 |
Puppy Linux Discussion Forum Puppy HOME page : puppylinux.com "THE" alternative forum : puppylinux.info
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in|
The time now is Tue 21 May 2013, 04:04 All times are UTC - 4 |
 Forum index » Taking the Puppy out for a walk » Announcements |
|
Avec panache: SliTaz
Moderators: Flash, Ian, JohnMurga |
 
|
View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Page 3 of 4 [58 Posts] | Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, 4 Next |
| Author | Message | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Sage
Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB |
Thanks for your support, Chris. So far, I haven't read 'Teach Yourself Brain Surgery'. But when I find time, I'll be offering humour transplants. Not identifying my primary target nations, but I expect to be a $mnaire quite soon.... |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
wiak
Joined: 11 Dec 2007 Posts: 59 Location: Travelling to the Philippines |
Sounds like a dream come true this one. Even their package management system sounds like Debian's apt-get, which I've recently used and already love. I have downloaded SliTaz yet, though even my slow dialup can handle that. I have immediately registered on their forum though (http://forum.slitaz.org/). Feedback and support is what keeps any project development going. We all know how important the murga forum is for puppy, so hopefully everyone will join SliTaz's forum and start contributing to that too. Its not competition to Puppy so much as competition to bloatware. Now to download it and find out how to create packages for it. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
muggins
Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6660 Location: lisbon |
Definitely. I regularly check dsl to see if they've got any new, tiny, apps etc. So I'm quite keen to see how Slitaz evolves. By the way, our host, JM, has released a new murgaLua, v0.6.6. I wonder whether there are any lua scipts, worthwhile adapting to puppy, here: http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/DSL_Tools |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
vg1
Joined: 02 Dec 2007 Posts: 142 |
It will also run from a frugal install. Only two files are needed, the whole system is in rootfs.gz. Here is my grub menu.lst:
This is from subdir [ie two level deep]. User's conf is saved on home part if specified [hda1 above] . It creates a dir [hacker] on root of home. The browser works fine, I am writing this from Bon Echo frugal setup as above. It will also play mp3s in alsa player, but not other formats. I guess additional codecs are needed for that. I use it often now when all I need is 'net browsing and listening to mp3s. Although much smaller than puppy, it takes longer to boot. On my pc about twice as long, depending on the puppy version: p4 1.7 [oc'd to 1950] 768 ram seconds, grub to desktop: w98 [lean] - 18 p214R - 22 dingo - 24 p301 - 28 wxp [lean] - 35 lhp, teenpup - 40-50 slitaz - 50 nimblex, slax, woolvix - abt 60 It's fun to play with, but no real competition to puppy. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Sage
Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB |
Lightning fast from an HD full installation. Did you try it? It can also work from USB - there is some discussion on their Forum.
Well, maybe there's plenty of room for both? When I installed a load of packages, there wasn't much more needed - and barely scraping the 50Mb barrier. It's ability in expanded form probably meets the requirements of 75% PC users? Interest here has been stronger than expected. For years, I've been urging folk to follow the example John set with MeanPup ~50Mb. Less is the way to go, especially if the future lies in embedded code a la Back to the Future of 8-bit computing! One can pander to the whims of allcomers forever as more and more bizarre old minority use kit, as well as new HW, turns up. Probably such requests would be better accommodated by a well-written, comprehensive exposition on package sources, how to compile them and how to deal with troublesome dependency issues. That is to say, such a reference manual directed at each individual distro and regularly updated as single issues emerge? And written with complete novices in mind. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
KJ
Joined: 20 Jul 2006 Posts: 174 Location: Above sea level .. about 320m |
|
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
wiak
Joined: 11 Dec 2007 Posts: 59 Location: Travelling to the Philippines |
I'll put this info on the Slitaz forum, since that's where it most usefully belongs, but in case anyone from the Puppy community has been trying Slitaz and run into the issue I had, I'll put it here too: I tried Slitaz on an old Dell Latitude 500MHz CPx laptop. It booted fine and was very fast but couldn't find my 3Com 3c590 pcmcia lan network card. The answer may be in Slitaz's documentation, but I couldn't find it. However, I stumbled across the answer on the Slitaz forum: http://forum.slitaz.org/viewtopic.php?id=100 also in: [url][http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2008/03/31/07/04/42-a-quick-look-over-slitaz-1-0/url] At CD boot time I had to issue the following boot command to get my pcmcia card recognised: slitaz modprobe=yenta_socket Then once I was X, I needed to configure static IP (since I wasn't using dhcp) by opening a terminal and entering: subox netbox or use: Menu -> System tools -> Netbox Configure Networking [the default root user password is "root" and the default normal user "hacker" password is empty i.e. just hit enter for that one] Note that subox appears to be Slitaz's way of doing sudo. After that, ifconfig shows my network card is all set up and it works fine. You can also enter the command lspci to see all the recognised pci devices (which now included my 3Com pcmcia LAN card). If you get really stuck with a particular network card, you can also enter the command: modprobe whatever_module_for_your_network_card and then use netbox again. You'll have to search for the list of network modules on the system though. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
wiak
Joined: 11 Dec 2007 Posts: 59 Location: Travelling to the Philippines |
Well, I needed to find out because I have an old Celeron 400MHz machine (Dell Latitude CPt with 128 MBytes of PC100 RAM) that I need working for my kids (the machine has a 800x600 LCD display, setup for 24 bit colour). It already has one partition containing Win 98_SE. I created two 512 MByte ext3 partitions and a Linux swap partition of size 90 MBytes (that's the space I had left). I did a full hd install of Puppy standard version 2.17.1 on one partition and a full hd of slitaz on another. I set them both up for networking and then carefully timed them booting up from grub to the final desktop display. [note: I left sound ENABLED on all of them] Results: Slitaz (Xvesa, kernel 2.6.24.2 SMP) 32 seconds. Puppy 2.17.1 (Xvesa, kernel 2.6.21.5) 44 seconds. Puppy 2.17.1 (Xorg, kernel 2.6.21.5) 52 seconds. Win 98_SE roughly 80 seconds. [to be fair, I have a lot of packages installed in W98 so its registry is chock a block. I just added that W98_SE distorted figure for interests sake]. I'm keeping all of these on this machine, because other factors determine which is best and when. But on such a low-resourced machine, Slitaz is likely to be run most often. Once they had booted, I then timed loading their main web browsers: Slitaz, Firefox ver. 2.0.0.12 - about 10 seconds first start. Puppy 2.17.1 Xvesa, Seamonkey 1.0.8 - also 10 seconds first start. Win98_SE, Firefox 2.0.0.3 - 20 seconds first start. Subsequent browser starts were about 5 seconds each for all of them. Performance, in that sense, quite fine for all. I imagine that the people over at Damn Small Linux are a bit concerned though - they really need to start offering a newer kernel and browser. Slitaz is indeed a good wake up call I'd say. Puppy is developing nicely, but DSL seems to be going nowhere (DSL-N was started but then froze...) |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Sage
Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB |
Even more so now. I've been keeping Robert's regularly upgraded 2.4 kernel distro running because it successfully dealt with scsi full installations. Yesterday, he told us he took scsi out. Both feet, both barrels! When you've got a good working product that regularly features in the top ten - don't fix it!!! |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
vg1
Joined: 02 Dec 2007 Posts: 142 |
Sage - yes, it looks like full install is much faster. My figures were for frugal install for all [except windows, of course]. I only do frugal installs on my main pc as they are easier to maintain, update etc. I have a full install on an old toshiba laptop where nothing would boot [32M RAM] except w98. Tried a lot of distros with no luck. Pup214R was the only one that worked. I did a full install and it's ok, albeit slow. My comment re competition - I don't think slitaz and puppy are in direct competiton. Puppy is bigger, more polished and more complete, with more add-ons etc. Slitaz is more dsl-like, only better. vg |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
wiak
Joined: 11 Dec 2007 Posts: 59 Location: Travelling to the Philippines |
I don't think the word "competition" should be used for something like this. They are alternatives. Puppy Linux has been around for a lot longer and thus caters for many things Slitaz doesn't (yet). For example, wireless and dialup modem. Slitaz's repository is also quite small, but good nonetheless, and really sophisticated in terms of organisation. However, apart from core size Slitaz is much more like Puppy than it is DSL, in my opinion. The latter uses an old kernel, an old browser, and old components in general. Like Puppy, Slitaz uses pretty much the latest of everything. The next release of Slitaz is likely to include wireless support and modem support. You can add Abiword and Gnumeric to Slitaz at present, I believe, but currently, there are far more packages available for Puppy. In its current form, Slitaz is somewhat less automated than Puppy; new linux users would find Puppy wonderful, but probably have trouble with Slitaz. Experienced Linux users, on the other hand, will have no problem at all setting up Slitaz and making it similar to Puppy in functionality. Well... one thing works against it internationally - most of the documentation is in French. Google translation helps, and there are some english docs, but limited. Again, with sufficient support that will change sooner rather than later I feel. I would certainly recommend Puppy rather than Slitaz for new users moving to Linux from Windows. It works great, is well tried and tested and has a helpful forum. The main problem with Puppy longterm, I'd say, lies with its system of package management (not with the underlying functionality, which is excellent). Hopefully, some of Hairy Will's suggestions will be put into practice in terms of repository management and security. I know this is old ground. I have read several old threads about it, and some of the discussion has been quite heated. Gecko was unhappy with the overall release situation, including how repositories were managed, for example. Puppy's killer/winning characteristic is indeed the flexibility of its frugal install method and its use of squashed file system addons. On full installs the balance starts to shift. I also use frugal installs mainly, and really love Puppy's devx sfs programming environment addon. It is also very easy to produce new dotpets for Puppy, with the likes of pet2dir and new2dir, but perhaps it is too easy? - with not quite enough organisation. There is also a learning curve concerned with really getting to grips with a new distribution. I'm currently trying to learn how to produce packages for Slitaz, but that involves a fair amount of effort (especially since the best docs are in French and I don't speak that). I don't yet know how to expand Slitaz when run as a frugal install - I simply haven't looked into that as yet, since I preferred a full install of it. My full install now has many additions, to do with compiling and development of packages, so it takes up around 240 MBytes on my hard drive partition (but still runs like lightening generally). But it will certainly be quite a while before I feel as comfortable using Slitaz as I do when using Puppy (though it wasn't really so long ago when I felt equally unsure of my way around Puppy itself). I am quite sure Slitaz can be expanded to whatever form you want though - its only the core download that is incredibly tiny considering how much it already contains. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Sage
Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB |
Wouldn't worry about the French in SliTaz. Although most of it is intuitive, virtually everybody speaks enough to get by. Long tradition of French-speaking in Indochine, Africa, Louisiana (!), even GB and, of course, mandatory in Canada! Apart from which, the French are reluctant to permit English speakers to practice their French these days- too keen to try out their English. Comme ci. As far as content, let's hope they DO NOT start adding wireless and all those junk drivers for laptops. We need to kill that technology before it kills us. Get a Nokia N95! Glad to report that the upgrade command automatically updated my installed Firefox to 2.0.0.13. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
gerry
Joined: 26 Jul 2007 Posts: 944 Location: England |
Can't find a print function. Is it so tiny that I've missed it? Gerry |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Sage
Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Posts: 4622 Location: GB |
Paperless office?! |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
gerry
Joined: 26 Jul 2007 Posts: 944 Location: England |
Hmmm..... Having tried it, I think it's "worth keeping an eye on", rather than "use". But they would welcome developers to join the project... Gerry |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
| Page 3 of 4 [58 Posts] | Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, 4 Next |
|
|
View previous topic :: View next topic |
|
Forum index » Taking the Puppy out for a walk » Announcements |
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum |
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group