the Slitaz approch to help the third world?

[atle@xxxxxxx]

Hello folks...

The attached document is sent out to the Open Source Zambia mailinglist
today.

Anyone who likes the idea, the concepts...

Please let me know


Best regards

Atle

Say Hello to your new friend Slitaz

What:

Minimalistic Linux Distribution.
Comes in various "flavors" that can operate on machines down to 16MB ram. 
The normal version boots on machines with minimum 160MB ram.
Can be installed to USB memo sticks, mobile phones with a flash drive, 
runs from Live CD into pure Ram, installed to hard drive or even PXE net boot.

The smallest and most ram consuming version is just 28MB ram .iso file.
Download it from Slitaz.org, burn it to a CD. Boot up and remove the CD.
The whole thing just runs in ram. Then you can install different programs 
like Open Office 3, Skype, Google Earth and a whole lot of others.

If you look around a bit at the forum, you might even find a version of Slitaz 
that contains a ready up and going web server, with nothing less than Joomla 1.5.8 
running as its presinstalled. I requested that special version in the forum, and some dude
made in inn less than a weekend.

So lets put it this way...  The less compressed Slitaz comes, the less ram it needs.

The lowram version of Slitaz is about 150MB big. That one can boot at something like 10MB ram.
I still have not tested this my self, but I would like to hear from anyone who does that.

Now what does that mean?  Microsoft or even Ubuntu is big fat hardware consuming bullshit.
There is almost nothing you can not do in slitaz, that you can do in Ubuntu/XP/Vista.

At least for me its pretty clear that Slitaz is working in opposition to the mainstream OS.

What MS and others want, is to have YOU buying all kind of hardware. New and more expensive hardware.
Its a ratrace where most of the industry cooperates. Look at Nokias softwarepacage.

Its big, fat and ugly. Does one need that? A over 30 MB package to connect to the Internet?

Certainly not. That package sucks ram. So does Ubuntu and XP/ Vista.

With Slitaz you can bring almost ANY computer back to life. Make it into a state of the s*** workstation
or server. That reverses the hardware ratrace created by the greedy industrialist.

Slitaz is not only the smallest "full" OS in the world, but also especially made for PHP developers.



WHY:

SLitaz can really make a change in Zambia and other developing countries. I have noticed that most people here,
at a certain level, has a memo stick. A one or two mb flashdrive.

slitaz is VERY efficient when it comes to what to install on. 

I give some examples here:

A laptop with 64MB ram and no hardrive. Can it run slitaz? yes.. If either a USB port is present, but the bios does not
support USB boot, there is a few workarounds. Then it probably has a CDrom or a floppy drive.
You make a boot CD or floppy that will fetch the OS from the USB and continue to boot from there.

A PC with 16 ram, no harddrive and no USB port, but a CD rom and a floppy drive.  Can it run Slitaz?  Yes...

You boot the low ram version from CD and any doc or whatever, you save to the floppy.

Another great benefit from slitaz compared to other fat distros, are the possibility to actually understand the file system 
of Linux. Being so small and minimalistic, its quite sure that your little brother or sister, stands a better chance of 
becoming and Open Source genius as the OS in it self is less complicated.

Oki... Lets put it this way....  with a "boot toolbox", as a Slitaz Loram installed to a USB, a a multi boot floppy disk and CD, 
loram version a compressed version, there is no way you can not boot ANY machine. Please challenge me on that.
The only thing that can stop that is a onboard security chip for non tamperable BIOS password(new laptops) or
if the machine only has a floppy drive. Then it will be booted on the even smaller little brother of Slitaz, 
Bloody Stupid Linux (yes... it exist) That one will boot down to 8MB ram into terminal.

So I guess you have already figured out that I might have some big big plans with Slitaz?

Ohhh YES...  They are big and I need HEEEEELP.

I divide it into two different projects:

A School Live CD DRLB Clonezilla Focused OS
A Slitaz "Open School" personal educator

Lets just call them Open Schools personal and server edition.

So lets start with the School version...

The plan is to make "focused operating systems. That means that when you or me teaches about Open Office, we might just want that
computer to show and run just open office and nothing more. No msn, no web browsing, no games no nothing.
The same goes for Ktouch, the touch learning program for OSS. You boot the PC and there is NOTHING you can do apart from 
doing your Ktouch. I think its the dream of any teacher. Its truelly inspired by me suffering in Norwegian schools with that
crap OS MS. Slitaz makes that possible.

So i name it something very advanced to look a bit more important than I am:-) I admit that.

But it can work like this. The DRLB simply means Disk less remote boot in linux.

so when I discover that the Clonezilla DRBL CD was just 200 mb or something like that, I assume that the CD can also contain 
a couple of Slitaz OS that are stripped down to become "focused OS" and that can be spread out to all PCs in a wired network 
by ease. To understand what I am talking about, go to http://www.clonezilla.org

Steve, the father of Clonezilla is ready to support this idea.

Secondary, a non wired classroom can install from a CD, a mobile phone or a flash drive, depending on whats serves the purpose.

Thats the "server edition". Please make suggestions or flex some intellectual muscles on this one.

The Open School "personal educator" is more simple to understand.

When you have the JoomlaSlitaz version on a CD, it takes maximum 32MB if it ment for a computer with more than 160MB ram.
If its a 16 MB computer it needs the 150MB boot CD.

So what do we do with all that space that are left on the CD?

there should now be about 600MB of free space on that CD. Thats where we put inn all kind of stuff that makes it possible 
educate your self. That can be stuff and white papers about:

HTML
JAVA
PHP
PERL

and whatever we can come across on the Internet.

Then we tie that into the presintalled Joomla, simulating the Internet as local host.

So they boot up their "educator", start their Firefox 3.0, put in "localhost" and there they will find a specially made version of
joomla 1.5.8 that is filled up with 600MB of educational stuff.

Great? Are we talking SERIOUS developing here?  

Now... We need a space on the internet to do this project.

I KNOW... we can do this. I KNOW this can help not only Zambia, but give more kids, more youth a better chance on their life.

And I KNOW i can do this my self cooperating with does dudes out there in those communities that are around, mixing clonezilla
forum, slitaz forum and joomla forum.

But I hope that this challenge will be handled locally to put Zambia onto the OSS map, as its just almost a black hole today.

So we need to get organized better than the Chinese mafia.

What I can offer apart from bringing this to the table, is a web site that we can use in Norway, to be a "contact person" that
coordinates the project between the communities and also to offer my house here in Makeni as a HQ for the project.

What I can not offer is ANY knowledge about programming or making this focused OS and other advanced tasks.

I have no money to put into this, I have some idea about how to do it without any money doe.

Anyone has the skills to contribute here. Do research, find educational material to add in.

Those that are skilled in programming I don't think I need to tell them what to do.

Lets Roll... Lets smoke Zambia out of that black hole:-) 


PS!  Having someone to read through this text, its noticed that some programs just cant run under 16 mb ram, and also that you
simply cant run Google Earth without a 3D grapich card...