@Darjeeling,
just check it out: does the new 4.0-rc work in your machine? Or: does only this
http://is.gd/TazDevISO
work on your machine?
It is a matter of some minutes.
For me it seems that one needs to have ,,full" Xorg - whatever this means. Feel invited to explain it here, pankso!

4.0-RC1 crashing on boot-up with kernel panic - HELP?
(42 posts) (10 voices)-
Posted 13 years ago #
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Thanks for your reply, Michael.
> Does the new 4.0-rc work in your machine?
No, as I wrote, it doesn't.> Or: does only this http://is.gd/TazDevISO work on your machine?
Yes, it does. That was the last thing I tried very late last night (early this morning) and it surprised me. For the first time since the 4.0 cooking version from last May I was able to boot straight into the graphical desktop. None of the many rolling versions since ever worked for me. Neither does the current RC. I wrote about this here a long time ago but got no useful response. The TazDevISO loads Noveau for the Nvidea card in the PCI Express slot. But, strangely, it also loads the cheesy Intel AGP on the mobo although this is disabled in the BIOS. Still, for me the TazDevISO is a huge improvement over the current release candidate.One issue that hasn't changed since last May is that the panel crashes when I remove the top panel and begin to customize the bottom panel ...
Posted 13 years ago # -
P.S.:
> For me it seems that one needs to have ,,full" Xorg - whatever this means.
Yes, that's definitely the case for me, too.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Then we shold wait a bit till some of the developers finds time to explain that here. And my proposal is that many people now should compare the performance of both ,,offers" in this moment.
For me Xscreens are important: in case one has a problem with it I cannot afford to recommend Slitaz to any novices. I am not a developer and have trouble enough to iron out things to the amount that I can work like I want to work.Posted 13 years ago # -
> And my proposal is that many people now should compare
> the performance of both ,,offers" in this moment.... yes, that makes sense. But for a distro with a 2-year release cycle the call for public scrutiny should have come months ago, not just a few weeks before the final release. Also, if the developers had engaged more often in the discussion and the evaluation of reported bugs, severe design flaws like the problem of the "partial Xorg implementation" could have been addressed much earlier and people like me (there must be others) could have actually used Cooking. I wonder how many people read about Slitaz in the DistroWatch review and elsewhere; downloaded, burned and booted Cooking; ended up at the console and put the CD in the bin? There must be lots of them. I wonder how much potentially useful feedback has been lost because of this?
At times Patrick Volkerding seems quite remote from the crowd. But unlike Slitaz, Slackware has effective feedback mechanisms in place that get through to the developers. This is what makes Slackware such a mature, stable and comparatively bug-free distribution. I wish it was like this here, too.
On the positive side ... we have Trixar in the forum, who seems always available, who explains things and who tries to solve problems. Bless him for this.
Posted 13 years ago # -
@Darjeeling
Normally I used stable 3.0 and cooking was just a kind of casual hobby. This problem, sorry, I did not realize earlier. How many people gave up Slitaz for such a reason I have no idea, either. But a black screen is definitely the end and most guys do not want to follow it up further. Slackware is extreme stable, yes. Buch this amount you should not expect with Slitaz. There is quite a difference in experience and age. Plus: the ,,genius" of Slitaz is whereelse... ;-)
Of course everybody continues it only in the amount that it functions. But for a school environment it offers a lot of chances, especially for a bit older hardware. I guess it is realistic to have a kind of Slitaz (not a flavour with everything installed) with
- LibreOffice as an AppRun (but then jre must be installed)
- a recent firefox
- a functioning hmtl-editor like kompozer
- and may even a kind of additionally ,,mountable" extra part LaTeX
30 MB space is not the conditio sine qua non, but it should stay slim, easy and have a quick response.Posted 13 years ago # -
Where did you hear that we have a 2 year release cycle? I think you're confusing our release cycle with Debian's. SliTaz is supposed to release annually (as in yearly). It just had set backs that prevented it from being released end March last year.
I think most people are making the mistake of thinking the Release Candidates or Cooking/Rolling versions are finished products. They are not. It's similar to Debian's 3 release structure - namely the Stable, Testing and Unstable editions. Cooking/Rolling is our Unstable edition, the RCs are now our Testing versions and SliTaz 3 is still our Stable version. At the moment the RCs are being developed pretty rapidly, so feedback is valued. We're already planning the second RC release in the next 3 days. So keep testing and keep giving feedback. It's needed so when SliTaz 4 releases, we have something that works out of the box.
Posted 13 years ago # -
> michaelbischof: Slackware is extreme stable, yes. Buch this amount you should not expect with Slitaz.
... I only brought up Slackware because like Slitaz (and unlike e.g. Debian) it also follows some sort of non-open development paradigm with no formal bug reporting mechanism for the average user. The quality of such a distro depends on how much attention the developers pay to bug reports in an informal place like this forum.
> michaelbischof: 30 MB space is not the conditio sine qua non, but it should stay slim ...
... I think the 30 MB limit has become an obsession here. Personally, I couldn't care less whether it's 16, 32 or 48 MB. What matters is that Slitaz supports the broadest possible range of CPUs and that 256 MB of RAM should be sufficient for the default flavor. This means Slitaz should always be compiled for i386/i486 CPUs and its default flavor shouldn't come with large applications like an office suite or Gimp pre-installed. In fact, my favorite flavor would be something I'd call "Slitaz Nude", which boots into a functioning Openbox/Lxde desktop that has all the necessary admin- and preferences tools installed but except for leafpad and galculator nothing else. Not even a web browser! The Slitaz repository is stuffed with applications and libraries, tazpkg works extremely well and tazlito is the best tool of its kind in any distribution. Why not leave it entirely up to the user to customize their individual setup?
> Trixar_za: Where did you hear that we have a 2 year release cycle?
I didn't hear it, I deduced it Sherlock-Holmes-style from observation. But of course you're right. The current 2-year cycle seems to be an exception to the rule. I've only been using Slitaz since 3.0 Stable came out in 2010, so I wasn't aware of what went on before.
> Trixar_za: I think most people are making the mistake of thinking the Release Candidates or Cooking/Rolling versions are finished products.
... maybe most people are but I am aware of the difference. I'm familiar with Debian's stable/testing/unstable branches and I don't have illusions about any overnight rolling-release that's produced by a robot. But things are a bit different with the upcoming release of Slitaz 4.0. This version has been in its "cooking" stage for well over a year and for most of that time I have been unable to boot into the graphical desktop. I first complained about the issue in March 2011 here in the forum. The fact that the current RC still doesn't work for me (and others!) and the fact that Pankso is thinking about a final release in a few weeks really should set the alarm bells ringing.
> Trixar_za: We're already planning the second RC release in the next 3 days. So keep testing and keep giving feedback.
... I will.
Posted 13 years ago # -
P.S.:
> .... that has all the necessary admin- and preferences tools
> installed but except for leafpad and galculator nothing else.Obviously, there should also be a terminal emulator (xTerm or Sakura)
and a file manager (PCmanFM or PCmanFM-Mod). But I consider these
part of the desktop which is why I didn't mention them.Posted 13 years ago # -
Hi Darjeeling,
I would like to join your central argument
,,What matters is that Slitaz supports the broadest possible range of CPUs and that 256 MB of RAM should be sufficient for the default flavor. This means Slitaz should always be compiled for i386/i486 CPUs and its default flavor shouldn't come with large applications like an office suite or Gimp pre-installed."
With some additional remarks:
- a webbrowser like tazweb is a must! But this must function: there are still issues with adding bookmarks. A second must! - To install firefox after boot is a matter of seconds, in case one wants that
- but slitaz should be made so that other software, like Gimp, Kompozer, etc. that comes with static-build dependencies, should run with it. No ,,wrong ELF-header..." problems
- a file manager like pcmanfm is a must as well.Otherwise one cannot recommend Slitaz to no-nerd type of people.
Such people estimate software from a simple point of view: what do I want to do? They have no idea about its technical background. I just had a look: a simple note editor like Gnote would make it necessary to import a huge bunch of Gnome desktop infrastructur, about 30-40 MB. So this Gnote AppRun has this size - for a note program!
But such things should run on Slitaz if you apply them in form of extras (with static dependencies) ,,ready-in-itself".
That is the way to go, in my humble opinion.Posted 13 years ago # -
PCmanFM-Mod now has been renamed to SpaceFM now and Lxpanel also has been forked into versions like lxpanelx ( http://code.google.com/p/lxpanelx/ ). Would be nice to see them included too ;)
The last few rolling and cooking versions haven't been developed or fixed much at all the last few months. This new RC branch is being rapidly developed since pankso is back. Many of the common issues will be addressed and fixed. Don't worry, SliTaz 4 will work just as well as SliTaz 3 by the time it gets released as stable. Pankso is pretty strict on things like that, which is half the reason we didn't release last year - it just wasn't stable enough.
I also don't think adding more junk or creating a fully featured version would help much and the 30MB limit is more for how much RAM we can load in without locking the CD/DVD-ROM. The upper limit is 190MB although we prefer to aim for 160MB - this limits to how big the compressed iso image can be - I think that translates to a max of around 50MB. Any more than that and you just won't have any RAM left on a 256MB RAM machines without resorting to CD/DVD-ROM locking and data swapping (which is SLOW). I do agree in making a stripped down version just running the basic apps with lxpanel, busybox, slim, openbox, xterm and pcmanfm set ;)
Posted 13 years ago # -
For myself I can help myself - in most cases, sometimes too slow. I think of how to do so one can give it away. For such a case one has to meet the following conditions:
- an Xscreen must be there, in any case
- one should be connected to the net with ease
- there must be one light but usable webbrowser (tazweb is ok, except the bookmarks issue)
- one filemanager
The rest must not be within slitaz itself. Let us assume LibreOffice AppRun or a desired Kompozer that would run in Slitaz. One can copy it to a CD and then to a harddrive and use with slitaz from there. Like this... at least ,,normal" people would insist on a more elaborated browser like Opera or Firefox and an easy method to keep their data. Most people would install Slitaz to their harddrive anyway, in case they like it. Then this RAM burden is less important.<= The commandline option ,,home=/dev/sda2" fails very often. At least on my machine. The GRUB message comes like ,,...must be either a blockdevice or a pathname...", which means that he cannot recognize ,,home=/dev/sda2", right?
Posted 13 years ago # -
Yet it's LiveCDs that sell people on Linux. The RAM issue is important because of that ;)
Posted 13 years ago # -
FYI a loram is available too. Works fully with 128M RAM.
http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/cooking/flavors/slitaz-4.0-RC1-loram.isoPosted 13 years ago # -
Hi,
4.0-RC2 will be ~38Mb with full Xorg. We not fixed on 30Mb no more, we always wanted slitaz to be usable with 256MB of RAM and 30Mb was a max regarding to that. But with the new 4in1 the default SliTaz is fine since you can install a full desktop with only 48Mb RAM.
We have one year release cycle, this time it's special and we needed that. We must handle more than 3000 packages now, we had to find/manage a new build server, we had to rewrite a new packaging system and this took us 2 year of active developement. More info: http://scn.slitaz.org/2011/05/new-build-bot-up-and-running/
We are not starting to ask for feedback, it's 1 years we work with new build tools and packages have been well tested, rebuild many time. Now we need fedback on the default LiveCD, we know it's a shame if people boot and end up with a console mode when they expected to have a desktop, so we focus on the default LiveCD actually.
I commited a GTK only flavor with just X, Openbox, slim, pcmanfm and lxpanel. It will be bootable as a single ISO or from the core boot menu since gtkonly will be one of the 4 version in the 4in1 core liveCD.
- Christophe
Posted 13 years ago #
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