Rather than compare SliTaz to other larger distributions, let’s look at what SliTaz does have. Overall, the sound autoconfiguration seems to work well.īecause its goal is to ship a minimal ISO file, it may not be fair to say what software is missing in SliTaz. However, even this did not work completely it brought up AlsaPlayer with the file loaded but not running. You can change this default by right-clicking an audio file in emelFM2, going to Edit Filetype, and changing muine to alsaplayer -e. The problem traces to the default audio application being the Muine audio player, which is not included in SliTaz 1.0. Sound worked well for me, and I was able to play MP3 and Ogg files with AlsaPlayer, although just clicking them in the emelFM2 file manager did not work. Other than Flash, Firefox seems to work well, although the Alt-arrow keys did not go to the previous/next Web pages as in other distributions. And as SliTaz does not include a video player on the live CD, I cannot comment on video support. Unfortunately, I could not correctly install the Flash plugin either automatically or manually. With the Internet working, I tried to get some Flash videos to work, but was met with a request to download the Flash plugin. Looking around the menus, I was not able to find any support for wireless networking. I later tried running the live CD on a Compaq Athlon 64-bit computer and had no issue with its network card, as it was autoconfigured correctly. However, I was not able to connect to my shared directory on my file server through either Network File System (NFS) or Samba. Unfortunately, SliTaz didn’t detect my wireless 3Com 3c556 Hurricane CardBus adapter during bootup, but I was able to enter modprobe 3c59x manually as root (password is root) and get Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and the Internet to work fine. With my plugged-in wired Ethernet connection, I was ready to start surfing the Internet. If you choose to, you can install Enlightenment or Openbox as alternative desktop environments. This setup is usable, though it lacks the pizzazz of some of the newer desktop environments. The bottom panel, which runs the full length of the window, shows the workspace selections and the window list. The centered top panel shows icons for the menu start (a spider), file manager, terminal, Web browser, iconification tool, volume control, network status, CPU utilization graph, and clock. The desktop, based on Joe’s Window Manager (JWM), is uncluttered. Boot prompt options let you specify sound, screen, persistent home directory, language and keyboard mapping, kernel module, and laptop options. I took the default username of “hacker” (no password) and got to the desktop, then removed the CD to see if SliTaz truly ran from RAM (it did). The distribution autodetected both sound and video correctly on my system. In the process, SliTaz asked about language (French, French Swiss, or English), keyboard mapping (French, French Swiss, Belgium, Canadian, Dutch, English UK, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, or US), sound selection, and video. As stated on the Web site, “The distro can be used by anyone who knows English and has some familiarity with Linux.” The Web pages and the online user forums are available in English as well as French.īooting my Dell laptop with the SYSLINUX-based SliTaz live CD took about two minutes to bring up the login prompt. With the exception of the boot screen and some of the included documentation, which are in French (but also available in English on the Web pages), everything is in English. Although based in Switzerland, SliTaz has an English- and French-speaking audience. SliTaz stands for Simple Light Incredible Temporary Autonomous Zone the T is capitalized to reflect that SliTaz is built with the Tazwok tool and has several other Taz-based applications. You can store user data and settings on persistent media, and support for more than 400 additional download packages is available. The current version, SliTaz 1.0, weighs in at a light 24.8MB and provides a nice selection of applications that run on a lightweight desktop. SliTaz is a new micro GNU/Linux live distribution designed to run from RAM (a recommended minimum of 128MB) and installable to a hard drive or USB device.
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