A New Installer, spk-gui, LXTaz and 1679 Commits

September 2026

August was spent under the hood, September brought it to the surface. SliTaz 5.1 now has a rewritten installer, a graphical package manager, a modern LXDE desktop and a system settings tool. And 1679 commits landed across the repositories since the last news, 1277 of them in the wok.

The Installer, Rewritten: TUI and GTK

tazinst 4.0 is a new start. The engine now speaks a small machine protocol, and two frontends drive it: tazinst-tui, an ncurses installer in SliTaz orange with a step counter, clear partition and format choices and retry on error, and tazinst-gtk, a GTK3 installer with its own icon and menu entry. Both open a ready install file directly on its summary. Under them, grub legacy and syslinux are gone: GRUB2 installs on BIOS and UEFI alike. The old TazPanel installer and the broken web install media were retired, and the manuals were updated in English, French, German and Portuguese. tazinst-gtk now replaces tazinst-gui in the core flavors.

spk-gui: a GTK Package Manager, at Last

It has been a long wait: SliTaz finally has a graphical package manager again. spk-gui, shipped with spk 3.0, is a GTK3 frontend with zero package logic of its own: it drives the spk tools through their machine output, so what you see is exactly what the command line does. Search, details, install and remove, from the menu or the LXTaz dash.

spk itself went from 2.4 to 3.7 in the meantime. Upgrades are now atomic in two phases, with a static spk-mv helper so that a live glibc upgrade can never pair a mismatched loader and libc; spk upgrades itself first and resumes with the new version. Dependency resolution understands PROVIDE, meta packages install again, and spk-add went from one fork per file to a single pass: upgrading an 18,000-file package dropped from 987 to 41 seconds. tazpkg followed the same path, from 5.9 to 5.9.5.

LXTaz: a Modern LXDE Desktop

The LXDE stack is current upstream, but it still looked like 2010. LXTaz is our answer: a set of small GTK3 components on top of Openbox and lxpanel, light enough for SliTaz.

Around them, slitaz-configs gained the SliTaz-Dark theme, default now, and its SliTaz-Light twin (GTK2, GTK3 and Openbox), two matching symbolic icon sets, DejaVu Sans 11 and a new wallpaper. LXTaz ships in the core, core-retro and Firefox flavors.

trame 1.0 and trame-gui: System Settings

trame, the unified system administration backend written in POSIX shell, reached 1.0. It learned network boot configuration, Wi-Fi with 802.1x (PEAP, TTLS, PWD), Bluetooth, hardware and missing firmware detection, keyboard layouts, locales, storage, power, users and logs, all tested on real SliTaz boxes. On top of it, trame-gui gives the desktop a settings application: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound, display, power, storage, users, language and time, in tiles.

TazTerm: a Terminal for Humans and AI Agents

tazterm is a new VTE terminal with split panes, and the default terminal of the x86_64 desktop. Command blocks, Ctrl+click on URLs and file:line, alerts when a long command ends out of sight, themes and configurable shortcuts. A read-only tazterm ctl interface lets local AI agents, like navette, watch panes without ever seeing a secret. Six releases in nine days, from 0.5 to 0.9.1. Speaking of local models: navette now picks the largest model that fits in RAM by itself, and decide, a tiny tool for typed decisions on text with a small local model, entered the wok.

Faster Boot, eudev and Lighter ISOs

udev 182 is gone: eudev is now the only device manager, on both arches. The boot scripts were reworked (network in the background, no double coldplug, ntp on the first DHCP lease), and a desktop comes up in about 4.5 seconds on NVMe. The flavors lost dead weight (icu, jack, unused libraries), gained the Intel SOF audio and legacy iwlwifi firmwares, and metier now builds UEFI ISOs natively on SliTaz with the kernel stored only once.

Thousands of Commits in the Wok

1277 commits in the wok since August, 2490 since January, and more than 3000 packages touched. The big project: receipts v2, a cleaner format for split packages, now used by nearly 900 receipts. Cookutils went from 4.9 to 4.26 to carry it: split packages no longer inherit the main receipt's variables, the wok is purged after each cook, and a postcheck now spots files packed twice.

This is the work of three people. HGT signed 605 wok commits, converting receipt after receipt to v2. Pascal Bellard signed 391, from v2 conversions to glibc, krb5 and the cross compilers. Pankso signed 281, and the new tools around them. A big thank you to both of you: 5.1 exists because the wok moves.

Across all repositories (wok, cookutils, spk, trame, tazterm, flavors, slitaz-configs, lxtaz, tazinst, tazpkg, tazlab (now with Docker support, thanks to Erjo), boot scripts, navette and others), 1679 commits landed since August 1st. 5.1 is getting close.

— Christophe Lincoln (Pankso)