Slax author's Blog (RSS)
30
October2012
Weekly update #9
As like every Tuesday, I'm going to summarize current progress of Slax development. What happened during the last 7 days? Read on...
First of all, I've reduced the size of Slax desktop release to fit even 148MB, by removing unused stuff from the build, such as some of the icons, themes, unused data files, localizations and such. It seems final Slax could be somewhere around 210-220MB including Development module, web browser, and many applications.
Next, I went through selection of external firmware drivers for default Slax release. There is an existing repository with hundreds of fw drivers at kernel.org website. These drivers are not official part of Linux Kernel, however they are still publicly available. I couldn't include all of them due to the big size, so I had to go one by one and find out what device is it used for and how probably will be the firmware needed by average Slax user. Finally I selected about 200 drivers, mostly for WIFI adapters. Adding those to Slax should make more people happy since their wifi cards will work out of the box. However, I'm not yet sure if this should be included in final Slax or not. It has 9MB compressed, and still it doesn't cover all possible firmwares, for example my own notebook's wifi doesn't work even with the additional firmwares.
Finally, I fixed libflashplayer loading (by tracking down what missing library caused it to misbehave) and also I fixed SSL certificates, since there were not properly generated symlinks in /etc/ssl/certs making konqueror (and all other kde networking parts) complain that each website has invalid certificate.
Next week, I'm going to finalize multimedia integration into KDE, and prepare for multilanguage support. I should also be able to release a RC1 (release candidate 1) of Slax in two weeks, since everything seems to be almost in order.
User comments
Tomas, good job.
But I have little question, why "clear" command in Terminal/Konsole not working properly / coomand not found ?
Simply said clear is a part of ncurses package, and ncurses is not included in Slax since there is no need for it at all.
I'll put there a symlink to busybox. In the meantime, you can use '/mnt/live/bin/busybox clear'
``These drivers are not official part of Linux Kernel, however they are still publicly available. I couldn't include all of them due to the big size''
How much is the "big size" Tomas?
Could you make the other drivers available in a module in case that our devices are not enabled/present in your selection of kernel drivers?
Also, in Development module, will you include bison, flex, and other modules that are needed to build stuff but not present in the previous development modules? Why? I like to use tex, latex, and have built successfully thanks to the author of kerTeX and vonbiber, slax user, a package for it. It requires ed, flex, and other packages. I would like to have a kerTeX package for Slax and a build script almost exists by modifying the SlackBuild created by kerTeX author T. Laronde. TeXLive is big and has many more dependencies, TeTeX is depracated, so i like kerTeX and hope I can build it successfully on Slax like I have done so on Porteus.
Also, before I forget, will you include k3b? I hope that you don't remove it like they have done so in Porteus :( They make it available as a module, but that is not desired in this case. Thank you very much for working again on Slax and I like your plans of posting build scripts to build packages instead of allowing users to upload modules which many times do not meet your standards and requirements. Like always let me know how I can help. Slax has and will always have a special place for me!
The "big size" is actually 20MB. Will be better to have this as a separate module I think.
Regarding devel tools, everybody needs different tools of course, so the main goal is to provide some common ones and make others as modules.
Regarding k3b, I'll most likely not include it in Slax. It is so ugly... And most people do not burn CDs nowadays... It was very reasonable 3 years ago, but I don't feel the need now.
k3b is not to be included! As long as cdrtools, cdrdao and growisofs are included as CLI tools we will be ok! Thanks for the information. Porteus devs. included pburn, but you do not have any obligation to include it here.
How about the word processing, spreadsheets that were koffice and now calligra? Will these be included also? They were included before or are they too big?
Thanks for your hard work again!
I'm nowadays making hard decision what software to include and what only make available as modules (even official ones). Office suite seems too big from my point of view, while everybody can use google docs for example (which adds zero bytes to the total size of Slax, since it's online through browser). Most likely office won't be included neither.
Please Tomas change scripts bootinst.bat/sh or remastersys or anythink simpliest.
can this be why I was having so many troubles with ext4 ............phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxODY
simply metod rip iso to usb is unetbootin. Porteus run after instaling unetbootin but slax is not working after write usb unetbootin .
@Ken,
clear does not work but CTRL-L works. I dont know their difference, but you can also try alias ^L=clear I guess.
Hello, I see that good work is going well!
I want to know if you kept kwin in KDE and the function of the visual effects that are disabled for yourself if the performance of the video card is slow. it's very important to keep it. Ciao!
It would be nice to have a theme dedicated to Slax and not the usual theme Oxygen... Would be fair to distinguish visually from the other!
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Thank you for informing your slax fans of slax 7 progress.
Concerning the look of slax 7, I have two interrogations:1) will you provide a virtual display that will accomodate laptops in dual display mode? and 2) Do you have already choosen the wallpaper for slax 7. Is it possible to get some preview of the desktop?