SliTaz Community

Here at SliTaz we always working on improving and fixing existing tools as well as inovative applications. Today we release our package manager stamped with 4.6.*, we will probably have minor bug since we made some big changes.

The most interesting improvements for end user is the upgrade mechanism, we now use MD5 encryption to track any changes and the new command to upgrade the system is ‘tazpkg up’ AND is faster than ever! processing 650 package on 6 years old P4 2G RAM take less than 10 sec. The old way to do things was good when SliTaz had 300 packges in the repos 4 years ago, but now with 3000 packages in the cooking repos we needed a better way to handle upgrade on SliTaz. Usind MD5 encryption is also the most secure and rubust way to check if a packages have change or not.

Tazpkg up have 3 option to let you –check –recharge or –install upgrades. Up have is own help command giving you a shorthelp on howto use tazpkg up.

On the desktop side I created tazpkg-notify, a notification systray icon started with your X session and check for a missing or too old packages as well as upgrades. The upgrade function is perfect with the new boot option who let you recharge (nothing installed) automatically the list of packages on each boot. The new line in /etc/rcS.conf is:

RECHARGE_PACKAGES_LIST=”yes|no”

After recharge the notification deamon will be displayed with you packages information. When you click on it a small window will be displayed to let you start the GUI. Here is some screenshots of the notification icon, the tooltip when mouse over (GTK theme has updated for better tooltips):

2011-04-08