A week with Slax Linux 4.1.4
What caught my eye about Slax
The first thing that caught my eye about the Distrowatch announcement on the release of Slax 4.1.4 was that it included KDE 3.3 which had only been out a few weeks. I wanted to try out KDE 3.3 and a live CD like Slax is a great way to do it, so I went over to the Slax website to download the ISO. Whilst I was at the website I noticed the Slax slogan "Slax - your pocket OS." This got me thinking, can you really survive with just a live CD (and a small one at that) as your only distro, in a 'Mandrake Move" type way? I decided to challenge myself to try for a week.
A bit about Slax before "the challenge"
Before I get on to my challenge, let me tell you a bit about Slax first. Slax is a Slackware based 185 MB bootable Linux CD. It includes: Kernel 2.4.28, KDE 3.3.0, Koffice 1.3.2, KDE Games, Mplayer, Kplayer, Midnight Commander, Rdesktop, K3b and also the Fluxbox desktop. Slax is the work of Tomas Matejicek, has very nice website and an active forum.
So, getting started, I popped my newly burned CD in the drive and started my computer. The first thing you see is the green shamrock Slax logo, a nice starting impression. Then you get the initial boot prompt where you can hit 'enter' to boot with the default 'slax gui' option or press "F1" for help/options. I pressed "F1" and my options were:
slax gui, slax nohotplug, slax passwd=ask, slax copy2ram, slax tohd=disc0part1, slax fromhd=disc0pt1, slax eject, slax hdc=ide-scsi, slax load=modules, slax vrefrsh=85, slax hrefresh=64 and memtest. If I wanted even more information it says I can look at cheatcodes.txt on the CD. I just chose 'slax gui.'
Off it went and after just over half a minute, and a bit of verbose startup I got to the login screen. I had a minor hiccup at this point as it hadn't detected my PS2 keyboard attached to my laptop. I have had this problem with other distros in the past so I just unplugged the external keyboard and rebooted and used the laptops built in keyboard.
It a text based login so it could be slightly intimidating to a completely new Linux user but this does make it feel like a "proper" Linux login. There is a nice text box with instructions telling you the user name of "root" and the password of "toor" so it really isn't that scary! The message box also tells you your options after you have logged in to start the GUI. They are: gui, guifast, guisafe, mc and Rexima. I opted for GUI.
KDE
A minute later I was greeted by the Slax welcome sound and the KDE desktop. Those people not familiar with the KDE desktop in general can take a tour. The Slax KDE desktop has a really cute Tux the penguin as the wallpaper and shortcuts to the Konsole terminal, Konqueror web browser, Kontact the PIM, the KDE Control Center, JuK the music player and KPlayer the media player. What about the software included?
Editors: KHexEdit, Kate and KWrite
Games: Arcade: KAsteroids, KBounce and KSnakeRace. Board Games: KReversi. Card Games: Patience. Tactic & Strategy: SameGame, KAtomic, KSokoban and KBattleship
Graphics: Kuickshow, KPDF, KolorPaint and KSnapshot
Internet: Remote Desktop Connection, Kopete, KPPP, KMail, KNode and Konqueror
Multimedia: K3b, KsCD, KAudioCreator, KPlayer, JuK and KMix
Office: KOffice Workspace, KWord, KSpread, KPresenter, Address Manager, KChart, KFormula, Kontact and KOrganiser
As well as the regular KDE System and Utilities applications, Lost & Found, Find Files, Help, Personal Files, Bookmarks, Quick Browser, Run Command, Lock Session and Log out.
This is certainly everything I should need. What makes this really impressive is that all this is on a 185MB CD and Windows XP with this equivalent software is 4GB. I haven't got too much more to say about KDE 3.3, I think a lot of the improvements have been behind the scenes and some of the others applications were cut from Slax for space reasons. Over all, it seems faster and I didn't have any application crash issues at all. From this I would suggest upgrading.
"The Challenge"
OK, on to the challenge. I am going to try to use only this Slax live CD for a whole week as my only OS, a "pocket OS." I use what is on the CD and that is it. So what do I on my computer? I surf the internet, Slax has got Konqueror, my browser of choice anyway, so that shouldn't be too hard. I use web based email so I don't need an email client. I write my web pages with a WYSIWYG editor, this might be a little bit hard but I can use either Kate to do it the old fashioned way or KWord as an HTML editor so I'm not going to be stuck. I listen to MP3s, I'm not married to any particular player so JuK should be just fine. I write the occasional letter and KWord has that covered. Every now and again I will play a game but normally nothing more than Sokoban or Tetris so I'm 50% covered in the event of complete boredom. This shouldn't be too hard...
Monday. I catch up on my emails and read a bit of Linux news. This isn't any different to normal since I do this in Konqueror anyway. Incidentally, Slax got me straight on the internet using my broadband router without any intervention from me. Although I do like doing a bit of configuration myself I wouldn't want to have to do this every time I start up my "pocket OS" so this is actually a good thing. Next on to writing a little something about Slax for tuxs.org. Slax auto-mounted all my drives so I could get to my page templates and I carry a USB key with me most of the time anyway so saving my work isn't going to be a problem. I have been using KWord up to this point to write my notes. I normally use OpenOffice but I must say for the features I use I haven't had any problems switching at all and in fact it even feels a little bit faster. Who knows, at this point when the week is up I may even switch and only use OpenOffice when I need to do more complicated things. I am putting off deciding if I am going to use Kate or try KWord to actually put this page together at the moment.
Tuesday. Pretty much the same as Monday. I surf the internet and check my emails which obviously is fine as I'm using good old Konqueror. I write a few more notes about Slax in KWord and edit what I have done so far. Not painful at all so far.
Wednesday. Surf the web, check emails. I listen to some MP3s in JuK. As I said, I don't have strong feelings about any player, so since I can hear them I'm more than happy. I am listening to them from my mounted hard drive but I don't think this is cheating too much as I could have them saved on a USB key if I wanted. I have already decided that a "pocket OS" wouldn't be too useful if you didn't have a USB key. I have a thought, on my regular installed distro (PCLinuxOS), I also listen to music CDs, I should give this a try. So I reboot and use the 'slax copy2ram' option, eject the Slax CD and pop in my music CD. Fantastic!! I write a bit more in KWord.
Thursday. Surf, email. Then time for the big decision. Most of the "work" on my computer is writing web pages so an HTML editing application is really the make or break application for me on whether I can truly live with a "pocket OS." I decide to try WYSIWIG with KWord. After testing it, well, the results are just what you are looking at now - brilliant! I am really impressed with KWord. It is very easy to use and its HTML capabilities are easily as good as OpenOffice Writer or even Mozilla Composer. It is fast. I could very easily swap to using KOffice (and KWord in particular) as my office productivity suite - and I probably will.
KDE is my main desktop but sometimes I just feel like something simpler so I dip in to Fluxbox. So that's what I do, reboot and start slax guifast. Blimey! Fluxbox is amazingly fast on Slax and I can use my KDE applications with it too! If you haven't tried it, give it a go.
Friday. I survived a week! Quick check of emails and then I finish this article.
I survived the challenge
Overall, for what I typically use my computer for I survived, and quite nicely too. Would I suggest that someone ditch their installed distro and just use a live CD? I'm not sure. Live CDs have a few definite advantages: you can carry your OS in your pocket (like the slogan says), particularly with an 8cm CD, so you always have a consistent desktop no matter what computer you are working on and the software is very stable as it is running in a controlled environment. One downside with Live CDs in general is that you are usually restricted to the choice of software included on the CD however certain distros like Slax and DamnSmallLinux allow you to download extra modules which puts them on the same footing as installable ones). Overall though, the software included with Slax as standard should allow you to do almost everything you need to do and you should certainly be able to get your work done with it. My only reservation about the "pocket OS' concept is that you do need to store all your data somewhere. The two real choices are a USB key, but you would need a bigger one than my meager 128MB very shortly or carry a CD-RW. I didnt try the CD-RW idea but theoretically there is no reason at all why it shouldn't work. So that was my experience of a week with just a like CD, what about Slax?
I really liked Slax. It looks great, its own icons are really nice, KDE is obviously very good too and it works perfectly. The software included is everything I need, and as I said, it fits all this in to 185mb and certain other OS's need 4GB to achieve the same. Slax is a very polished distro and I give it tops marks and would highly recommend anyone to give it a go.
Barney Matthews