Documentation (en)
The Cooking version doesn't provide any Release Notes, major changes are announced on the web site and the Blog provides fresh news about the project's activity. Like the stable version, you will find documentation on the wiki site and support on the community forum.
Getting started
SliTaz Panel
From spring 2011 the new way (and tool) to configure the system is TazPanel. It is a CGI/web interface with a themable user interface from where you can control your entire system, this includes package management, adding or removing users, creating Live systems and much more. Each page provides a small description to help you manage your SliTaz system. To access the panel you can use the menu entry in "System Tools" or this url:
Network connections
Open Tazpanel and go to the Network tab. This shows a basic overview of your networking interfaces and their states. To configure your Ethernet device, mouse over the Network tab and select Ethernet . From here you can configure your device to use DHCP or a static address. To configure Wireless devices, mouse over the Network tab and select Wireless. Here you can select a network to connect to. When you click on the desired network, the Connection box underneath will be appropriately filled in. Next, enter your passphrase or leave the field blank for none. Finally, click the Configure button to apply settings.
More detailed information can be found in the Handbook: Network configuration
Applications
To have a list of all graphical applications, you can use the SliTaz menu button
at the bottom left of the screen. To have a list of command line tools, you
can open a terminal and double press on the tabulation button. Tazpanel provides
a nice GUI for package management through the
Packages tab. To retrieve a list of all
installed packages, open Tazpanel and navigate to the
My Packages page. To install new
packages, you must have a network connection, the DVD of packages or a USB storage
device containing any downloaded packages. Naturally any package management
can also be done from the command line using tazpkg
.
Office suite
The SliTaz packages database provides a variety of lightweight office applications. All of these packages are easily installable in a few clicks through the packages manager in Tazpanel. SliTaz also provides a simple way to install the powerful LibreOffice suite: just search for "LibreOffice" in the packages manager, double click on "get-LibreOffice", select the "Auto install non free package" checkbox, and click Install.
To have a lightweight office suite: just use Abiword as the Word processor, Gnumeric as a Spreadsheet and Homebank for Bank Accounting.
Multimedia
Most SliTaz flavors include a wide range of sound card drivers, a volume
mixer and a light audio player to easily listen to any MP3 or OGG files. The Sound
card is autodetected at boot time and audio support works out-of-the-box
on many systems. If you manually add a new user and can't listen to audio, please
check that the user belongs to the audio
group. For any other trouble, please
check the full documentation and/or use the forum.
Videos can be watched by installing one single package or using a dedicated
LiveCD or LiveUSB system. The SliTaz team have packaged some of the best video players
available under GNU/Linux: mplayer
, xine-ui
and vlc
.
System information
You can get information on your system by clicking on "System information" in the System Tools menu, then "Summary". Clicking on the other buttons offers you more information, and using the benchmarks can give you an idea on how fast your computer is. To have a list and control of all your current processes, you can use the "Task Manager", available in the same men.
Becoming Root
By default, Slitaz doesn't have its desktop running as root administrator:
it asks for a root password (default root
) for any superuser work.
Therefore, it is safer and more secure. To become root in an xterm, simply
type su
and enter the root password. To run a graphical application
as root, use subox
. For example, to run leafpad as root you
would run subox leafpad
.
Installation
SliTaz can be installed to a hard disk or on an USB mass storage device using the SliTaz Installer in Tazpanel. The installer makes a full HD install. SliTaz won't function in memory (RAM) anymore like in Live or Frugal mode and everything is persistent.
To generate a LiveUSB system, you can use the "Tazusb LiveUSB Tool" from the "System Tools"
menu or tazusb
from the command line. More information can be found in the SliTaz
Handbook: LiveUSB media