Slax 5.1.8.1 KillBill Edition -- first impressions

Slax is a live CD that I've been very anxious to try. Any distro that claims to be light on hardware -- yet features the KDE desktop -- is something I've got to try. I'm beginning to think KDE gets a bad rap. It runs pretty darn well in this distro, as well as in MepisLite. And I think KOffice is a terrific package, with KWrite being one of the best programs out there for writers.

First things first. Slax is a cutdown version of Slackware, one of the first Linux distributions, and one that remains wildly popular (it's No. 10 on Distrowatch). And it's not Debian, if that means anything. I guess I mention that because so many distros use Debian as their base, it's nice to try something different.

The boot process is pretty good. The script displayed on the screen asks you to log on as root with password "toor" And there are on-screen hints, such as startx to get KDE running, flux to use Fluxbox instead, mc to run Midnight Commander and xconf to autoconfigure the graphics adapter. Startx didn't work for me -- my display didn't cooperate, so I killed X and used xconf, which did work. I got the message, "creating /etc/corg.conf ... all done. Run startx now. If you get black screen, hit Ctrl+Alt+Plus. But all was well, and I was off and running. Later, I changed resolutions in KDE, and the screen looked absolutely terrific in all its 1280 x 1024 majesty. Thanks, KDE!

And if you want to put Slax on your hard drive, slax-install will do just that. Configsave and configrestore will save and restore your file systems,
fileswap will create a swap file. Pretty simple.

Once Slax KillBill goes into KDE, you see a yellow desktop and samurai sword that means you're in KillBill -- named because Wine is included and you can run Windows apps without Win being installed (hence the "Kill Bill" -- as in Gates -- reference).

On the menu, in addition to the KDE button that can launch just about everything, there is a console button, Konqueror, JuK (music), KPlayer (video??) and K3B for CD and DVD burning.

I easily configured my ethernet card for static IP with KDE -- it was as clear and easy as any other distro I've used.

While KillBill has Wine installed, I couldn't manage to get any Win apps to run. Perhaps I'm missing something? I'll try again later.

Another thing: The version of KWord in Slax killbill is 1.5.2, with KDE 3.5.4. I some trouble getting "smart" quotes working -- it just wouldn't do it. I didn't have this problem in MepisLite, the distro in which I fell in love with KWord. The "current" version of KWord is 1.6.2, so maybe this is a bug that got squashed.

The KDE desktop in Slax killbill is surprisingly responsive. Menus appear immediately (this being a 3 GHz Dell, I expect that, but I don't always get it).

And I got a nice surprise: Many printers on my network were automatically configured and usable without me doing anything. I was able to print to one immediately ... I wasn't able to configure an additional printer, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it, since I could print elsewhere.

KDE is such a nice desktop -- the screen resize and rotate button on the lower right allowed me to immediately pick my favored resolution -- 1280 x 1024, and as I said above, it looks terrific.

I still love KWord. It's my favorite Linux word processor by far. It's much lighter on resources than Open Office, and I've read that it's even lighter than Abiword.

KDE's Konquerer browser responds fast and displays pages well. There was no Flash player installed, though.

Sound worked fine. I had to tweak it with ALSA Mixer in a terminal window, but that's normal for my PC.

At this stage, the sticking points are the smart quotes in Kword, and for the killbill edition, figuring out how Wine works. (Wine remains a mystery to me. The only time I could do anything with Wine was when I installed IEs4Linux in Xubuntu -- that worked. Now I see why Codeweavers has a business.)

Maybe I need to run Winecfg or something. The reason I burned the KillBill version of Slax first was because one of my goals in running Linux is to port over the two Windows apps that I need at the Daily News -- Internet Explorer (because our in-house Web system requires it -- and no, Firefox won't work) and the Hermes publishing system from Unisys, which is our main software for putting out the paper. I'm not against giving $40 to Codeweavers to make it happen, but I figured that a distro with Wine in it already would somehow be easier to use.

Still, my first impression of Slax is a favorable one. I've already burned CDs of the plain Slax and the smaller Popcorn edition, meant to install on 128 MB flash media. I'll try these in the Dell, and hopefully soon in the Thin Puppy (the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I'm using to write this post). If it works, will I have to rename that machine Thin Slax? Yes, I will.