Distrowatch has recently put on the waiting list a very interesting tiny gem, SliTaz.

As this tiny distro is a French one, it's no wonder the reviews written so far are in French: here, here, here, and here.

However, as I was too lazy to write this post on Friday evening, when it should have been written, there is already another English-language review here: SliTaz GNU/Linux, the Smallest Desktop Distro Ever Created.

Fact is that I was intrigued by this distro, and I have tried it both as a LiveCD and as an installed system with my old laptop, HP Omnibook XE3, Celeron 850 MHz.

The website of the distro is neat and clean, and it includes a good deal of documentation. However, as it's a French distro, the documentation is much more complete in French than in English. This is why I will personally refer to the French documentation as far as I am concerned, but not before mentioning a few pages of interest:

 LiveCD usage and options, however more complete as Utiliser le LiveCD et ses options.

 There is no English installation page, so you'll have to resort to Instructions d'installation sur HD (the ncurses installer is very straightforward, but in French!).

 Packages; Tazpkg - Package manager; Tazwok & the wok vs. Gestion des paquets + Wok & Tools.

 Tazpkg Manual is in French only (but all the messages issued by tazpkg are in English!).

 System administration vs. Administration du système.

 X Window System vs. Système de fenêtres X.

 Generate a LiveCD flavor (using Tazlito - SliTaz Live Tool) vs. Générer un LiveCD à saveur.

 En français uniquement : Chroot environment ; Configuration du réseau ; Développement ; SliTaz et la sécurité du système ; Hacking SliTaz LiveCD.

Now here it is SliTaz 1.0 from the LiveCD, with Firefox opened (3 tabs), an xterm, jwm + lxpanel; note that SliTaz starts by default lighttpd and php-cgi (8 processes):

LiveCD with Firefox: 66-67 MB of RAM occupied

As it's very simple to install it, here's the memory usage on the installed system, before starting any Firefox: 28 MB!

As an installed system, 28 MB were needed, no Firefox started

Let's get slightly more technical for a while:

 In order to be able to use the PCMCIA-based RealTek 8139D NIC, I had to add to the boot kernel line: modprobe=yenta_socket.

 To get rid of any of the post-boot questions (this is valid for the installed system too!), I actually edited the file /boot/grub/menu.lst and added to the kernel line the required options. To make sure I would copy the same arguments I used for a successful boot, I took them from here:

root@smarttaz:~# cat /proc/cmdline
root=/dev/hda1 modprobe=yenta_socket lang=en kmap=us vga=791 screen=1024x768x16

 There is no S3 Savage ("savage") X.Org driver, it used VESA, but it worked actually very well. The actual process was: /usr/bin/Xvesa -ac -shadow dpms +extension Composite -screen 1024x768x16 -auth /var/run/slim.auth vt07.

 Normally, you should be able to set your options in ~/.xsession, you can find an example here.

 There is a bug in lxpanel: no matter what I tried as settings, maximizing a window will cover the panel too, although it shouldn't.

 The login manager (desktop manager) SLiM has the user halt for... you know what for :-)

 There is no need to run mkfs.ext3 prior to launching the installer, as the documentation says. You only need to run fdisk or to already have the required partition(s): slitaz-installer will take care of the rest.

One more screenshot, the System Tools menu:

There is one particular thing I liked with SliTaz (apart the "Taz" in the name) is the command-line package manager, Tazpkg. It is a shell script (written from scratch) compatible Bash and actually invoking Ash in SliTaz.

It's simple, neat, with the script itself (and the messages) in English, and the online documentation in French — but you have some basics in English too.

As you can see, it's very simple, and it works very well:

Note that it can be used in the "shell" mode, which is much more convenient. Also note that it can manage the dependencies — took from the receipt file included within each package (the French text speaks of "recette", so it's about the "recipe" meaning, not the "récépissé" or "reçu" in French) — but you can also decide to skip the dependencies, thus there is more freedom power to the user!

Each *.tazpkg is actually a cpio archive. Quite straightforward.

SliTaz 1.0 has 448 packages in the online repository, of which some 135 are already on the tiny CD image.

Note the special packages get-flash-plugin-1.00.tazpkg and get-skype-1.00.tazpkg! (I have not tried them though, nor I tried Pidgin 2.4.0.)

Oh, BTW, I suppose you should read the Releases notes for SliTaz GNU/Linux 1.0 (FR: Notes de publication) before getting it (EN, FR). I have not read them!

The only problem I see with SliTaz is that the package are only binary packages, and the sources directory only contains the sources for the SliTaz-specific tools (BTW, tazpkg, tazlito et comp. are released under GPLv3), whereas the GPL mandates the existence of a written offer to make available the full source code for at least 3 years for everything that's distributed as binary, and the easiest way is to set a sources ftp/http/rsync/cvs repository in public access. This non-compliance with the GPL is specific to some other distros too (e.g. Zenwalk, Arch), and the common excuse is that "you can have the sources from upstream, and the URL is in the build script". This is an excuse, nothing more, and this won't make the distro GPL-compliant.

You can find the exact sources used to build a given package by reading the receipt file, e.g.:

# SliTaz package receipt.

PACKAGE="asunder"
VERSION="1.0.2"
CATEGORY="multimedia"
SHORT_DESC="GTK light CD ripper."
MAINTAINER="pankso@slitaz.org"
DEPENDS="gtk+ libcddb cdparanoia-III"
TARBALL="$PACKAGE-$VERSION.tar.bz2"
WEB_SITE="http://littlesvr.ca/asunder/"
WGET_URL="http://littlesvr.ca/asunder/releases/$TARBALL"

# Rules to configure and make the package.
compile_rules()
{
	cd $src
	./configure \
		--prefix=/usr \
		$CONFIGURE_ARGS
	make
	make DESTDIR=$PWD/_pkg install
}

# Rules to gen a SliTaz package suitable for Tazpkg.
genpkg_rules()
{

	mkdir -p $fs/usr
	cp -a $_pkg/usr/bin $fs/usr
}

Note however that the GPL requirements — 3.a) and 3.b) for GPLv2 — are also having a practical side, not only a theoretical one: the "upstream" is not bound to keep the source tarball for a given release available once a new release is out, as long as the said "upstream" provider does not offer binaries. Oh well, c'est pas si grave que ça, except for the case when the developers would get angry for criticizing this omission.

Let's get back to the bright sides of SliTaz: the ability to build your own flavor of ISO, either from the predefined profiles (currently, "core" and "openbox"), or from your own flavor, with the easy choice being to include all the packages currently installed in your system:

Choosing a flavor...

...from the available ones...

...or from your own appétit

The bottom line? I liked SliTaz for its extremely low system requirements, and I particularly liked the package manager. I suppose I won't keep it on my old laptop, unless I will keep it as a good platform for experimenting with an uncluttered Linux distro. Developer-side, it comes with GCC 4.2.2 and 3.4.6, Geany 0.13, make 3.81, CMake 2.4.7, CVS 1.11.12, GTK+ 2.8.20 (incl. -dev), glibmm-2.8.16 (incl. -dev), GTKDialog 0.7.9, wxWidgets 2.8.6 (incl. -dev), PHP 5.2.5, Perl 5.8.8, etc.

P.S.: Eeek! Today's DWW has its own review of SliTaz!

UPDATE: SliTaz just got its own Distrowatch page, screenshots on TCS, and a new mirror.