SliTaz v5.0 RC2 Part 2

This is a follow-up to my troubled review of SliTaz v5.0 RC2, and it will make a lot more sense if you read that first. Still running in VirtualBox.

  • after installing SliTaz v5.0 RC2, run tazpkg recharge to get the updated package list, and then tazpkg up to upgrade the entire system
  • with 5.0RC2 this showed a large list of packages each of which said either "New build" or "New version <n.nn>"
  • in fact, it wanted to upgrade 233 of the 234 installed packages
  • this appears to be why my previous attempts at installing packages failed - it would make sense, although only if the package manager was too dumb to check builds/versions/dependencies instead of just names-of-dependencies ...
  • they really need to issue a new RC, this is crazy-huge update
  • and the documentation should point out that tazpkg up is highly recommended before tazpkg get-install <whatever>
  • went from 220 MB to 300 MB in use - not sure if this is stored downloaded packages
  • it rebooted cleanly - and dropped the disk used to 270 MB
  • and tazpkg clean-cache removed 239 files = 43.6 MB - much better
  • best way to see what's available is tazpkg search bash - this simultaneously tells you if it's installed and what's available remotely
  • this time tazpkg get-install bash worked without error, and bash itself is working without problems, so - problem solved
  • tazpkg get-install virtualbox-ose-guestutils brought me unexpected graphics happiness after a reboot - SliTaz's utils version is 4.2.6 and I'm running VirtualBox 4.3.26 (on Windows), so I didn't expect it to work ...
  • Fullscreen and Seamless work
  • haven't tried shared folders
  • to finally get the time off GMT I went to "http://tazpanel:82" (requires root login) -> Settings, set my time zone (which wasn't enough) and set the date to the correct time, seems to be fixed
  • the panel in OpenBox is lxpanel, the desktop is handled by pcmanfm
  • configuration profile is ~/.config/lxpanel/slitaz/
  • ~/.config/lxpanel/slitaz/panels/panel includes the menu, but recommends using the Preferences menu item in the GUI ... which doesn't have a way to edit the menu
  • to search for a file (presumably a binary although I don't think it's limited to that) that's not installed, use tazpkg search-pkgname locate
  • locate is in the findutils package, xset is in the xorg-xset package (although that didn't help me as much as I wanted with setting a new font ...)
  • how to get the Dvorak keyboard layout (VirtualBox/Windows this isn't necessary, VirtualBox/Mac, VirtualBox/Linux and undoubtedly real hardware it is): edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-Keyboard.conf, changing Option "XkbLayout" "us" from "us" to "dvorak", then log out and back in, you're done
  • the maintainers (or A maintainer) of SliTaz appears to be obsessed with note-taking software: the repository is of moderate size (~4800 packages?) but there are an inordinate number of note-taking packages - weird
  • I love that package info shows both download size and installed size
  • Firefox is incredibly old: v17
  • installing in KVM under Linux, SliTaz's gparted didn't recognize the default virtual hard drive: I had to set it to "SATA", likewise the default "virtio" network card had to be changed - I chose "e1000"

With the exceptions of Firefox and the package manager upgrade problem (which I admit is somewhat justified by the desire to keep everything really small), I'm really liking this distro. It's incredibly tiny and yet has a fully functional graphical interface (I consider OpenBox fully functional: not everyone does). A lovely little OS, I'm impressed.