Cooking up SLiTaz on my Dell Latitude Cpt -C 333 Laptop
Hopefully found a lightweight enough solution to running my ancient laptop. Even a cli base install of xubuntu followed up with openbox it just too heavy. Found SLiTaz, which offered me a new learning curve too! Once you get into it, things are really easy, and as long as you don’t expect an ubuntu sized repository…..
Installation:
SLiTaz cooking iso dated 20090228 (much improved desktop interface over version 1.0 20080322)
Following boot up and login, go root:
su
root
Get network running:
SLiTaz didn’t pick up my PCMIA card a 3Com 575. Strangely none of the pcmia cards in the drivers list worked but I found 3c59X and that did the trick:
To find the drivers available:
modprobe - l | grep drivers/net
To load chosen module, in my case 3c59x:
modprobe -v 3c59x
To load the module at boot time, edit your rcS.conf file and add the name of the module to the LOAD_MODULES section
Updating, Upgrading, Installing packages:
tazpkg recharge && tazpkg upgrade
tazpkg get-install slitaz-toolchain
tazpkg get-install perl
tazpkg get-install python
tazpkg get-install libid3tag
Installing MOC-2.4.4:
Get MOC-2.4.4
Required packages:
perl, libmad, libid3tag, libmad-dev, libid3tag, ncurses, ncurses-dev
make sure you install all these first, otherwise running configure takes ages!
cd to the packages directory
cd /home/tux/moc-2.4.4
run configure
./configure
Configure tells me MOC will be compiled with mp3 decoders and OSS. Once I have installed a few more alsa goodies, I’ll see if it will compile with alsa.
Make and install
make
make install
mocp ends up in /usr/local/bin and this sin’t in the PATH so to run
/usr/local/bin/mocp
If you want to edit the configuration, copy config.example from the moc-2.4.4 folder to /home/tux/.moc and edit the settings to your liking. I needed to up all the buffer settings to get close to gapless playback when I pull my music off my server.
Setting up nfs:
tazpkg get-install portmap
tazpkg get-install unfs3
Add them both to RUN_DAEMONS in /etc/rcs.conf
nano -w /etc/rcS.conf
Either mount manually or edit fstab for automounting from your nfs server (however, not getting automount at boot, so may need to script this in later!)
Office Productivity:
tazpkg get-install abiword
tazpkg get-install gnumeric
Set up SUDO:
tazpkg sudo
visudo
G
o
add the following (using a TAB between tux and ALL):
tux ALL=(root) ALL
Press the ESC key
then
:wq
Now you can sudo with user tux and no need to go root, just sudo 
Making Slim and desktop pretty, and work together:
Not overly keen on the colour schemes and wallpaper in “cooking”, so here is how to tidy things up.
1. find yourself a preferred wallpaper
2. ensure it is resized to no more than the visible size of your screen. My laptop does 1024 x 768 so I used this size.
3. make this your wallpaper
4. issue the following command, assuming you have your wallpaper in /home/tux/Images
(oh, and note I am sudoing now, but if you haven’t installed sudo do this as root)
you can use jpg or png images, edit the second command accordingly
sudo mv /usr/share/slim/themes/slitaz/background.png /usr/share/slim/themes/slitaz/background.png.backup
sudo cp /home/tux/Images/yourwallpaper.jpg /usr/share/slim/themes/slitaz/background.jpg
Now logout, and you should see your image appear behind the login panel. It’s almost seamless as you move from login to the desktop this will depend on the spped of your PC.
Check out the slim homepage for more ideas and themes
MORE TO FOLLOW