SLAX Linux Live 4.2.0

I was interested in finding out more about how to boot a Linux distro from a USB flash drive and came across SLAX. The USB booting will have to wait until I put aside enough $$$ to buy a 1GB jump drive.

Anyway...I stumbled across the SLAX website and decided to download it. SLAX is a "live" Linux distro you can run from a CD. It's based on Slackware and is quite compact (compared to the KNOPPIX Live CD I made) at only 180MB. Tomas Matejicek, the developer "behind the curtain" has put together a really great package featuring, to quote him:

Linux Kernel 2.4.28-pre4 with SATA support
X.org 6.8.1
KDE 3.3.1
KOffice 1.3.3
KDE games
MPlayer 1.0pre5 with KPlayer
kopete ICQ/AIM/Y!/IRC
midnight commander
rdesktop (rscp in KDE)
hotplug support
cdrtools
k3b burning GUI for KDE
mutt email client
wget
and much more...

After burning yourself the Live CD and booting it you'll get to the boot: prompt. You get a few seconds to begin typing any special boot options you want. I like the "slax copy2ram" option which copies all modules to RAM. Tomas warns that this will slow the boot process but I found that there didn't seem to be much difference in that area. Once you're booted though...It really goes! You can use the "gui" command which starts the X environment. A very nice KDE implementation in my opinion. And, as I said, fast! I could access my Windows partitions and tried out KPlayer on one of my .WMA tracks. Fine there. Started up Konqueror and checked out a few pages. That was one area I did see some hesitation. Once the page began loading it loaded fast but there was some wait before that time.

I'll have to stick some screenshots up later. Or you can go to the SLAX site and see a few. My first impression of this distro is very good. So ends my first post from SLAX.

SLAX Linux Live - Home Page