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Hi! I was wondering why SliTaz uses tazpkg as its package manager and not aptitude and Debian's repositories? Since Debian has a lot of packages, wouldn't it be better to have APT and Debian's repos instead? What if SliTaz was based of off Debian? would it decrease the performance of Slitaz and increase its hardware requirements?
As a user of Linux Mint, I find SliTaz a bit confusing for new users to install and compile packages.
I have installed SliTaz on VirtalBox and on an old pc I found (AMD Duron 900MHz, 168MB RAM) and I truly am impressed by Slitaz; its crazy fast yet beautiful for a 100MB filesystem. Now, the only thing that I find confusing is tazpkg as the package manager; it only has like 3000 packages while Debian's repos have 30,000+ packages. Thats my question then: why not use APT and Debian's repos?
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Hi,
My 2 cents:
a) Slitaz is not based on Debian, but Slitaz provides a good tool to convert Debian packages,
b) Slitaz is really fast and efficient because it is not derivated from other distro,
c) and if the package manager is confusing for you, please take the time to read the doc, I am sure it will help,
d) and if you want a fast and light Debian, you'd better ask Debian's dev. Would not you?
Happy slitaz.
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One of the reasons I moved to SliTaz was to get away from Synaptic. Why do you ask? Because Synaptic has to 'optimize' it's packages db listing every week. Ok, nothing wrong with this because it makes searching for them easier. What I do have a problem with is that this seemingly process is that by default it takes up 90% of your resources on an old machine. This is something that's present in all Ubuntu/Mint/Debian versions.
The second reason this won't work is because Debian and SliTaz aren't 100% compatible. You cannot use some Debian packages without having to modify them to work with SliTaz. Some Debian packages you won't ever be able to use because it tries to replace SliTaz's internal ones. In short? It's a shit storm waiting to happen.
So in conclusion, that's why we don't use Debian package manager. It would slow down SliTaz INCREDIBLY every week and will probably break more than it fixes.
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>Because Synaptic has to 'optimize' it's packages db listing every week
lolwut? also, I dont have synaptic installed on my debian PC.
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Yes, but for the nice graphical interface they'd want synaptic installed...
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PackageKit is better)
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Ahh, that explains much. Thank you all for explaining so many things! I really don't have a problem with SliTaz's package manager, it's really similar to synaptic anyways: instead of sudo apt-get install, in SliTaz, its subox tazpkg get-install. No, the reason I wanted debian packages in SliTaz is because of the low amount of installable packages in SliTaz's package manager.
Could you guys please tell me what the software is called that changes DEB files so I can use them in SliTaz? Thanks!
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tazpkg convert package.deb and you don't have to be root to convert it (so no need for sudobox to use it).
It's also better to use the su command in terminal rather than subox. Alternatively, you could just install sudo, configure it with visudo (google how to use vi) and use the no sudo password trick for Ubuntu (yet again google ubuntu sudo no password). That way you can just type sudo something to make it work. No password required. Some people think this is insecure, but if the person is already on your box to use it, then they probably know your password anyway so a sudo with a password will make no difference...
Also don't be fooled, Debian might have nearly 100,000 packages, but this is largely due to package splitting. Having up to 5 packages per application and up to 3 per lib kind of cooks the numbers 
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