SliTaz v5.0 RC2 Review

  • SliTaz website
  • live CD with an install option
  • tested in VirtualBox
  • version 5.0, RC2, aka "Cooking"
  • installer isn't super-slick, but it's easy to use
  • mouse wheel NOT supported (again, this is VirtualBox)
  • the bootloader GRUB4DOS, the first time I've seen that in the wild (I've seen documentation about it: it seems to have some functionality that's more advanced than plain GRUB)
  • it has a graphical front end (OpenBox) AND an incredibly install size: I think this is a new favourite (BUT - read on)
  • Openbox, 3.2.53 kernel, Midori browser, default term is Sakura
  • 219 MB for the entire system installed!
  • old kernel, 3.2 series originally released January 2012: there have been multiple long-term stable releases since, kernel compiled May 2014
  • xterm is installed by default
  • box time is set to GMT as the install never asks you about time zones (come on, it's not that hard ...)
  • any attempt to "insert" the "Guest Additions CD Image" locked up the virtual machine: more likely a VBox bug than a SliTaz one?
  • there's a default vi ... but it's BusyBox <sigh>
  • package manager is graphical tazpanel or command line tazpkg, which looks like it's mostly tarballs and shell scripts - and very small
  • tazpkg list to show what's installed
  • tazpkg list-mirror seems to be the way to check for available packages (although it's not the only one)
  • to install a package from the repo(s): tazpkg get-install openssh (get-install because install is for installing local file packages), and it does get dependencies
  • gdmap is NOT available, neither is kdirstat (graphical disk usage programs - it would be interesting to see what's using the most space on such a stripped install)
  • rsync, gvim, vim, and vim-tiny are available
  • firefox is available but not installed: by itself it's 37MB (the base install, it's worth remembering, is 219MB)
  • managed to get the GuestAdditions CD to mount (not sure how or why, just appeared), BUT, found package "virtualbox-ose-guestutils" and installed that: version is 4.2.6, which didn't work with my 4.3.x VirtualBox
  • even "chsh" isn't available: bash claimed it set itself as the default, but I still get sh (haven't rebooted or even logged out) - and when I try to run it by hand, I get: error while loading shared libraries: libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory - oops, so much for their dependency system
  • zsh installed cleanly, but also won't run - this time for lack of libgdbm.so.4.
  • better yet, that's broken tazpkg itself, which won't run because of a missing libgdbm.so.4 - and tazpanel is also broken now, so no way to add/remove packages at all
  • /bin/sh is now a link to /bin/zsh: I've edited /etc/passwd so both giles and root point to /bin/ash, which is a pointer to /bin/busybox, but I expect the system won't log in at all on reboot, should be fun
  • yup: boots to text console with complaints about not being about to mount ext3 or ext4 (the drive is ext4-formatted), and about missing libgdbm.so.4: then, when I type "root" at the login prompt, it gives me "login incorrect" without ever asking for a password - sweet!
  • at which point I abandoned ship, severely disappointed

Got the problem sorted: read the follow-up here: SliTaz v5.0 RC2 Part 2. This is a pretty major glitch, but the distro is still good.