So I installed 5.0rc2 on my hard drive and applied all the pending updates. It was unclear to me that these updates would come directly from the "cooking" channel and that it would break everything. Well actually, only the slitaz icons package is broken, but the impact is huge as lxpanel can't start anymore and the remaining apps are full of holes.
I didn't know how to install back the older version of this package (and I was unsure at this time that it was the real problem or some side effects of my own experiments) so I did a second install and immediately blocked the icons package. It worked and now everything looks stable even after an update.
Well not exactly. At this current step, there is 2 concurrent desktop systems in rc2, namely pcmanfm and spaceFM which predate each others. More notably, there are 2 desktop settings entry in the preferences menu. Uninstalling pcmanfm fixes this problem. So: tazpkg remove pcmanfm
The overall user experience is less good than slitaz 4 because of SpaceFM. IMO, It exposes way too much administrative tasks within the main GUI. I hate this engineer approach to user interface which reminds me the Puppy Linux's file manager (which is the most complicated UI I've ever seen for a pretending "easy" Linux). It's very easy to break the whole system forever by misclicking into the Settings entries of the contextual menus. Spacefm needs for a default "casual" mode where all these dangerous settings are hidden. Also The "Edit" entry of the file contextual menu is severely misnamed ("Manage" could be better).
What bothers me the most is that I didn't find a way to cleanly add my own applications into the starting sequence of the desktop environment. More precisely, I didn't manage to add xbindkeys so to add support of basic hardware buttons (you know, XF86LowerVolume and such). I finally found an alternate solution by add key binding directly into OpenBox.
Once tazpkg turned into a fork bomb. It leaded to 100% cpu usage but no visible hanging process. I don't remember how I triggered this bug, but it was not something exceptional. Maybe I was too quick in clicking within the tazpanel package interface.
Few other things I can't tell it's normal or not.
* clicking in tazpanel while the web page loading is not done leads to an annoying "1" message box. I guess it's a stub for some behavior.
* tazpanel tells me "can't resolve localhost" since I've set up wifi ; I can still open 127.0.0.1:82 by Firefox
* "tazpkg convert" is so slow I though it didn't work. It takes hours to convert the libreoffice package.
* xorg sticks to the "vesa" driver despite I installed xorg-xf86-video-intel. A manual edit fixes it.
* firefox-official doesn't care for the locale settings and download the english release. The problem is it's not really possible to localize an english-speaking firefox anymore. It's still possible via a hack but the result is disappointing.
* get-java6-jre doesn't work any more (Oracle fault I guess)
* My wifi card is named eth2 and tazpanel sometimes mixes up eth1 and eth2 because there is only an "eth" page in the network page.
* SpaceFM root-mode commands via yad don't work.
* Firefox can't reveal a downloaded file in SpaceFm
* b43-fwcutter package descrption is wrong. it's not a driver
* the shortcut editor will mess up Libreoffice .desktop files if you edit them
Last but not least: Slitaz told me about a missing module agpgart_intel and I made a HUGE mistake. I installed linux-libre-agp. Well I won't tell you what is Linux Libre. It has nothing to do with Slitaz and its kernel. But by installing such a package, tazpkg will pull a bad version of depmod, and in a glance all the module dependencies for the main regular Slitaz kernel are broken and you can say bye to your precious system. Uninstalling the depmod package fixes everything.
so well, that's all for now. I only wanted to share my humble experience.
