SliTaz: smaller than you think, more useful than you think

I started using SliTaz on a USB stick half an year ago just as a workaround to make my laptop with crashed hard-disk usable and try to rescue some of the disk contents. Eventually I ended up keeping the distro as my regular OS. There's a lot to like about it.

First of all, it's unbelievably small- 25 MB. Yes, in times of Vista, there are graphical OS's and software distros that small. Yes, they cheat, but with style- the OS is uncompressed using lzma, one of the most efficient compression algorithms. And it has an amazing amount of software, too- Openbox provides a slick GUI and even graphical effects like transparency, Geany is a powerful programmer's editor, Firefox is there, a mail client, torrent client, CD/DVD burner, PDF viewer, mplayer, even Sudoku. I like the choice of lightweight, but stylish programs. Finally, there's a system information applet, which gives you just what you need, and a Debian-like package manager- with a GUI.

The lack of an office suite is one of the key decisions in SliTaz. These days it is not uncommon to rely on Google Docs as a no-frills office suite. And getting rid of one of the bulkiest pieces of software has a lot of unexpected consequences. The OS is loaded in RAM, which makes it exceptionally fast and responsive, and eliminates a lot of reading/writing to the USB stick, which prolongs its life.

Why is SliTaz significant? Small is fashionable again due to the resurgent interest in mobile devices and ultra-mini PCs. Especially the Asus EEE PC and similar devices would be a perfect fit.

In this age of mobility it becomes increasingly important to have a stable environment so you can maximize your productivity. It becomes annoying if you have to set up a new PC every couple of weeks or switch between two different environments. By carrying around a USB stick with your OS, you have not only your documents and portable programs with you- the window manager is the same, you can use the familiar key bindings, the shortcuts and menus are the same. It feels like you're on the same machine.

Finally, you can regain this lost feeling that you understand what's going on with your OS. You keep it simple, you have just what you need and use everyday, and when you need a rarely used package, just install it from the repository. It won't be there when you reboot (unless you explicitly write RAM to the USB), and security-wise, I like the idea- it's as if you update your software for security vulnerabilities when you need it. It's also harder for malware to set itself up to start on reboot.

But why did I choose this specific distro? I used DamnSmallLinux for a while, and it was really cool for awhile, but showing its age- most of the software is hopelessly old- kernel 2.4 and... only last year switched to Firefox 2? No, that's not a typo- in times when Firefox 3 is stable, lagging one major version behind seems backwards. If you want to be small, get Firefox 3, use Google Docs, get rid of the office suite.

More importantly, in DSL there was a 50 MB core of applications, which could not be easily modified and customized. That makes it harder to upgrade as well. In SliTaz you can change everything- remove or upgrade to your heart's content. I can remove more programs, making SliTaz even slimmer.

The only nitpick I have is that a lot of the configuration utilities assume you have certain base programs. For instance, I wanted to have mrxvt instead of xterm, and get rid of xterm. Eventually wrote a small wrapper for xterm which invokes mrxvt.

#!/bin/sh
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
 if [ $1 == "-fa" ]; then
  ARGS="$ARGS -fn"
 elif [ $1 == "-fs" ]; then
  shift
 elif [ $1 == "-e" ]; then
  ARGS="$ARGS -e sh -c '"
  while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
   shift
   ARGS="$ARGS $1"
  done
  ARGS="$ARGS'"
  break
 else
  ARGS="$ARGS \"$1\""
 fi
 shift
done
eval exec mrxvt $ARGS