SliTaz Forum

epicslitaz

Member

Registered: 2011-08-07

Posts: 2

Extremely slow installation of packages

When I attempt to install a package, it gets stuck on

Compressing the fs...

LZMA 4.57 Copyright (c) 1999-2007 Igor Pavlov 2007-12-06

I have attempted to install google chrome over 4 hours ago and it is still stuck on that. the hdd is being accessed quite a bit constantly and the cpu load is 100%. I am not sure if my system is too slow or if there is another way to install packages. Yesterday i tryed to install openoffice but it was stuck in the same place for 9hours, so i just closed out of the window. I am currently trying to restore a 13+ year old computer and am impressed with the speed of slitaz. it is about three times faster than win98 which was already installed on the system. I have installed slitaz using the 3.0 loram cd. I have burned the cooking loram cd and was going to upgrade.

System Specs:

HP Pavilion 7270

Intel Pentium 1 166Mhz(i586)

80mb RAM(16mb+64mb)

2mb VRAM

10GB HDD(2.5GB HDD + 7.5GB HDD)

1.5GB ext3 partition for SliTaz

1GB Swap

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Extremely slow installation of packages

Well, the LZMA (which our packages are compressed in) is very process intensive to use and on slower systems it takes a while to compress or recompress using it - especially for bigger packages.

The thing is, you're trying to download pretty big packages that need to be downloaded externally and then converted over into tazpkg so it can be installed. For example OpenOffice needs to download about 400MB of files - which it then has to convert over and package as tazpkg then installed. This can take long on a fast machine too. Chrome itself needs to get about 22MB of files and go through the same conversion process. It's a little bit faster, but can still be a pain.

You just happen to stumble on to two of the few get- packages in SliTaz.

So yeah, it has to do with your download speed and how much processing power LZMA has to convert the packages over with. The bigger the package (or it has A LOT of dependencies) is the longer it's going to take. Add to that the download time and it can be a pretty long wait.

You would probably find packages like Abiword, gnumeric and Firefox would install faster because it doesn't have to go through the above process since the packages are already read-made ones.

epicslitaz

Member

Registered: 2011-08-07

Posts: 2

Re: Extremely slow installation of packages

Thanks, I made another 2gb partition and installed slitaz cooking using the loram cd. I then tried to install it in terminal, but it is stuck on that point. I realized that I was wasting my time by trying to install chrome and openoffice because chrome needs 258mb of ram and openoffice 3 also needs 258mb of ram. I researched and saw that openoffice 1 only needs 64mb of ram. is there a way to install openoffice 1. would i have to download the .deb then use tazpkg convert to convert it to a tazpkg?