Firefox, AlsaPlayer, GParted, ePDFView, ISO Master, Burnbox, Leafpad, GPicView, mtPaint, Asunder, Alsaplayer, mhWaveEdit, Geany, and a few games.
Additional packages can be downloaded and installed using the text-based Tazpkg manager, which I’ll come back to.
SliTaz’s boot sequence is one of the slickest I’ve come across: Being so small, it loads in seconds then, after four quick configuration options – language, keymap, sound and video (both my soundcard and 1280x1024 resolution were detected) – you’re into the login screen.
Here, your choices are ‘Hacker’ (user) or ‘Root’.
The JWM desktop is set up with an Xfce-like panel at the top sporting just a few applications, one of which is Emelfm, the file manager.
I’d run into this file manager a few years ago, in early versions of Zenwalk Linux, and wasn’t hugely impressed with it, although its dual-pane function can be very useful and, if you don’t like it, you can always get Thunar from the SliTaz repository.The default desktop isn’t all that pretty but you have to bear in mind the compact size of this distribution.
One seriously good thing to point out here is that my broadband network was instantly available to me in the live CD environment, with no input needed from me - impressive indeed.
SliTaz comes with a few really useful utilities.
There’s a hard disk installer (still under heavy development, and in French only), a build tool (tazwok), a program to remaster the CD image (tazlito) and another for creating an image for installation on bootable USB storage devices (tazusb).
That bootable USB stick option means the hard drive installation isn’t much of an issue and, anyway, I’d bet the project’s founder, Christophe Lincoln, will have that install routine cracked quickly.
If you’re running SliTaz on a decent sized USB stick, and on a more powerful computer, then you’ve a whole other world of software options available to you.
The project's download server includes heavyweights like The GIMP, Kino, AbiWord, Inkscape, and the Enlightenment 17 window manager.
It’s here we return to SliTaz’s package manager, an APT-like system known as ‘tazpkg’.
Using it is as simple as using APT: "tazpkg recharge" updates the list of available packages and "tazpkg install package" installs them and their dependencies.
Tazpkg also lets you list, remove, extract, pack, search, repack, upgrade, or get information about available or installed packages – it’s really rather good.
Having said that, SliTaz won’t suit everyone’s needs.
Its window manager, while interesting and functional, simply isn’t mainstream enough and requires a fair bit of learning before you can get it to look and work how you like.
But if you’ve an old laptop gathering dust under your desk, and you’re looking for an interesting, fun project SliTaz is a great choice.
There’s a solid base to it, with well-chosen default software and a reasonable downloadable selection to complement it, all wrapped up in a mini-marvel of a distro.
Give SliTaz a try – you won’t be disappointed, and its cleverness will make you smile. And that’s a promise!
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