Is that I always get introduced to some new program as a side bonus. I’ve been messing with SliTaz at home, offline, and at work, online, and it’s a very cool distro in its own right. It’s hard to find a shortcoming in a distro that manages to give you a reasonable selection of software in 25Mb.

But two of those applications are new to me — ISO Master and Joe’s Window Manager — and both are worth looking at very closely.

I hadn’t messed with an ISO editor in a very long time, but ISO Master is definitely going into my repertoire as a much-needed utility. Graphical from start to finish, easily modified to use the editors and other auxiliary software you prefer, and — best of all — it does one thing, and does it well. You can edit the structure and contents of an ISO with ISO Master. It doesn’t make coffee or wax your car, but I don’t want that. Sometimes I want an ISO editor, and that’s all. And that’s what it is.

JWM, I will admit, I have seen before and used under other minimal distros — Puppy and DSL both offer it as an alternative window manager, I believe — but never taken the time to prod. I was surprised at how quick and easy it is to manage. One configuration file controls just about everything (I think 😉 ), and you can reshape your entire desktop in a matter of seconds.

Most of my experiments get erased when I reboot SliTaz, but I plan on trying it out a little more as soon as I get online again at home. Then I’ll have the chance to properly arrange things how I want, and see what else it can do.

I also want to take a closer look at Xvesa, which I believe SliTaz is using instead of the full X suite. Seems like it might be an alternative for older machines using Ubuntu … or perhaps TinyX instead.