Last Cooking ISOs Before 5.1-RC1

November 2026

Hello everyone. Here are new cooking ISOs, dated 10 November 2026. They are the last cooking set before SliTaz 5.1-RC1: from here we stop adding and focus on what breaks. Since the October news, 255 commits landed in the package wok and about 560 more in the other repositories, from the installer to the ISO builder, the desktop and the community sites.

The set is the same seven ISOs as in October, for i486 and x86_64. All of them were booted for real in a virtual machine before publication.

USB Keys Written With dd Now Work on UEFI

This is the most important fix of the set. The x86_64 ISOs are hybrid: you can write them to a USB key with dd. Our ISO builder, metier, stored a checksum in a place that broke the primary GPT of the image. On some machines the partitions of the key vanished after dd and UEFI boot failed, especially on keys that had been used before. metier 1.5 repairs the GPT CRC after the checksum is written and the ISOs of this set carry the fix. If an x86_64 ISO of October did not boot from your key, please write this one again.

metier 1.5 also adds a language menu to the GRUB screen of the x86_64 ISOs: pick your language, keyboard and time zone before the system starts. Together with a fix in tazlocale (slitaz-tools 1059), which now builds the locale before the first session starts, the live system comes up in the language you chose from its first session. We checked it with French on core x86_64; it was not tested on i486.

Installer: tazinst 4.7

The installer went from 4.5 in the October ISOs to tazinst 4.7.3.

Kernel, Hardware and Wi-Fi

Linux 6.12.115 replaces 6.12.89 in the linux-lts, linux-phoenix and linux-cloud packages. In the ISOs, linux-lts gets btrfs built in, so a btrfs root does not need a module to be mounted and the Realtek alx Ethernet driver is now installed. When the kernel is upgraded, its post-install now updates the boot entries and /boot/bzImage.

The firmware package was rebuilt from the upstream list (version 20261019), with one package per hardware family. New firmware packages are in the ISOs: Realtek rtw88, Realtek Bluetooth, MediaTek MT7921 and MT7922, Intel Wi-Fi 7260, 7265, 8000 and 9000 (x86_64), and the small network firmware set for wired NICs. On the driver side, the kernel gains MediaTek mt76, Realtek rtw88 and rtw89, Qualcomm ath11k and ath12k and Broadcom brcmfmac PCIe support. We had no machine to test Wi-Fi in this cycle, so treat these as untested on real hardware and tell us what you find.

Smaller hardware fixes: USB printers are found again (CUPS now builds its USB backend with libusb 1.0), the AR3012 Bluetooth patches are shipped, 1024x600 netbooks keep their resolution on a BIOS framebuffer console and the PCI IDs database is current (20261104).

The LXTaz Desktop and Its Login Screen

The desktop ISOs now start lxtaz-dm, a GTK3 login screen written for LXTaz as the default login manager. It replaces slim, which stays installed as a fallback. The live system logs in automatically through it.

The desktop tools moved forward too: a new system monitor (lxtaz-mon) opened from the quick settings menu, a screenshot tool (lxtaz-shot, on the Print key), shared icon tiles, a battery alert at 10% and 5%, a file manager that can open a folder as root and edit the desktop menu, and a welcome window that fits small screens. The LXDE panel got the classic layout back with roomier spacing.

The core ISOs also carry a new small web browser, Toile, built on the Soie rendering engine, a light HTML and CSS engine written in C. It is young: Firefox ESR stays in the firefox ISOs and remains the browser for everyday use.

Tools

Bugs Reported by You, Fixed

Many fixes in this set come from reports sent through filature-report, TazHelper and the bug tracker at filature.slitaz.org. Among them: the Xorg video driver choice on x86_64 (#1004, #1011), the time zone not reaching the desktop session (#1005), LXTaz tools starting in other desktops (#1009), the VNC box of tazbox (#1010), the Wi-Fi icon staying on eth0 (#1027), tazinst on dd keys (#1015, #1035), the sound card control of lxtaz-ctrl (#1033) and the kernel module packages of the 3.16 kernel (#1030). Filature itself got a reviewed-reports view and a better bug page.

Under the Hood

A large part of the 255 wok commits are quiet repairs found by rebuilding every package against the new base: libraries that were built but not shipped (nfs-utils, asterisk, guvcview, reiserfsprogs and six more), missing dependencies and build dependencies, libraries installed in /usr/lib64 instead of /usr/lib on x86_64 (fluidsynth, spidermonkey, vice) and packages that picked up Wayland by accident from the GTK3 headers. Security updates include OpenSSH 10.6p2, rsync 3.5.2, PHP and the kernel. New or updated applications include micro, strace 6.13, fsarchiver 0.8.9, llama.cpp b12110 and cookutils 4.34.

Also new in the repositories, outside the ISOs: pelote 0.1.2, to drive a machine from an Android phone through an encrypted relay and tisse 0.0.7, our Wayland compositor in development.

Sizes

The ISOs grew by 1 to 11 MB since October: current firmware, more kernel modules and the new desktop tools and browser.

Get It, Try It, Tell Us

This is the last stretch before the release candidate, so your tests count more than ever. Try the ISOs on your own hardware, old and new, write the x86_64 ones to a USB key with dd and tell us if they boot, in BIOS and in UEFI.

Download the ISOs from the download page and read the SliTaz 5.1 release notes draft. The live system logs you in automatically; if it asks, the accounts are tux / tux and root / root. Found a bug? Use filature-report from the desktop or write to us on the forum at maille.slitaz.org.

Thank You

Thanks to Pascal Bellard, HGT, Paul Issott and madanadam for their commits in the wok, to the translators who brought Turkish to the tools and to everyone who tested the October ISOs and reported what did not work, Nicolae Crefelean in particular.

- Christophe Lincoln (Pankso)