SliTaz Forum

slicel

Slitaz has made a lot of progress since v1 and I was glad to help with many fixes and improvements.

Slitaz has one stable release event per year that will generate publicity for good or bad and for new users is slitaz's "only one chance to make a first impression."

To make the v4 release succeed, it is worth remembering the v3 problems.

Slitaz 3 had broken word processing (abiword), broken printing (cups, gutenprint), broken dialup, broken firewall, and broken compiling (linux-source).

Many of those are basic functions-

It is more understandable for a distro to be buggy with the latest technology but less understandable to be buggy with basic functions.

It is more understandable to have a buggy basic function in v1 but less understandable to have a buggy basic function in v3 or v4.

It is nice to reduce boot time from 6 seconds to 5 seconds but it is more important for spreading slitaz to be able to plug in a local printer and print from firefox in less than a year.

Slitaz 3 might have had more problems than slitaz 2 (looking at feedback) with-

tazusb
loram flavor

Those might not be basic functions of all distros but they are part of slitaz's advertised niche so should just work.

Even what a rude person might think is a "stupid" user mistake gives valuable information to help slitaz. What is it about the slitaz os gui that leads to 3 years of new users running the installer on an unprepared hd? As mentioned a few years ago, it is not so stupid to think that "installer" is the first step, although it is actually the second step. How many 2011 users will think slitaz v4 is broken?

Any single feedback can be the tip of the iceberg, given all the people who read the forum without registering or try slitaz without ever visiting the website because a friend or relative distributed a dozen copies. We will never hear from many slitaz trial users. They will decide with a toss of the hand, not by registering another account on some website.

Every distro, the day or week after its new release publicity, has some portion of its newly burned disks spinning in computers and some portion of newly burned disks sitting in trash bins.

At some point in time, Microsoft only had 100 users.

Thank you

seawolf

I agree with you, @slicel. v3 has seen some problems that could and have put off a number of users. Heck, I considered going back to v2 at one point had the packages been updated for it.

Use of the bugtracker or even just a forum thread to identify important/repetitive bugs, as well as a checklist to ensure we have one working solution for major desktop activity, would I think improve the release by some way. I've just noticed Erjo made this issue on the Labs site: http://labs.slitaz.org/issues/433
Going back through the forum and adding bugs could be very useful though somewhat tiring.

There has been some great work to fix packages -- but of course this only applies to Cooking (broken?) until the release -- and I think we have learned a lot about testing them (e.g. chroot-ing environment etc.). The docs have improved by quite some margin, and thankfully links on slitaz.org/doc now point to the correct doc.slitaz.org. In fact, the whole web presence seems a lot more connected and together.

I think v4 should be a great release. In fact, I'm going to install Cooking in a VM right now to see how far along we are.

pankso

Hi,

I Think most of the bugs you talking about are solved and we realy improve Slitaz build system these last mouth (tazwok & wok). In a few days cooking will get a huge update (all packages will be updated), this mean the current cooking packages on mirror are quiet out-of-date as well as ISO images.

So I did some new ISO with latest cooking packages from Tank, more information here:

http://listengine.tuxfamily.org/lists.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/2011/03/msg00007.html

Christophe

I am a big slitaz fan, and have hit a number of issues with V3 (I used V2 a little bit).

I have limited time to participate and contribute, but will participate if I am given a chance. I know what I need as well as where it was broken for me in the last year.

What I REALLY would like to see is a point where a V4 RC is announced with a request for feedback, then give it like at least 2 weeks for community testing, bug reports together, and solving all "obvious" (read: basic functions) bugs before another RC is released and a convergence toward a stable enough version is reached for GA.

What do you guys think of this ?

slicel

Pansko, I hope you are correct but I remember similar sayings before v3. People worked hard before v3 too but there was some Titanic complacency in not recognizing warning signs. Slitaz lost ground to other distros (friendly rivalry is healthy).

Erjo's list is from January but is 0% complete. I would think the checklist for release would be the same for the release candidate and/or latest cooking so then I worry how cooking decisions are made with a 0% release checklist.

I do not see bugtracker on the website anymore but I thought devs got the bugs from the forum already.

Seawolf's and Christophe's ideas might help, to make a forum thread (or threads) for collecting bugs or listing missing features (hibernate?) or testing the release candidate, if devs would use the information.

Documentation is another topic. I think seawolf and spork put commendable effort into documentation. Echoing my older comments, condensing is as important as expanding. I think there are 3 tazusb pages (not counting whatever drafts might be in labs), which hurts navigation as well as comprehension. Many forum problems arise from following the wrong page or outdated or incomplete documentation. I often try to make my forum posts as rough drafts for the guides, for guides editors to use.

Darjeeling

I've been using Slitaz 3.0 stable from a customized live CD since it first came out in March last year and, generally, I've been very happy with it. But there were plenty of problems, too. With the help of people here on the forum I managed to iron out some of these problems. But other problems persisted and bug me daily. I had therefore high hopes when a new cooking version was released last November. I thought that a prolonged testing period would eventually lead to a cleaner, more beginner-friendly Slitaz 4.0. But alas ... although I tried many times, following all the advice given here on the forum, I haven't been able once to successfully boot this cooking version into a graphical desktop. In the beginning I thought there would be a follow-up release sometime in December, taking care of the problem. But as far as I can see, nothing has been released since more than 4 months (!) and I think this defies the purpose of a cooking (or beta) release. How are people (the general public, not a handful of insiders) to participate in the testing phase of a new Slitaz version when the cooking release doesn't fulfill even the most basic requirement?

Earlier today I tried out the slitaz-cooking-core.iso from ...

http://listengine.tuxfamily.org/lists.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/2011/03/msg00007.html

... Boot -> Language: English -> Keyboard: French -> Hal ... and again I ended up at the console. When I logged in as tux and ran startx I got this ...

Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"

Using config directory: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d"

dlopen: libdrm.so.2: Cannot open shared object. File: No such file or directory.

(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/X11/modules/extensions/libdri2.so

(EE) Failed to load module "DRI2" (loader failed, 7)

(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/X11/modules/extensions/libdri.so

(EE) Failed to load module "DRI" (loader failed, 7)

(EE) VESA(0) No valid modes

(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration

Fatal server error: No screens found

... which means there's no out-of the-box vesa support. Then I installed what's needed for my hardware:

tazpkg get-install nvidia

tazpkg get-install mesa

tazpkg get-install mesa-demos

tazpkg get-install linux-agp (turned out, was already installed)

tazhw detect-pci

nvidia-xconfig

Detect PCI devices kernel modules

=========================================

Linux agpgart interface v0.103

* Loaded module: intel_agp

> Module in use: snd_hda_intel

! Missing module: nouveau

nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.

Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint

nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PCI Int A->GSI 16 (level low) -> IRQ 16

VGAarb: Device changed decodes: PCI:0000:01:00.0, olddecodes=io+mem, decodes=none:owns=io+mem

NVRM: Loading NVIDIA Unix x86 Kernel Module 195.36.15 Thu Mar 11 21:41:46 PST 2010

*Loaded Module: nvidia

And yet, when I run startx I end up with with the same error ...

Fatal server error: No screens found

... it turns out /etc/X11/xorg.conf is empty and /var/log/xorg.0.log is very long, too long for me to write down by hand ...

pannet1

SliTaz set out to be the smallest distro in size and its still the leader. I would suggest the developers to include all drivers possible atleast for the internet (network, wifi and USB) and the display to work correctly, out of the box.

Few people have the patience to download packages from sliTaz website from another OS and do a tazpkg install <package name>. Personally, I did the same thing for getting internet connectivity through wvdial with the help of my reliance netconnect usb,

I agree this could increase Slitaz package size a little bit but the benefit for end user is tremendous for this trade off.

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