Software: Slitaz Version 1.0

I feel I haven't given enough time for promoting Slitaz Linux. Version 1.0 was released this month, and I was pleased to see my name on the developer list. It's just under 25MB in size and an incredible distribution. Distrowatch has a review of it, and there will be a how-to I have written, being published on the Custom PC website very soon indeed.

Slitaz is designed as a bootable CD. I part-wrote the scripts that allow you to install it to a USB flash drive. Unlike a hard drive install, the filesystem is kept as a single file on the flash drive, which is loaded directly into memory at boot. This means the system is super fast once loaded and minimises writes to the flash drive. It also means that if you screw around with something and make a mistake, simply reboot and you're back to square one. All documents and settings are stored in your home folder, which is mounted post boot - so you very rarely need to rewrite the filesystem - only when you install a new program.

If you need to make a change permanent, you can simply right click the desktop and tell it to write the filesystem. This then takes the memory resident filesystem and writes it to the USB drive. It backs up your previous system, so you can roll-back on boot if things go wrong.

Slitaz has its own packaging system, where you can install Abiword, GIMP, Pidgin, Kino. Firefox and Alsaplayer come as standard. Pretty much everything you need! I have installed OpenOffice via Debian packages (it has BusyBox for dpkg support) which I am tempted to store in my /home folder so that it is not memory resident.

There are still holes in the documentation, and I'm helping out as much as I can. I'm hoping to put some more work into it at the end of April. Check it out!

Distrowatch

I haven't been this impressed with a new Linux distribution for a long time. A compact package with basic applications, a web server and web development tools, an excellent package manager, remastering utilities and good auto-configuration scripts - all in a 25 MB download. What more can one need? While SliTaz GNU/Linux is unlikely to satisfy every user's needs, the project is a great testament to the old saying that good things come in a small package. It is also a tribute to the infinite versatility of Linux and free software. Give SliTaz a try, you will like it!

When it's released, I will. But frankly, it's quite easy! The "tazusb" tool is documented

Weird. I run it under VirtualBox all the time.