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Topic: SliTaz, It's no DSL, but...

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dslfool

Group: Members
Posts: 105
Joined: April 2004

Posted: Mar. 30 2008,15:23

Has anyone seen SliTaz (slitaz.org), a 25MB ISO with JWM and FireFox?

From the SliTaz site:
* Root filesystem taking about 80 Mb and ISO image less than 30 Mb.
* Ready to use Web server powered by LightTPD with CGI and PHP support.
* Browse the Web with Mozilla Firefox or Retawq in text mode.
* Sound support provided by Alsa mixer, audio player and CD ripper/encoder.
* Chat, mail and FTP clients.
* SSH client and server powered by Dropbear.
* Database engine with SQLite.
* Tools to create, edit or burn CD or DVD images.
* Elegent desktop with JWM running on the top of Xvesa (X server).
* Home made graphical boxes to command line utilities.
* More than 440 packages easily installable from the mirror.
* Active and friendly community.

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Toshiba Portege 7200CTe notebook, 600MHz PIII, 8GB CF as HD, 320MB RAM
DSL 4.2.5 (frugal toram)
...and the picture is of Fuad Ramses from the film "Blood Feast".

roberts

Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Mar. 31 2008,14:53

My initial comments...

First off kudos to the development team of Siltaz.

Lots of commpression is used here gzip and lzma to achieve small size. We have often discussed using more compression but didn't because the older cpus would spend too much time decompressing things. Small distro does not mean run extremely fast on very old hardware due to overhead of uncompressing.

Using initial ramdisk, kinda like our initrd version. There using newer version supported only in 2.6 kernel. Boot up is a little slower as builds up the ramdisk with rootfs.gz, I like it. No unionfs/aufs which I have already stated that I would rather not use. So kudos for that. Even their modules are compressed. They have 224 compressed modules. DSL 4.x has 617 uncompressed modules, DSL 3.x has even more. DSL has more but duplicate applications, two window managers, several editors, two file managers. I have often promoted to drop some of these duplicates.

Caution Siltaz boots with open ports and known root password. I would not boot with open ports. Also firefox starts with a connection to their website, so they know your ip, open ports, and root password is not a combination that I like.

I like the simpilicty of their core architecture. I will investigate further.

Edited by roberts on Mar. 31 2008,14:54

roberts

Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Mar. 31 2008,21:20

no its not DSL, but ...

I like the foundation of initramfs/rootfs.gz - very easy
I have already made a remaster. If you know cpio then it is easy.
But probably only us old guys are that familiar with cpio.

They have a different philosophy of running their system once booted. I still prefer the DSL way of doing things. But will likely adopt the foundation.

curaga

Group: Members
Posts: 2163
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: April 01 2008,16:21

I'd like to say my view of initramfs vs. initrd.
Initramfs is first uncompressed, then unpacked to rootfs. It is writable, but it is also ramfs, which can overload very easily.
Initrd is similarly first uncompressed, then mounted. With ext2 there's little filesystem overhead. With the same files, initrd would take more ram. But there's an upside with ext2 initrd: it is not rootfs, so it can be freed when not needed, and it can be imposed limits to, so it can't overload your ram & swap.

Then there's the way I've been thinking of, using initrd but cramfs instead of ext2. This uses about a quarter of ram compared to either previous approach, as it is never uncompressed. And this small ram usage can still be freed after boot.

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There's no such thing as life. Those mean little jocks invented it ;)
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Windows is not a virus. A virus does something!

lucky13

Group: Members
Posts: 1478
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: April 01 2008,16:38

Quote

Then there's the way I've been thinking of, using initrd but cramfs instead of ext2. This uses about a quarter of ram compared to either previous approach, as it is never uncompressed. And this small ram usage can still be freed after boot.

Have you tried benchmarking the differences in any quantifiable way? My concern is cramfs and squashfs would be fine on newer hardware but the price would be how they could burn up older computers -- what you free up in RAM would suck on older, slower CPUs.

--------------
"It felt kind of like having a pitbull terrier on my rear end."
-- meo (copyright(c)2008, all rights reserved)

12 replies since Mar. 30 2008,15:23

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