SliTaz 5.0RC3 'Cooking' - Review

  • previously: a look at RC2 and RC2 part 2
  • related: sound in VirtualBox
  • SliTaz 5.0 RC3 came out May 20
  • testing in VirtualBox
  • the installer is still the same, and after installing TinyCore 6.3, I have to say this is a much nicer experience: as previously mentioned, it's not newbie-friendly, but if you know Linux this just flows
  • but: on reboot the boot menu complains about a missing file vesamenu.c32
  • this file existed in the /boot/syslinux/ folder in RC2, but it's a binary so I'm hesitant to just copy it over
  • if you hit tab at the "boot:" prompt, it says "slitaz cmdline", and if you type "slitaz" it boots properly and all seems to be according to plan
  • if I use this install much I'll figure out the boot menu (I'm accustomed to GRUB, but this is something else - probably still GRUB4DOS
  • tazpkg recharge followed by tazpkg up gets about 35 new packages out of 400 or so (which is a good thing, given how outdated RC2 was)
  • the default browser is "tazweb": I thought I'd catch them by running "ps ax" to see what the binary name is ("probably midori" I thought), but no, it's "tazweb"
  • and to my considerable surprise, it supports at least basic JavaScript (an improvement over the previous base web browser)
  • but it doesn't appear to support tabs, which is kind of critical these days
  • tazpkg get-install flash-plugin was needed for YouTube to work, and that pulled in ~30 other packages ... including, completely bizarrely, "qcad" (really)
  • sound output from YouTube (and presumably other sound sources) appears to be borked, but I've had a lot of problems with sound escaping VirtualBox ... (fixed, see this
  • their default firefox is still back at v17, so tazpkg get-install firefox-official, which got me v37.0.2, which is slightly out of date (v38+ is current)