Distro news and sponsor

Hi all SliTaz fellows!

So here are some distribution news and some information on how to sponsor the project. Like usual, commits never stop into our Mercurial repositories and we had a really nice and productive IRC meeting last friday. The meeting ended up with a collaborative wiki page to write SliTaz 4.0 Release Notes and we also fixed the timeline, more info on doc.slitaz.org.

Packages

On the packages side, the Cooking repository has now more than 3000 packages. We did many small fixes and added a few well tested packages. All the SliTaz sub projects have been released such as Cookutils, SliTaz Tools, TazPanel, etc. So don’t forget to update your system via TazPanel or # tazpkg up -r.

Boot menu

So after years with a poor splash image and boot prompt, I have committed a new graphical menu for SliTaz Live CD or USB systems. Default entry will boot SliTaz core. The menu let you select default language for system and keyboard, let you access some help files, the command line boot prompt and web boot.

New Desktop layout & icons

The SliTaz configs package, which provides all custom artwork and configuration files, now provide a new desktop layout with two panels. On top panel is an applications launcher, date and time, notification icons and battery applet – colors fit monochrome style. On bottom panel a menu, taskbar and pager. The SliTaz icon package has also been updated and provide an overall new icon theme. More complete than the previous version, but still very light.

Sponsor us

The project has grown a lot over the last years and uses more and more resources. For example we need more than 72 hours of compilation to rebuild a full cooking wok. Building packages uses a lot of CPU. The machine which handles that is called Tank. It’s actual hardware and not a virtual machine. Tank is hosted at my home and I pay for electricity and network connection, but my connection can’t handle all the website requests, so we are searching for a sponsored dedicated VM or server. More info at www.gofundme.com/3ql70.

If you want to become an official SliTaz sponsor, you may be interested in our new website page about Sponsoring SliTaz. I will come back on this sponsor stuff in a future post, but must update the full website beforehand and make a script to display a random sponsor logo on the main page.

SliTaz is also going to the SolutionLinux expo in Paris, you can help me pay my train ticket and offer T-Shirts to Pascal and Erjo :-) www.gofundme.com/f1w9w.

- Christophe