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I have been using Slitaz for the past 3 years (2.0 stable and 3.0 stable) and they both boot and work fine on an old PC with an AMD K6-3 running at 450 MHz. Now I just downloaded the latest cooking version and it does NOT boot, specifically it starts booting and ends in a kernel panic.
Some investigation yielded the following information. The latest cooking boots fine on my newer PCs that have an i686 or better CPU. The kernel for the latest cooking shows Slitaz 2.6.37-slitaz (i686), where my stable slitaze 3.0 shows Slitaz 2.6.30.6-slitaz (i586).
I believe this is the root cause of the kernel panic some users are getting, they have older i586 or older pentium CPUs and the kernel is built only for i686 or newer CPUs.
QUESTION: Have the Slitaz developers made a decision to NOT support the older i586 based machines??
Slitaz is a GREAT small linux that has worked great for me to learn linux and use my older PC. It would be a shame if future Slitaz releases did not continue to support the older i586 based PCs.
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Hi,
Thanks for the analyse, well I did not take the decision to go i686 and I'm going to investigate that immediatly because YES slitaz will stay old computer compatible!
The first thing I seen about Processor type and features in 3.0 kernel is:
CONFIG_M386=y
And now we have:
CONFIG_M486=y
...
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Actually, no they haven't. This is caused by the Linux Kernel dropping support for older hardware in the later versions of the Kernel. Hence you get kernel panic when you try running it on hardware that's support go dropped.
This is why some versions of Puppy still use the older version of the Kernel for it's builds and why DSL never got upgraded beyond it's version of Linux.
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Not sure about that Trixar, I think the generic i386 config did'n drop anything and is much more portable than i486 since we got kernel panic on new computer that are non-intel. These new processors, say AMD, are compatible i686 but I guess not i486.
About DSL, the story is a bit different... they use a 2.4.x kernel serie and never got 2.6.x. Then I published SliTaz, with new way to boot (all in one initramfs) and finally Tinycore is born, the main dev is the one who was maintaining DSL and when he published Tinycore he said he was inspired by SliTaz... and he was not only inspired, you will find a lot of slitaz files (md5 check) in the first version of TC, on Distowatch interview he talked about his inspiration from SliTaz... he could have say it's fork but using FLTK and not GTK...
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I knew about the DSL developers creating TinyCore, but I never knew that SliTaz inspired them. I find myself inspired by SliTaz as well, but I note there is parts we can go even lighter on - like using uclibc instead of glibc. There are also intermediate languages we can use to write distro tools. For example the creator of Puppy jumps between these languages a lot and is currently using one that allows people to write programs in BASIC, that then can be compiled into a binary. For me, Genie looks pretty interesting to me because it's similar to python, but links directly into the linux libraries so no wrappers like Python or perl uses. Best of all, it's not interpretative, but compiles an executable binary like the BASIC tool puppy uses.
I could fork or write my own, but I'd rather learn how to do it and then find some way to incorporate it into SliTaz - maybe even a flavour designed like that.
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