Welcome to SliTaz ARM
This website provides information, notes and links about the SliTaz GNU/Linux port to the ARM architecture. SliTaz currently supports the ARM v6 (armel) architecture and work is on the stove for armv6hf (hard float) and armv7.
SliTaz ARM is supported by the official SliTaz project but with its own boot scripts for faster start-up. A base system will use around 20mb of RAM. SliTaz can turn an ARM device into a music or web server, a NAT, an IRC bot, a small desktop and much more.
Raspberry Pi
Currently the SliTaz official ARM port works on the Raspberry Pi and can be used to setup a small server. DirectFB, Xorg, JWM, E17, Openbox and the FOX toolkit and FLTK are ported and provide a nice and light GUI support. Sat-rpi lets advanced users create custom Rpi flavors with an official Kernel, custom boot options and more.
SliTaz Tiny/Touch Screen
The SliTaz Tiny/Touch Screen aka sts provides a suitable desktop for small screens such as a 320x240 TFT display. The screenshot shows sts running on the Raspberry PiTFT touchscreen. The desktop is powered by Openbox and LXpanel. All applications are started maximised and without decoration.
To close windows and switch desktops you must use the hidden bottom panel. Sts provide a small cmdline tool to handle custom tasks and the sts-session script can be used to start an X session via startx and ~/.xsession or the Slim login manager.
$ sts help
Packages
All SliTaz ARM packages are automatically built by the ARM Cooker. To properly handle the SLITAZ_ARCH variable, the recommended Package Manager is spk. One way to start with the Spk Toolset is to generate a distro and include spk. On a SliTaz ARM system you simply run 'spk-up --list' to get the latest packages list. The current ARM packages mirror URL:
Build distros
To create some custom ARM SliTaz flavors we use a tool called 'sat' which stands for SliTaz ARM Tool. Sat is a cmdline tool written in SHell script and in the spirit of SliTaz, light, fast and easy to use! Get the code via the Mercurial Hg repository or download the latest tarball: tip.tar.bz2
$ hg clone http://hg.slitaz.org/slitaz-arm
You may want to browse the slitaz-arm Hg repo and have a look at the README to get started. Once sat is cloned and installed you can generate a distro with a single command from your local slitaz-arm repo:
# sat mirror && sat gen --flavor=arm-base
Prebuilt ARM Toolchain
To compile SliTaz packages to ARM you need a working cross compilation toolchain. You can build your own with 'cross' or use our prebuilt toolchains available from the SliTaz Mirror:
Cross compiling
SliTaz provides all the necessary tools for cross compiling Open Source software. The cookutils package provides 'cross' which is used to create cross compilation toolchains and 'cook' is used to cross compile SliTaz packages.
Here is a cmdline quickstart setup:
1) Setup the build chroot ------------------------- # tazdev gen-chroot --arch=arm # tazdev -c --arch=arm 2) Setup the cross toolchain ---------------------------- # mkdir -p /cross && cd /cross # wget http://mirror.slitaz.org/arm/cross/slitaz-arm-toolchain-20140304.tar.bz2 # tar xjf slitaz-arm-toolchain-20140304.tar.bz2 # cp -a slitaz-arm-toolchain-*/arm /cross 3) Setup cross/cook environment ------------------------------- # cross arm-setup # cook setup --wok 4) Testsuite and cross compile zlib ----------------------------------- # cross testsuite # cook zlib
If you want to cross compile packages that have a lot of build dependencies and don't want to build them all from source, you must download any official SliTaz ARM packages to the /home/slitaz/packages in the build chroot.
README, howto and docs: cross - cook.
ARM emulator
On SliTaz you need to install the 'qemu-arm' package which provides the Qemu CPU emulator for the ARM platform. If you have built a distro with the sat tool you can emulate it with:
# sat emu