Slax

Why Slax?

Slax is small: < 200MB and yet very usable. It even includes KDE desktop. It is modular: If you need more packages, go to the well-maintained slackware distribution and pick your favorite tgz packages, convert them to lzm format (e.g. execute tgz2lzm vim-7.1.tgz vim-7.1.lzm under slax), and copy the lzm file into the slax/modules/ directory. Next time you boot slax, your favorite packages will be available.

It has quite a few interesting features that makes customization painless. It just rocks.

Using Slax

Login as user "root" with password "toor".

Selected Slax Packages

This site contains some selected slax packages.

  1. essential/ contains mk-boot-usb, packages that it needs, two simple text editors, and some other essential tools. Put these packages into slax/modules/ so that the usb key you create can easily clone itself.
  2. zh_TW/ contains packages for displaying and inputing Traditional Chinese language, courtesy of my brother Chao-Chin Hung. Put 0*.lzm into slax/base. Reboot and make sure that the zh_TW modules are correctly loaded as shown in the picture. If you are using slax 6.0.7, you can further replace boot/initrd.gz with initrd-6.0.7.gz found here, so that Chinese file names in vfat partitions are displayed correctly.
  3. useful/ contains packages of my own choice. The qemu and kqemu packages are converted from Eric Hameleers's page. The gnutls package is required by the qemu package and is converted from slackware 12.1.

making sure that the zh_TW modules are loaded

Interesting Uses of a Slax Computer

There are a few interesting boot options to know. You can try each of the following by pressing "e" and editing the command line at the grub boot menu. If you like some of these effects, you can edit boot/grub/menu.lst and add entries for your favorite effects permanently. See the end of this page for a complete example.

Recovery mode: remove the clause changes=/.../.... Changes will not be saved. Each boot will be fresh like booting for the first time. This can be useful in a computer classroom, where a windows computer would need a recovery card to restore the harddisk to the original state on every boot. In fact all other linux livecd's made into a live usb using the mk-boot-usb approach behave in this mode by default.

Lightening fast mode: Add copy2ram to the boot command line. Everything will be copied to ram at boot time. It takes a lot of ram (512MB might do if you don't have many modules; 1G is safer), boots more slowly, but runs faster once it finishes booting. If you further type the command umount -a in a terminal, the usb key can then be removed. This is most suitable for running a diskless kiosk or a diskless terminal that serves an indefinite population and stays on for the whole day once it boots. For example, this can be perfect configuration for a library terminal whose only function is browsing.

See SLAX Cheatcodes for more options and be imaginative to come up with more possibile interesting applications of a slax computer.

Further Customization

This section is optional.

Slax is relocatable. It does not have to occupy a whole partition to itself. You can put it in a subdirectory of a partition that slax will share with other distributions. Besides adding the directory prefix to the vmlinuz and initrd.gz phrases in menu.lst, you just have to add the from=... to the list of boot parameters (and also remember to modify the changes=... parameter accordingly).

A Complete Example of the Boot Menu

Please compare the default boot menu created by mk-boot-usb, and a customized boot menu "vf2".

DSL slax otg
default part 5 part 6 part 7
"vf2" dsl-4.2.5/ of part 5 slax-6.0.7/ of part 5 part 5

The "vf2" version puts all 3 distributions into the same partition (partition 5), and defines 3 different entries for the same slax distribution.

mk-boot-usb

  1. intro
  2. use
  3. slax
  4. clone
  5. discuss
  6. advocacy

appendix

other lang