Hi,
I have been held a HP Omnibook 6000 with a PIII Coppermine, 796 Mhz, with 192 MB Ram (not upgradable). The GPU is a ATI Rage 3.
The machine had already a Slitaz, as of 2011. I could not get a tty : it was triggering a kernel panic, with messages related to the GPU driver : mach64.
I rebooted and I tried to update the repos, it didn't work, even changing the main repos. I tried to update, it broke, therefore I installed the Slitaz 4.0 after I reformatted the root partition. Then I thought it would be all ok, but it was not.
First thing, it messed badly with the video, and therefore I tried to reboot to live Slitaz, which was working, chroot, change driver. No go. It was still not working. I had consulted the wiki, used the tips and tricks provided, still hoping to get it to work, it worked perhaps during one session and the next not anymore. Before and after that, I had tried to boot to init 1, or init 3, when I realized (reading the wiki, seeking for information) that the init levels have been removed ! Wao, what a progress !
I therefore removed slim from the daemons, in order to get to a prompt after boot, instead of getting a black screen, but for unknown reason then tazkpkg would not work anymore. I ended breaking the system by trying to switch to cooking (from within the live and chroot), and sparing you the details (I also tried to restore slim as daemon but after that the boot was still finishing on a tty prompt, which I wanted only for a temporary solution), after several days of this struggle, I decided to give up, and try antiX which was about to release the version M12. antiX has done all well, has normal runlevels, working well, a hardware detection which didn't fail, and everything, except little details easy to fix, works normally.
Just before installing antiX, I had a doubt : was the problem coming from the machine, or from the distro ? I had used Slitaz before, and as long as I would not update the cooking after install, it would work. But after I installed antiX, I realized that the machine could perfectly work, session after session, without presenting strange inconsistencies (ie : a slight change in the lxpanel made me loose the menu button, which I had to reinstall and never got the same as the original one, and in the live could not find where the config files where located, so that I could not restore it as it was before, even from a live in chroot). Again, I will spare the multiple weird issues I met with during about 3 days.
I could have gone to my blog, or any place where people report about their experience with a distro, but I preferred to come here because I have known Slitaz since a few years now, and with the brilliant start it has had, I am expecting it to become better, not to regress the way it has.
I hope the next versions will provide normal init runlevels so that if something goes wrong it can be fixed in a classic manner, and I hope all will also be more consistent. What use is it to sell spider usb sticks if the distro inside is not reliable ?
Regards,
Mélodie
PS I had an account back in 2008, but it has been erased since...
