What hath Slitaz wrought? It seems when I first encountered the distribution, I did not think it would turn into a serious-use tool. After numerous support issues and refinements, the users have responded favorably to it.
We have 120+ users using Slitaz 3.0 at a hospital in Kenya as their main workstation. It is booted over the net and comes with Abiword with aspell, Gnumeric and Firefox as the main packages.
There is a fileserver which is mounted with sshfs-fuse and we developed a mount gui in yad. There is a network printer and we have a yad gui to print to it also.
Because the machines net-boot, we put ntpclient in the autostart startup section. We also put the config files for orage calendar and ayttm chat in the user's home directory on the fileserver.
Some of the refinements lacking which will be included in our release using version 4.0 are password manager, screen lock, calendar and chat. I've selected fpm2, lockdis, orage and ayttm packages. As a bonus, the screen automagically sets the correct resolution. That setup is in testing mode.
The most interesting part of the daily work is that I am in California and my counterpart is in rural Kenya where Internet access is minimal. His access to a build machine is non-existent yet we manage to get work done. He tells me how the latest build works on his network and I refine it and dropbox the iso over to him. We have managed to test the new 4.0 release as well. Some Panasonic Toughbook (CF 50's and CF 51's) laptops do not like the 4.0's higher resolution settings.
Midori is much nicer on RAM than Firefox. We have over 20 machines running on 512MB RAM. Oh yes. The genius of this distribution is that even with all these packages, we are still around 55 MB LZMA compressed image flowing out of the boot server.
As a bonus, a network image provides a pristine, virus-free, OS on the workstation. Everytime! No viruses, no hard drives, and the applications run fast off RAM. I mean the Windows users have converted because these systems are so much faster.
Thanks Slitaz and looking forward to a long relationship together.
