Slax

Slax is amazing. Among other things, Slax is my current installed distro. There appears to be some kind of kernel-driver problem with Slackware on this system. But Slax works fine. And once installed to the hard drive with the slax2hd module, Slax is able to install all of the software from the `Slackware 12.2 DVD. Except for the login, I can't tell that I'm not running Slackware.

I've also been able to copy it to my RAM, essentially running a live CD without a CD in the drive. Like most slackware-based Live CDs, Slax has a preset root password, and it also has an optional text login. It doesn't have a preset root account. This makes it easy to mount a hard drive or flash device as /home:

(mount /dev/sda1)

create a user account on the device:

(adduser pitbull)

create a new secure root password

(passwd root)

logout with "exit",log back in as a normal user

And you've got a remarkably good approximation of an installed system, but if you've used a flash drive, it's portable. Plug the flash drive in, boot the CD, and run the same system on any computer, same files, same configuration, same everything. Other live CDs can probably be hacked to do this, but like everything else with Slax, Slax makes it simple and straight forward.

There are so many other things Slax can do! Haven't even talked about the packaging system and the custom CD builder. Also, the defualt version of Slax is less than 200 MB, and takes about ten minutes to download with a DSL connection.

And it works so well! Really fast! Really carefree!

IMO, one of the great things about Slackware, by the way, are the great distros that have been created from it. Apparently, the simplicity of Slackware lends itself to creativity. Slax, Vector Linux, and Zenwalk Linux are all really interesting creations in ther own right.