SliTaz, a GNU/Linux distribution which weighs in at only 25
megabytes, recently caught my eye and as a fan of light-weight
distributions I had to check it out.
Everything is fairly straight forward. During the boot process it asks
you a few simple questions regarding your preferred locale, keymap
setting, audio card, and finally the resolution and color depth that you
wish to use. Unfortunately for me (and not surprisingly), Dvorak was not
among the items that were offered in the keymap prompt so I had to
settle for the US (Qwerty) option and attempt to remember the layout.
After a moment, X fired up and I was greeted with JWM (Joe's Window
Manager) and LXpanel upon logging in. Even though I personally have a
preference for Openbox I have to say that the combination worked well
and it was a fairly decent choice for a small distribution.
I pleased to see that a lot of my favorite applications were installed
by default. One thing that you quickly realize is that even though the
overall footprint is much smaller than the more well known light-weight
contenders such as Damn Small Linux and Puppy, SliTaz still manages to
deliver a reasonable selection of software for you to use.
SliTaz also provides a installer and package manager called tazpkg in
case you decide to run it off of your hard drive.
If you do not want to install SliTaz to your hard drive and you find
yourself wishing that the LiveCD had more software or used your favorite
window manager instead you can use tazlito to create a personalized
LiveCD.
In my case, issuing tazlito get-flavor openbox && tazlito gen-distro
gave me a new ISO file that contained the one thing that I wanted on the
system.
You can read more information on regenerating the LiveCD via the SliTaz
Handbook's entry on the subject.
In conclusion, if you are in need of a distribution that does not
require a lot of resources, SliTaz is definitely worth checking out. It
is in active development and worth watching to see what the future has
in store for it.
Quick Image Tour:
The boot screen you are greeted with:
SliTaz asking for your preferred locale setting:
The SliTaz login screen:
The default environment with JWM and LXpanel:
My Openbox powered variant of the original LiveCD:
