SliTaz - New SliTaz Cooking ISOs, on the Road to 5.1

New SliTaz Cooking ISOs, on the Road to 5.1

October 2026

Hello everyone. It has been a while since we last published ISOs meant for everybody and not only for the people who follow the cooking branch day after day. For years SliTaz lived as a rolling distribution: one cooking branch, always moving, always a little bit unfinished. This spring we decided to go back to what made SliTaz reliable: a Stable release you can install and forget, and a Cooking branch where the work happens. Eight months, a full rebuild of every package and about 2800 commits in the wok later, here are fresh cooking ISOs: the first ISOs of this new model and our first ISOs for everyone in years. They are the road to SliTaz 5.1: a release candidate will probably follow, then SliTaz 5.1 itself, our first stable release since SliTaz 4.0 in April 2012.

SliTaz turns 20 this year. The recipe has not changed: a complete system that runs from RAM, boots in a few seconds and fits on a small USB key. What changed is everything around it.

Seven ISOs, Two Architectures

32-bit is not going anywhere: i486 keeps its full set and x86_64 is now a first-class architecture with about 5700 packages (about 6000 for i486). Every ISO is hybrid: burn it to a CD or write it to a USB key with dd. The x86_64 ISOs boot on both BIOS and UEFI.

base (i486 18 MB, x86_64 28 MB): a text mode system for servers, rescue and very old machines.
core (i486 48 MB, x86_64 66 MB): the LXTaz desktop with our own tools, the installer, settings and package manager, without a browser or extra applications. Build your own system from there.
core-retro (i486 45 MB): the same desktop on the frozen Linux 3.16 kernel, for hardware that a modern kernel no longer provides.
firefox (i486 130 MB, x86_64 153 MB): core plus Firefox ESR (153 on x86_64, 140 on i486, which needs SSE2) and everyday applications.

Under the hood: Linux 6.12 LTS on both architectures, with its modules split by family so that a small system only installs what it uses, eudev as the only device manager and boot scripts reworked until the system reaches the desktop in about 4.5 seconds on an NVMe laptop.

LXTaz: Our Desktop

We love LXDE: it is light, simple and it stays out of the way. But it still looked like 2010. LXTaz keeps the good parts, Openbox, lxpanel and the LXDE components, now all in GTK3, and it adds a set of small tools written for SliTaz: a fullscreen launcher on the Super key (lxtaz-dash), a quick settings menu for dark mode, brightness, sound and Wi-Fi (lxtaz-ctrl), a dock, a simple file manager, a session dialog, a privilege prompt and a welcome window that greets you on the first boot. SliTaz-Dark is the default theme, SliTaz-Light its twin.

The desktop comes with our own applications, all in GTK3: tazinst-gtk to install SliTaz, trame-gui for system settings (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound, display, power, users, language and time) and spk-gui to search, install and remove packages.

Home-Made Tools

Most of what is new is software we wrote ourselves, in plain POSIX shell or small C programs, the SliTaz way.

tazinst 4.5, the installer, with text and GTK frontends, and GRUB2 for BIOS and UEFI. New in these ISOs: the frugal mode turns a whole USB key or SD card into a live SliTaz with a persistent /home. tazinst writefs saves the running system back to the key and the previous one stays bootable from the GRUB menu.
spk, the new package manager. Upgrades are atomic: even glibc, busybox and the toolchain can be upgraded on a running system or the system is left exactly as it was.
reprise repairs the distribution. That is not something you see every day. It diagnoses a broken SliTaz, offline first. Before each upgrade it takes a snapshot of the known good state, so a bad upgrade can be rolled back without network. Every repair is explained, confirmed, backed up and can be undone, and the system has a "SliTaz rescue" boot entry to repair an installed system from the live ISO.
filature-report sends a bug report from SliTaz itself in a few clicks, with a privacy filter, straight to Filature, where developers read it (more below).
TazHelper turns any tester into a contributor: it runs automatic checks, walks you through a checklist of applications and sends an anonymous report only when you click Send.
metier, our new ISO builder, made all seven ISOs, natively on SliTaz.

Sovereign AI, on a Plain CPU

An old SliTaz motto gets a 2026 twist: an ultra-light system leaves the RAM to the things you really want to run, and today that includes local AI models. No cloud, no account, no API key and no big GPU: our AI tools run natively on the CPU.

Wove lets you talk to your system: wove "connect me to wifi", in English, French or any language with a lexicon. It never runs a guess: it shows what it will do, asks for confirmation and can undo. Its core is plain rules, so it works on any machine. Wove ships in the x86_64 ISOs.
decide answers closed questions about a text, like "why did this build fail?", with a small local model in a single forward pass, without generating a single token. A few seconds on a laptop CPU and the answer is always one of the allowed choices. It can be Wove's optional brain.
Navette is an agentic code editor: about 10,000 lines of C and ncurses, driving a local llama.cpp server. It picks the largest model that fits in your RAM by itself.
TazTerm is the new default terminal of SliTaz, made for working with AI coding agents: split panes, an agent can read the output of your panes (never type into them), secrets are masked before anything reaches it and you see at a glance which pane needs you. One small C program on GTK3 and VTE, about 24 MB of RAM for a window on every desktop ISO.

decide and Navette are one spk-add away on x86_64. The models are downloaded once, then everything stays on your machine.

A New Home for the Community

SliTaz also has a new home for its community. Maille (maille.slitaz.org) is our new forum and Filature (filature.slitaz.org) is where developers track bugs, publish dev news and follow every commit pushed to hg.slitaz.org. Reports sent from SliTaz with filature-report or TazHelper land there directly and the known repairs become a fixes database that reprise carries offline, so a fix found for one user can repair other machines without a network. Both are small C programs on SQLite, written for SliTaz and hosted on our own servers which run SliTaz too, next to the mirror, the cooker and the documentation.

Known Limits

We would rather tell you now: there is no OpenGL acceleration yet (Xorg 1.12), the newest Wi-Fi chips (Intel BE200, Realtek rtw89, MediaTek MT7921) are not supported yet and the toolchain (glibc 2.20, gcc 6.3) is old; its modernization is the work of SliTaz 6.0. The full list is in the release notes.

Get It, Try It, Tell Us

Cooking means what it says: these ISOs were tested carefully, but the branch keeps moving and your reports are what will make the release candidate and SliTaz 5.1 solid. So please try them on your own hardware, old and new, and tell us what works and what breaks.

Download the ISOs from the download page and read the SliTaz 5.1 release notes draft, which these ISOs already follow. The live system logs you in automatically; if it asks, the accounts are tux / tux and root / root. Found a bug? Tell us with filature-report from the desktop or on the forum at maille.slitaz.org. Coming from SliTaz 4.0? A fresh install that keeps your /home is the way to go.

Thank You

These ISOs are the work of a small team. Pascal Bellard and HGT signed about 1500 commits in the wok between them since February, from receipt conversions to glibc, krb5 and the cross compilers. Thanks to Stanislas Leduc, Paul Issott, Erjo, the testers who sent their reports, Nicolae Crefelean in particular and everyone who kept SliTaz alive during the quiet years.

Twenty years later, SliTaz is still small, still fast and ready for the next twenty. Enjoy!

- Christophe Lincoln (Pankso)