Josh Saddler

In the first article of this series, I test-drove three lightweight distros: Fluxbuntu, TinyMe, and SliTaz. I'm in search of a lightweight distro for an ancient 1ghz, 128MB RAM laptop. Of the three distros I tried, I was most impressed with SliTaz.

I took Linux Mint 4.0 Fluxbox Community Edition for a spin yesterday. How did the second Ubuntu-based distro do?

Worst-performing LiveCD ever.

And I mean ever, on any hardware I've had to use. Even booting a Gnome-based LiveCD and running Evolution and OpenOffice on this old laptop showed better performance. Booting Ubuntu 5.04 on my wife's ancient iMac G3 (128MB RAM, CPU about 400mhz) took less time than Linux Mint did.

Linux Mint offers the standard Ubuntu-style bootscreen, followed by an etremely long boot time. There was no way to get detailed boot messages or status, just a splashscreen with a bouncing progress bar. Fluxbuntu at least had the usual function key for verbose boot. The only indication I had that my laptop was still working for the 5 minute bootup was the constant thrashing of the CD drive. Fail for transparency -- I need to know what's going on during the boot process so I can tweak it for my system later, if need be.

Once the graphical desktop was loaded (another 6 minutes), the CD thrashing continued. At this point I was worried about what it might be doing to my drive, but grimly pressed on. Supposedly the LiveCD was using the existing 512MB swap partition on my hard disk, but not very well, as performance was abysmal. Also, just like Fluxbuntu, the annoying fan never turned off.

Desktop load times were further increased because of a couple of panel applets. The first sucked up bandwidth and CPU usage dialing out to find software updates ("1 update available;" who cares since it's a LiveCD?!), and the other took awhile to examine my hardware and tell me "1 restricted driver available." I assume this was for the integrated nVidia graphics chip, but I didn't bother trying to install either update. The functionality is nice enough, I suppose, but really shouldn't be activated in a limited-resource environment like the LiveCD.

Mint contains a minimal Fluxbox environment, with a single desktop "Install" icon, presumably provided by iDesk. Alone among the distros I've tried so far, Linux Mint does not by default display a more practical panel like FBpanel, Perlpanel, or Pypanel. However, in the Fluxbox menu there was an entry to start FBpanel. Why couldn't that have been already running, replacing the extremely limited Fluxbox toolbar? I clicked it, and discovered why. It took 8 minutes to load. Eight minutes to launch FBpanel, fer cryin' out loud. FBpanel is known for being tiny and fast; I had no problems with it in the other distros. The Mint panel starts up on the bottom of the screen, right under the Fluxbox toolbar. Fail for positioning; they shouldn't both occupy the same space.

I poked around the Fluxbox menu to see what was available. Linux Mint offers its own toplevel menu, laid out mostly sensibly by the developers. But for some reason, the menus generated by Fluxbox are also available at the bottom, and those are confusing as heck. The one nice thing is that the application name was displayed, rather than just "Picture viewer." Fluxbox's generated menus were quite poorly designed; it would have been better if the developers had left it out, in favor of their own menu. The generated Fluxbox menu had the most application entries (though poorly laid out, in multiple submenus), the Mint-designed menu had fewer listings, though better organized, and the FBpanel menu has the fewest entries, though it's the layout most familiar to Gnome and Xfce users.

Software selection is okay; the filemanager seems to be Rox, but I couldn't get it to actually load. Several minutes of disk churning, and then things went back to normal. At least OpenOffice isn't bundled with Linux Mint; who knows what that would have done. The Xfce Terminal is included, but its performance is just as piss-poor as the rest of the apps on the CD. Took 3 minutes to launch and get to the prompt. Now, even under load, when running Terminal on my old laptop, worst startup was around 10 seconds. It's a little unusual that they picked a terminal emulator that requires several Xfce runtime dependencies, when similar apps like rxvt, aterm, and eterm are available.

Having had enough of the poorly performing LiveCD environment, I decided to give the "Install" icon on the desktop a shot. Maybe it won't behave so badly once installed, right? Double-click.

Fifteen drive-thrashing minutes later, there's still no sign of the installer. Clearly it's trying to load something, but what--oh, look, the screen went blank. It was still backlit, so I'm not sure if it was trying to load a fullscreen installer or a screensaver or what. Wait, wait, wait some more. It never came back up. I put it down as "more retardedness," and decided to hell with this. I powered off the laptop the hard way. Oh well, it's not like there was any data on the hard disk. I wanted to throw the CD-RW across the room, but I still need it for the other distros.

If I'd been manually reinstalling Gentoo, I would have been at least halfway through at this point.

The verdict for Linux Mint: fail. A solid 0 on any scale. Not recommended for any machine, really. Especially not old hardware. Linux Mint 5.0 is currently in beta status, but even if the Fluxbox edition is updated, I doubt I'll ever try it again.

Coming up: PCFluxboxOS, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, DeLi Linux, and Arch Linux. Stay tuned.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a series of articles called "Distribution Checklist," parts 1, 2, and 3. The articles pose a series of questions to be answered when trying to decide "Which distribution is right for me?"

I wiped Gentoo off my old Toshiba laptop a couple of nights ago, and have been trying out binary distros with a smaller-is-better philosophy. The laptop has anemic I/O, and only 128MB RAM (nonupgradeable; the socket is fried).

I need a distro that is lightweight, mostly self-contained (if it can run from RAM, all the better), yet also has a decent package repository for the edge cases, like Toshiba hardware support utilities. I'm planning to turn the laptop into a useful secondary work environment for my wife. She'll need to run presentations from it, so there needs to be an easy way to get the VGA-out and/or TV-out working. No commandline intervention should be required to do anything.

So far I've been through Fluxbuntu, TinyMe, and SliTaz. Of the three, SliTaz shows the most promise.

First up is Fluxbuntu. Fluxbuntu is quite dated; latest available is a release candidate for 7.10, from October 2007. For an Ubuntu-based distro, it didn't have hardly any configuration tools. Also, booting takes forever, as others have noted. Well over 3 minutes.

While trying to install useful apps, I got my first hands-on experience with Synaptic, and, well, I definitely didn't think much of it. The button labels are not at all intuitive, nor is it especially obvious how to go about actually installing a package or series of packages. A button marked "Install" would have been appreciated ("Apply" means what to the new user?). And a more up-front list of packages to be installed would have been helpful. Perhaps it was just Fluxbuntu's particular config?

In addition to the package manager interface, the rest of Fluxbuntu wasn't exactly userfriendly, and I'm used to Fluxbox. The odd setup & configuration and poor preinstalled packages were enough for me to wipe the Fluxbox install. No PDF or image viewers. Ugly gtk1 audio player (XMMS). Oh, and seriously, preinstalled OpenOffice? With Rox? OpenOffice for a "featherweight" distro. Right. Ugh, Rox. I prefer something intuitive and attractive, such as Thunar, PCmanFM, or Nao.

Another annoyance was that even after installation (terrible; it seems to reuse the very first Ubuntu Warty installer), hardware support for my Toshiba was nonexistent. Even after installing apps that are known to work on Gentoo, such as tosh-utils, fnfxd, and the like, they just wouldn't work in Fluxbuntu. Something was interfering with the fan utilities; the noisy fan ran constantly. Also, the CPU never seemed to idle; it was constantly at full speed. Excessive heat and noise. Felt like the distro was fighting the very tools I installed to take care of it.

Fluxbuntu was toast after just one day. On to TinyMe.

This one is based on PCLinuxOS. Its main attraction was its lightweight claim to fame. It comes with a decent assortment of packages, for a 300MB or so download. However, even though it's running Openbox, it feels rather bloated. Both the TinyMe Control Center and the PCLinuxOS Control Center are slow to run. They're good ideas; they offer the configuration options Fluxbuntu lacked, but they subscribe to the KDE philosophy of control: multiple similarly-named (also badly-named) apps that do more or less the same things. Lots of redundancy, so wading through them all was a bit of a chore. Also, networking steadfastly refused to work, despite throwing all my Gentoo-learned command-line tricks at it when the graphical utilities failed. Ironically, I got further in wireless config than I did with the basic Intel PRO/100 wired adapter. It picked up my Atheros PCMCIA card as soon as I ran the configurator; a few clicks and it prompted for the WPA key of my home LAN. That was the only bright spot in the whole thing. CPU usage was uncomfortably high, while RAM usage was decent, staying between 37 and 56 percent with Opera and a couple of other windows open. Something was making my CPU work too hard to do anything useful though, so TinyMe came off. It just feels like a waste of a (potentially) good environment.

Next up: SliTaz. This one has been making waves at the review sites and distro centers because it's reputed to have the world's smallest desktop environment, weighing in at only 24MB. That's a tiny download, though if fully loaded into RAM it'll occupy about 80MB. That's pretty good for everything running at once.

I first tried SliTaz Cooker, as even though it's "unstable", it's more recent than the 1.0 release. It had more interesting features, such as using Openbox by default instead of JWM, and it has a graphical package manager. Also, more of it is in English. However, the Cooker LiveCD kept freezing up at "Preparing initramfs", so I switched to the 1.0 stable release.

This was the best-running LiveCD I've ever used. Fastest, too. I was surprised at how well-configured the environment was, and it had a nice selection of apps. There's some stuff we don't even have in Portage! LXDE, burning apps, etc. I was able to use my wired NIC out-of-the-box, which meant I could get live updates to the CD via Tazpkg, the rather nifty package manager. SliTaz includes a great tool to roll your own LiveCD variant: either what's currently installed, pre-configured alternative images available from the central server, or you can specify your own config files separately.

Alone among the three distros I tried, SliTaz seemed to properly work with ACPI, spinning down the laptop's fan when temperatures were low. I didn't even have to tell it to load the few laptop-related kernel modules at the commandline, either. It has pretty basic hardware support, but SliTaz lucked out and actually got my Toshiba right, something the fatter LiveCDs couldn't do.

It seems like every small and light distro these days is using slightly customized LXPanel, and SliTaz is no exception. Probably just as well; FBpanel and perlpanel are dead. Still, LXPanel provides a fairly configurable, useful panel. I prefer it to the standard toolbar in Flux and Openbox. It's basically a reverse Xfce setup. I like to run just one panel though, because of extremely limited screen real estate. Too bad you can't right-click on the bottom panel to configure or delete it. Couldn't find a way to put the launchers and the window list all on just one panel. But it's still relatively early in development; maybe with increased usage we'll see more features added.

The rest of the desktop is nice enough, though all the red wallpaper is a little wearing on the eyes. Also, I couldn't find a GUI configurator for font hinting. In the past, Gnome and Xfce have provided everything I need to get my fonts just right. I can't be arsed to hand-edit config files for this, Gentoo developer or not.

The app selection is great overall, but Firefox is an (un)fortunate choice, because while it's familiar (I use it on my other machines), Kazehakase or webkit-based browsers would have been somewhat faster options.

My only real problem with SliTaz is that it doesn't install. It freezes about halfway through the "copying packages" stage. Hard lockup. Have to reboot. Also, the 1.0 stable installer is written entirely in French. It's mostly noninteractive, but I suppose I could have mistranslated something and done something I shouldn't have.

Still, I'll be watching future SliTaz releases closely. It's got a lot of potential, and is the most attractive of the distros I've tried so far.

Next up for review are PCFluxboxOS (similar to TinyMe), Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, DeLi Linux, Linux Mint (Fluxbox community edition), and the latest Arch Linux beta CD. Though this last one is the most like Gentoo -- it's only as lightweight or fast as I'm capable of making it. I've had issues with Arch in the past, mostly related to retarded source and kernel package management, but since I don't intend to do any compiling (finally) on this laptop, maybe that won't be an issue.

I get the feeling that I may well not find a distro that suits my needs, so I may just setup a chroot on my AMD64 workstation and compile packages on it, then rsync it over the network. beandog gave me a good basic procedure list, though this would easily be the most time consuming of the available options. Still, it would be a very familiar environment to work in. Though I'd have to figure out, on my own, all the neat integration and graphical/one-shot configuration mechanisms binary distros already have.

Tune in next time for more mini distro reviews.

Oh, and Gentoo users, take a look at GPytage. This is a neat little app written by our very own ken69267. It's a very nice Portage config file manager available in Sunrise. Its sole dependency is pygtk. It's a one-stop shop for easy, fast management of your /etc/portage/* config files. Take a look at this screenshot, then go get the ebuild and install it.

It's official! Decibel Audio Player is now in Portage. Thanks to aballier for adding it, and thanks to everyone who provided feedback & testing.

Yay for yummy audio goodness!

In case you missed it, the Gentoo Foundation has been reinstated, so we're all nice'n'legal again.

Thank you, trustees, for all your efforts!

You can view our updated paperwork with the state of New Mexico here.

The newest Decibel Audio Player is out, and it fixes several bugs and adds some new features.

The ebuild has been updated, so get it here!