Slax wears the pants

By Steven Rosenberg on March 28, 2007 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

I was reading Sal Cangleso's excellent article on his Mini-ITX project, in which he builds small computers that run off of Compact Flash memory (just like the Thin Puppy!), and he mentioned that while he liked Puppy Linux, another small distribution, called Slax, was better. So I went over there and am intrigued -- I downloaded a few ISOs to burn later and try.

It's a small Linux, all right, and the main version is based on KDE, with the wonderful KOffice (smart quotes!!!) also on board. There is also a "Kill Bill" version that includes Wine preloaded to run Windows apps (now you know which Bill we're talking about), and a small version to fit on a 128M USB drive (now if I could only figure out how to make a USB flash drive bootable ....).

While there are a lot of people using Slax, as the forum attests, it is primarily the work of one man, Tomas Matejicek of the Czech Republic. And if you didn't get the reference, Slax is indeed based on that most noble of Linux distributions, Slackware.

For those already knee-deep in Linux, there are many specialized Slax modules available (1,857 to be exact), with options including the Xfce, fwvm, IceWM and Fluxbox window managers. How's that for freedom of choice?

Whether you're interested in Slax or not, you are interested in cool, homebuilt computers, aren't you? Thought so. There are three parts to Sal's Mini-ITX series, and all three are well worth studying before you embark on your own Mini-ITX (or any PC) project.

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