TazLab, Floppy Boot, Cook 4.1, and 428 Commits

May 2026

A busy month. New tools, new infrastructure, old hardware given new life, and hundreds of commits across the wok and the ecosystem.

TazLab

TazLab is a new single-file POSIX shell script that lets you build and cook SliTaz packages from any GNU/Linux host — Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, whatever you run. It sets up a SliTaz chroot, manages the wok, and can launch your built ISOs in QEMU. No proot, no systemd, no extra dependencies beyond what any standard distro already ships. If you want to contribute to SliTaz without running SliTaz, TazLab is the tool.

Source: github.com/pankso/tazlab

2026 Style Across All Subdomains

The redesign that started with the main website in March has now reached every public subdomain: cook.slitaz.org, the forum, the wiki, hg.slitaz.org, and floppy.slitaz.org. CSS variables, dark mode, mobile nav, clean typography — consistent across the board. No JavaScript frameworks. Built by hand.

floppy.slitaz.org is Live

Yes, floppies. floppy.slitaz.org serves a set of 1.44 MB floppy images that boot a current SliTaz development version (built 24 May 2026, up to 384 MB RAM). The images use the BIOS directly instead of Linux floppy drivers, which means they work on hardware that standard boot methods skip — including PCMCIA floppy drives. Write a floppy with a single dd command and boot a machine that cannot boot from USB or network:

dd if=fd001.img of=/dev/fd0

If your machine has a CD-ROM or USB port but cannot boot those devices via BIOS, floppy-grub4dos is also available: a single 1.44 MB floppy that bridges the gap. Pure SliTaz: small, works, no excuses.

Cook 4.1

The cook build system got its first major release since 2017. The monolithic cook script was split BSD-style into focused sub-tools — cook-pkgdb, cook-wok, cook-setup, cook-deps, cook-clean and more — each doing one job well, with backward-compatible shims so old habits keep working. A new cook-doctor runs read-only health checks on the build environment and on individual receipts, suggesting a fix command for every problem it finds.

And cook now has a TUI. cook-tui is a small ncurses front-end: browse and search the whole wok, watch a build stream live with coloured output, and read each package's receipt and health verdict in the sidebar. Slash commands cover the rest — /broken lists broken packages, /last the recent builds, /doctor the environment — and the right arrow opens any package's build log inline. C, ncurses, no dependencies beyond the terminal.

cook-tui, the ncurses front-end for cook

428 Commits This Month

Across all repositories — wok, cookutils, slitaz-forge, tisse, wove, navette, slitaz-dev-tools and more — 428 commits landed in the past 30 days. The wok alone accounts for 256 of them, with active package updates on the i486 branch. The 64-bit build is moving.

— Christophe Lincoln (Pankso)