[sf-lug] Sunday meeting & SliTaz 1.0 - 25 megabytes of GNU/Linux Power.

[Bobbie Sellers]

	Jim Stockford was there with his new ASUS EEE machine from
the ZaReason folks.  Screen is a bit small for my taste but Daniel
showed him how to brighten the display enough for the Javacat Cafe.
It seems a bit slow but it works fine with the Zareason installed
Ubuntu.

	Daniel got my Inspiron 4000 upgraded to the proper bios and I
was happy to see it again.  Thanks Daniel.

	Jason was there having ridden on a bicycle all the way. He
managed to haul along his big laptop.

	John had a small customized IBM Thinkpad having replaced the
hard drive with solid state drives.
	Two other enthusiasts were there and it is the fault of my
poor memory that I do not name them.

	There was a bit of discussion of the possibility of finding
other meeting places but the problems are of course parking for the
drivers and transportation for the rest of us.

	The meeting concluded a bit after 1 PM with a discussion of
the changes to be made to servers in which I was awed bystander.  Seems
as though the movers and shakers will be moving the old box as soon as
they are sure the new virtual setup handles everything properly.  This
used up most of the time before 2 PM.

	As we were getting ready to leave a young man with an Inspirion 8500
asked me about the group.  Looks like we may have another new member in
the near future.  I think the current economic problems may be
helpful to the advancement of the Free and Open Source Software movement
as people and organizations will have increased economic motivation to
escape Microsoft's expensive licenses and endless security problems.

	Read about this new small Linux disto in the current Linux Format 
magazine, SliTaz 1.0 which is only 25 Megabytes in ISO and
while at the SF-LUG meeting on Sunday downloaded the iso from the
web site.

http://www.slitaz.org.

	SliTaz is an acronym of course and think about Small, light and
so forth.
	Moved it with my little SD card reader from the Inspiron to the
Dimension and wrote it to a CD.  It looks very nice though I couldn't
find instructions on doing dial-up but they have a package I found
when I went to:

	http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/handbook/index.html


	You have two hundred or more commands and the handbook has directions 
on installation to a hard disk and to a USB drive.  Even a very small 
USB drive.  The USB install moves everything in the system
to memory and it takes relatively little memory.  Things happen
as fast as though you were on an Amiga since everything is in memory
and how many users of the Amiga remember the hack to move a system
image to a rebootable ram disk?.  Non-Amigans can dis-regard.  It
is not slow.
	Estimate for the Live CD or USB key is 80 MB of ram to run
in.  But there are cheats to let allow use in as little as 16 MB.
Unlike DSL which is twice the size SliTaz uses the latest kernel,
(2.6.24) and other up to date basic building blocks for the
system. It uses Joe's Window Manager on top of an X vesa and
all the tools are light and fast.
	It also has a file manager that is to die for.  It looks
like a desktop MC but here is a quote from the handbook.

emelFM2 - File Manager

EmelFM2 is a file manager providing many useful functions for daily
tasks such as managing devices, opening a terminal in the current
directory, drag and drop, create/rename directories, key bindings or
managing file permissions. It contains bookmarks to allow you to browse
faster, a text editor/viewer and much more. EmelFM2 can be launched with
some command line options - you can specify the dustbin directory or set
the start directory to display. For a full list of options: $ emelfm2
--help.

The context menu (right click on file/directory) makes it easy to unpack
.taz .gz archives, compress and create archives or compare files. You
can also create symbolic links via 'Create a link...'. Once learnt,
emelFM2 will allow you to work quickly and effectively.

	http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080331
Just scroll down the page a bit and you will find the remarks,

	But the Handbook is wonderfully direct and gives good instructions on 
command line use of the important tools.  There
is also a SliTaz Cookbook for developers with directions on
building packages using the wok with tools and receipts(recipes?)
which should make people feel more at home with the package.

	This is a package meant to keep old machines in use
as long as possible but the developer runs it on his high
speed hardware which must be very fast.

     later
     bliss at california dot com

-- 
  bobbie sellers - (Back to Angband) Team *AMIGA* SF-LUG

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
  It is by the beans of cocoa that the thoughts acquire speed,
  the thighs acquire girth, the girth become a warning.
  It is by theobromine alone I set my mind in motion."
         --from Someone else's Dune spoof ripped to my taste.