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Good morning,
I'm new to SliTaz community and have several general questions.
I hope to gather some stories and points of views, as part of these questions calls for subjective views.
A little background about me : I use GNU/Linux exclusively since 2005 and I am an happy user of Arch from 3 years. Today, I need a system that respects my views (KISS, FLOSS, low hardware requirements ...) and that can be used on servers as on old hardware (for people that can't buy a computer, for non-profit organizations etc). I see SliTaz as a potentially good answer for all of that.
1) Do you think my assertions are wrong ?
2) From your points of views, is SliTaz stable, installed on disk, day-to-day administrable by people that don't have a strong computer background, after a short formation on it ?
4) Is SliTaz cooking usable or is it more like a development preview ?
5) About maintenance / packages support : is the stable branch security-supported ? If yes, how many time ? Are stable packages frozen, like Debian ?
Thanks a lot, sorry for my english (and maybe for the place where I post, wasn't sure where to go for this kind of thread) !
1) SliTaz aims to work on older system and uses as few resources a possible. This is why we have several isos to fit systems as they come. For example, the slitaz-loram-cdrom version only need about 48MB to boot as a LiveCD. Most SliTaz 3 installations only need about 32MB to run at a reasonable speed. We aim to keep things simple and uncluttered, but some functionality falls to the wayside to save space. We also generally try to follow the FLOSS way.
2) SliTaz 3 is pretty stable, while SliTaz 4 (Cooking) is slowly working it's way into being so too. Day to day, it's a pretty stable. Most of us here use SliTaz near exclusively on our systems (I sometimes boot into XP, but only for applications that doesn't work in WINE). There are a few known bugs which can be fixed by the user, but besides that, it's a pretty usable system.
3) Cooking (and the SliTaz 4 Release Candidates) is more a showcase of where SliTaz is at the development stage and the iso images and package for it changes rapidly. As it nears a release however, these packages are frozen with only minor changes allowed, if at all. Security critical changes however are always allowed.
4) Once a version goes stable, we tend to freeze the repository for it. Major bug and security fixes still get applied, but minors ones tend to be left in place. Corrections may be made to the package later on though. There is no real amount since it happens as these bugs and security issues become known.
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Regarding your question 2):
not sure what you mean.
The nice thing in my view is that you can have a frugal install, ie, even if the user kills his system because of lack of knowlegde, it will get restarted as it was before then, or close (filling /home still a BAD idea).
I certainly will trust that enough to provide a customized (frugal) slitaz system to someone with limited knowlegde.
Getting something which does not work as it should to work is a different story, and to tailor the environment to specific needs might be WAY more complex than the press-the-button UBUNTU's or its derivatives' stories. Just check through this forum how many people have been asking for help about flash or OO.
Beside this, in my view most people will probably fall in love with V3 version of slitaz... 
I have been planning for the "gf test" for a while... should do that though....
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We never said SliTaz was spoon-fed easy
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Hey Trixar,
no, I agree it's not....
But it is beautiful, fast, efficient...
The support here is really great when needed....
and we all love it
By the way, i miserably failed in breaking my marathon-slitaz-uptime record, due to hw failure: my motherboard seems to be dieing...
I am trying to not overconfigure a new PC: do you have any opinion about a celeron E3400+8GB RAM+SSD ? which i can get for 200 €
any reason to think i should rather go to an i3 ? with 2.5 more horsepower, & more expensive at about 350 €.
How well would such a 4 thread cpu be used ?
(my current diying system is a 2.8GHz P4 with 2.5GB of Ram, so I really have no idea about stronger machines)
Tx
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Thanks for your answers.
Trixar_za : so it's not advised to install and use cooking on a workstation. Cooking is more for developpers and can't really bu used daily ?
Then, with stable, if for example midori gets security fixes with minor release, SliTaz team tries to push it on the repository ?
I see there was an attempt to make unofficial SliTaz backports for 2.0. Are there plans to reactivate it ?
christophe : sorry, I'll train to explain more accurately. I like to employ the same distribution for all my uses (servers, own workstations, family computers, and sometimes a second life for old computers). I'm more interested by SliTaz installed on disk than by SliTaz Live.
I think SliTaz should fits pretty for simple servers and my own worstations. But I was wondering about daily use and stability for non-Linux users.
With my early tests, I think I can install SliTaz stable, configure it (or make my own custom live install, as you said), make a short training on how it works and lets the user managing it without many troubles (not more than others, as distributions like Ubuntu can have many troubles too !). I believe this cause that the stable branch doesn't seem to get risky updates and because existing graphic tools seems good enough, am I right ?
Thanks again, have a nice day.
You and your user will love slitaz if it is tailored to your (their) needs, in which case close to no administration is then required.
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Yakulu: Not that it's not recommended - it's just update heavy and some of those updates might break things or require you to do some minor fixes. For somebody that's just looking for a system that works out of the box and doesn't change much, this could be annoying. In it's favour, it has up-to-date software at it's disposal where SliTaz 3's software is mostly 2 years out of date.
The Majority of packages for SliTaz 4 probably won't work for SliTaz 3. We don't really have backports for it except a handful of unofficial packages made by volunteers. I, myself, have a few @ http://www.trixarian.net/SliTaz - Once I move to SliTaz 4, I'll probably have to update the majority of those packages.
christophe: SliTaz will probably run on just about any system you throw at it. I'm thinking of buying myself a box with a P4 celeron 2,4GHz processor, intel motherboard, 512MB RAM and power supply for R250 (which is about 20 euros). I have a SATA HDD and I'll just need to buy a cable, which means in total the PC setup will cost me about R280 to build. Then I'll just put SliTaz on there and do the minor fixes as needed. I think one of the nice things about SliTaz is that it doesn't need much to work, so it works blisteringly fast on most setups.
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I see yes. I think it could be manageable, as I use Archlinux for years now. And, whereas it's more and more rare, it sometimes break on an upgrade. If we can find help here, on the ML or on IRC when something gets wrong, it should be ok for me :-)
Backports are quite important to my eyes, so if I choose SliTaz after real-word tests, I hope I'll can help.
Thanks again for yours answers Trixar_za and christophe.
Currently i have P4 2.8 GHz.
Slitaz runs well on it, but very often, FF is a pain, because the pages are slow to load. Mostly the processor is the bottleneck here, it seems (or is that waiting for the network, and i do not realize it since the cpu is at 100% ?)
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The bottleneck is probably FireFox. Try installing Adblock Plus, Flash block, CookieCuller and Fasterfox lite. They really help keep my resources usage low and my connections fast. There is also this extension that stops tracking cookies, but I forget it's name.
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okay,
but a ff bottelneck, is that really different from a cpu bottleneck.... ??
I am already using adblock and added the 3 others...
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Yes, because Firefox is a resources hog to the point that it sets aside RAM it uses for itself. Add flash to that and it can crawl or freeze on flash or large image heavy pages, especially if you have a couple of tabs open. Firefox can pretty much use up all your resources all by itself.
Don't get me wrong, it's still the best browser around, but I do feel certain things could have been managed better. Luckily there are extensions to help ease the load - I even know of one that manage Firefox's memory usage and one that makes tabs only load when you click on them.
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Well that gives me interesting second thoughts about problems I've hit recently
(i routinely have 50+ open tabs with FF, but never had the impression i was running out of memory with 2,5 GB, but maybe there is something wrong here).
Also I read recently that Flash needs an nvidia card under linux to get hw acceleration... have you ever heard of that ? could it be the reason that video, while running ok, is bringing my machine to its knees ? (i have an ATI based graphic card)
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I've heard it needs atleast a DRI enabled on the card's driver to work, which is the same if you want OpenGL to work with hardware rendering too. Type of card shouldn't matter.
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Tried to start a new thread .... could not.
Searched on DEB, RPM, ARCH. No topics on these topics.
Read all the public literature, Disrowatch, release notes, etc. How & why is this distro different from the many versions of Puppy, Arch & *buntu Linux?
Forum reading here, told me that apps for Ver.3 ae not working for Ver4. What is in your repositories? Still searching for answers....
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