1, Yes, at least slitaz 1 and 2 should run from hd with 64mb ram, but firefox probably will not run.

2. Loram loads fewer items to ram.*

3. I do not remember.*

4. Loram and its regular ram version are supposed to install the same os to hdd.

5. It should run as well as any other hardware of similar vintage, mhz, and ram, as far as I know.

* See my next post in this thread.

The loram flavors are available in stable and cooking.

Detailed loram info:
http://community.slitaz.org/node/6

A new cooking-20100314 is on the mirrors.

Thanks for the info. Regarding question 3, when I go to the flavors dowload page:

http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/flavors.html

and then I click on "Download a taste", it takes me to this page:

http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/2.0/flavors/

I see the loram ISO but no mention of stable or cooking. But if I back up the directory tree to http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/ (the Index directory for all ISO's), I see that there are directories for stable and cooking. If I navigate to stable and then flavors I arrive at http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/stable/flavors/

I then see what is apparently the same 33.5M loram ISO as listed in the 2.0 ISOs directory. Is this correct? The confusion for me is when I'm looking at this directory: http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/2.0/flavors/ there's no indication of whether they are stable or cooking ISO's.

Just because files have the same size and name is no indication they are identical.
MD5 fingerprint would be the same for identical files.
As you can see these are different.

http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/cooking/flavors/slitaz-loram.md5
f9bb0b98ac905229586c1b19b53c44a6 slitaz-loram.iso
http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/stable/flavors/slitaz-loram.md5
50dadce343210fdd7228199dd85ed4f6 slitaz-loram.iso

Always verify your downloaded iso against the provided MD5

md5sum -c md5

with iso and md5 in same location.


http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/ is the correct path

2. Although loram and regular ram are supposed to be two ways of booting the same distro, in the past I learned the hard way after much confusion that one lacked packages such as wireless tools. Also, I am not sure if lorams install live usb properly.

3. I think lorams were cookings at first but now I am as confused as you as to what has loram, xorg, or other features. About two months ago I asked if there were any lorams for cooking snow but have not received any answer yet.

I was talking about the fact that a visitor to the website can navigate to the same loram iso via 2 different directory tree paths. The first is through the stable directory > flavors > and this path gives an indication to the visitor that the loram iso is a stable flavor.

But the second path is through the 2.0 directory > flavors > and there is nothing indicating whether or not the loram iso (or the others on that page) are stable or cooking. After doing some investigation like I did, one can see that they are the same file size, name, and md5 sum.

http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/stable/flavors/slitaz-loram.md5
50dadce343210fdd7228199dd85ed4f6 slitaz-loram.iso

http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/2.0/flavors/slitaz-loram.md5
50dadce343210fdd7228199dd85ed4f6 slitaz-loram.iso

Stable is 2.0
That's the one you want,either one as they are both the same ;))
The question is can you get slitaz to work on your computer ?
Don't let the small stuff bug you, even if you point out real problems with this site or distro the people in control seem to frequently ignore it.
Slitaz has enough to offer that I accept it for what it is.
I look at it as the price that's paid for using their software and community for free.

You also can reach the same http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/2.0/flavors/ from http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/flavors.html that says it is not stable but is cooking.

"For convenience, the SliTaz team propose some ISO flavors; they are based on the Cooking version, but are not always syncronized with the standard version. The loram flavor can start SliTaz on machines with very little resources and needs only 64 MB without disabling the cdrom and loram-cdrom can boot using only 10 MB and a little swap memory, but is unable to release the cdrom."

I'm trying to get the loram iso going on this machine. It gets to "Welcome to your box" and then I see the mouse pointer on a black screen and the pointer doesn't respond to mouse movement.

I tried various combinations of:

no387; irqpoll; and agp=xyz

See how much free ram you have after booting to console.
Use screen=text boot option
Then type

free

enter
You'll see 64000 total,how much is free.

Here is mine:

tux@slitaz:~$ free
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
Mem:       254928       188188        66740            0        11396
Swap:       257032            0       257032
Total:       511960       188188       323772

I have SliTaz installed on 8 laptops, and have tried various flavors for the older ones. But most recently, i wanted to put SliTaz on a Toshiba Satellite 430cdt machine from 1997 with 32 MB of RAM, which will only boot from the hard-drive.

So i physically removed the drive and put it into another machine which can boot from live-CD, and installed the regular 20100221 cooking version from the CD, then put that hard-drive back into the Toshiba.

It works fine, the only problems being that upon booting to the desktop i get an error box complaining that FAM or gamin is not running, and for some reason the pcmanfm background image did not run automatically, so i added a line for it at the beginning of ~/.xinitrc.

Otherwise the only complaint is that actually using the desktop is painfully slow because the machine has only 32 MB of RAM, and so it has to make heavy use of the swap memory. Reading from and writing to the disk so much uses up a lot of time.

That's not really a problem for me because i use command-line a lot, so i set up this Toshiba to boot to the command-line, installed lots of great lightweight command-line tools (like ytree, sc, zile, tcc, ht, and nasm), and then i can always run startx if i really need it.

I think it's really cool to have the latest version of SliTaz running on such ancient hardware.

I wanted to send this message from that Toshiba, using Links in text-mode as my browser, but the SliTaz forum website would not accept my login, so i was forced to send this post from a different machine. :(

When I type "free":

total - used - free - sh. - buffers
Mem: 60020 - 52264 - 7756 - 0 - 1820
Swap 0 - 0 - 0
Total 60020 - 52264 - 7756

I did this again and the second time I got:

60020 - 52292 - 7728 - 0 - 1820

(and 0's again in the swap row)

I can see that it is fun,rewarding.educational experience for you to install slitaz on those old laptops :) What flavor did you use on this and what type of install.I prefer full install, more free memory is available after boot. I think it eats up too much memory extracting the whole rootfs.gz into memory with the poorman install(rootfs.gs+bzimage+boot folder).

You have 7728 KB or 7.7 MB memory free booted into text only ?
Free indicates computer see's no swap.
We know swap would help

root@slitaz: swapon -a

or add more ram to improve performance.

My 400mhz celeron top says xvesa consumes 28 MB (11%)of 256MB total physical memory @ 1024x768x16 by Ati rage2c onboard graphics w/ 4mb.
No video or flash content,just use opera web browser and play music.

So what hardware range is Slitaz designed for? : )

This Legend 408CD isn't cutting it. Even with the swapon -a command it only displayed a 'proto-desktop' and was virtually non-responsive. I've got a handful of EDO and two empty slots, but unfortunately this ill-conceived chipset only caches 64MB, so adding more would only make it even worse.

I have other computers ranging from Pentium II through Althlon & Pentium 4. What runs Slitaz nicely?

b.t.w. I thought Slitaz was for older pcs such as a Pentium 1. Now I'm starting to see that this is not the case. I don't recall where I got that impression. Can someone set me straight?

In the beginning, SliTaz seems to have been created to be the perfect computer-on-a-thumb-drive (a.k.a. USB memory-stick). But its lightweight but still extensible approach appealed to me for use as a regular hard-drive-installed operating system, as opposed to the "regular" distros like Ubuntu etc., which seemed to me to be almost as big and bloated as Windows. And if you follow distrowatch.com regularly, you can see that SliTaz has been steadily growing in popularity ... and my guess is that most other users also have it in a regular hard-drive installation.

According to all that's left of the specs webpage for the Toshiba 430cdt which i wrote about earlier in this discussion, that machine was designed for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95-B, which seems to to indicate that it was released around mid-1996. The one i have has 32MB of RAM and a 1G hard-drive, a 120 MHz Pentium (1) CPU, and 2 MB of shared video RAM. This is the most ancient hardware on which i've suceeding in getting SliTaz running, and it is the most recent version of SliTaz!

I also use SliTaz as my main operating system on my most up-to-date computer, a Toshiba Satellite !215-s5850 which i bought brand-new in May 2008. This is a 64-bit machine (2 GHz Athlon Turion64x2 CPUs, 2 GB RAM) which had Windows Vista installed as the original OS. I also have a very complete 64-bit Linux Mint 8 running on this machine, but i love SliTaz so much that i use it much more than Mint.

The other computers on which i use SliTaz fall between those two extremes:
* Dell Latitude CPi: 300 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB RAM
* Toshiba 2590cdt: 400 Mhz Celeron Mendocino, 64 MB RAM (SliTaz lo-ram)
* Dell Latitude CPx: 500 MHz Pentium III Coppermine, 128 MB RAM
* HP Omnibook XE3: 700 MHz Celeron Coppermine, 320 MB RAM
* Asus eeepc 701: 630 MHz Celeron M, 1 GB RAM

Except for the eeepc, all of these machines are from around 1998-2000 and i paid between $15 and $30 to buy each of them, and all of them use the regular version of SliTaz except for the lo-ram noted.

Swapon will not work if there is no swap partition.

I prefer to use gparted to make swap partitions.

Make a 128mb, 512mb, or some other size of swap partition, then swapon, then open memory-hungry programs, and then check the free command to see if the system is using swap.

Slitaz 1 on hd with 64mb ran decently but firefox would not work properly so a lighter browser was necessary.

Slitaz 1 on same computer increased to 192mb ram ran firefox decently, a big difference from 64mb.

One website listed 136mb maximum memory for the Legend 408CD.