Modern Firefox, Recent Hardware and 641 Commits

July 2026

The month the historic blocker fell: a modern browser runs on SliTaz. While we were at it, the kernel learned about 2024 laptops, an AI inference engine entered the repository, and 641 commits landed across the repositories.

Firefox ESR on SliTaz, at Last

For years, SliTaz was stuck on a Firefox from another age: Mozilla's modern builds would not run on our graphics stack. The lock was pinned down to the exact symbol: Gecko's theme probing requires the CSS machinery of GTK 3.20+, and our stack had stayed on 3.14. So the graphics stack was raised on both architectures — glib 2.56.4, pango 1.42.4, GTK 3.22.30 and a new libepoxy package — all autotools, without touching glibc. The result: Firefox ESR 153 runs on x86_64, and ESR 140 on i486 — Mozilla's last official 32-bit channel, which SliTaz fully intends to serve to the end.

Unexpected bonus: toile, our in-house WebKitGTK browser, came back to life on 64-bit in the process. Its blank rendering came from GTK 3.14, not from WebKit. The upgrade was proven on a real installation: a plain tazpkg upgrade from the old stack breaks not a single binary. Everything is published on the mirror, cooking, both arches.

The 6.12 Kernel Learns Today's Hardware

SliTaz 5.1 targets old hardware and recent machines. This month, the linux-lts 6.12 package family gained what was missing for a current laptop to work on first boot: the Intel LPSS controllers and the HID-over-I2C transport (modern touchscreens and touchpads), the SOF audio firmware every Intel laptop has required since 2016 (firmware-sof), and the Wi-Fi 6/6E firmware for Intel AX2xx cards (firmware-iwlwifi-ax). All of it validated on a 2023 Raptor Lake VivoBook: Xorg at native resolution, Wi-Fi 6E, Firefox ESR 153.

Along the way, lxpanel got an old 64-bit port wound fixed: its dynamic plugins were not being built at all on x86_64. Volume, network status, battery, sensors — all eleven plugins are back in the panel. And the kernel no longer draws its row of penguins at boot: charming on a 486 in 1996, less so across a 2880-pixel-wide screen.

The x86_64 Port Moves Forward

The 64-bit repository passed 4700 packages, 186 of them ported in a single night session. x86_64 booting moved cleanly to grub2-EFI, leaving syslinux to the 32-bit world. The py3k to python3 migration swept through dozens of packages, while the dead (openvas, ssfs, the ancient tazbug) were finally buried. Cookutils reached 4.9 along the way, driven by what the cooker kept uncovering.

Foyer and Marmite: a Thundering New Infrastructure

Two new VPS now carry the project, and both run SliTaz natively — we host on what we cook. marmite.slitaz.org, a root server with dedicated cores — 12 AMD EPYC cores, 32 GB of DDR5 ECC RAM, 1 TB of NVMe — is the new build host: it cooks packages automatically on every hg push and serves the mirror — that is where, on mirror.slitaz.org, user packages and ISOs live. SliTaz packages have never built this fast. foyer.slitaz.org hosts the rest: lab.slitaz.org for developers and the intrepid, with the website and forum to follow. And installed on SliTaz, it boots in under two seconds. The hearth and the cooking pot — the names say where the cooking happens.

llama.cpp and Navette: the RAM Goes to the Models

SliTaz turns 20 this year, and the vision has never been more relevant: be light. For the old hardware even Debian is dropping, and for the new — because an OS idling under 100 MB leaves all the RAM to local AI models. This month, llama.cpp entered the repository, and navette joined it: our in-house agentic code editor, written in C and ncurses, a llama.cpp client. A full desktop, a modern browser and an inference engine, on a distro that fits in your pocket — that is the 5.1 bet.

Reprise, and an Up-to-Date Desktop

reprise is a new tool that diagnoses and repairs a broken SliTaz system: inconsistent packages, missing files, Xorg logs and dmesg, a full report in one command. And a systematic check confirmed that the 5.1 desktop — openbox and the whole LXDE stack — is at the latest versions upstream ever released. No catching up to do: just maintaining.

641 Commits this Month

Across the repositories — wok, cookutils, flavors, spk, reprise, navette, trame, tazlab, slitaz-forge and others — 641 commits landed in July. The wok alone accounts for 378 of them. 5.1 is taking shape, and it will be current.

— Christophe Lincoln (Pankso)