Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Mini-Review of A mini slack

Filed under
Linux
Reviews
-s

Contained in 124 MB is Slackware scaled down. An attractive desktop experience was had by all. The popcorn edition is a smaller version containing XFCE and Fluxbox as opposed to KDE and is said to be able to run from an usb flash drive. It comes with Firefox for browsing, thunderbird for email and gaim for instant messaging in addition to the file tools included with XFCE and the underlying linux os foundation.

From the changelog we learn that new in this version:

  • v 5.0.5 Popcorn Edition
    • Initial release of SLAX PopCorn edition, a 124MB Live CD with XFce desktop
    • Contains Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, XMMS clone, Gaim and AbiWord
    • doesn't contain harddisk installer yet, but can be installed manually
  • v 5.0.5 all editions
    • fixed error message during X startup (about hostname)
    • guest user can see mixer icon and screensize icon too
    • added kio_imap for kmail
    • LISA is started with KDE to allow LAN browsing
    • startx didn't start KDE after flux command, fixed
    • updated fluxbox menu
    • created nice fluxbox plastik theme
    • added fstab-create script to make sure all devices are listed in fstab
    • added network configurator to set IP address by using GUI
    • fixed uselivemod and webconfig feature

I booted the cd version and found a comforting slackware init that started slax without flaw. Although it did mount all partition on the hard drive automagically and I never think that's a good idea. Upon boot is one of the best terminal screens I've seen listing helpful information and start commands including root password and user info similar to this frodo screenshot and thumbnail depicted here as borrowed from the slax.linux-live website. This was a nice addition. I personally prefer that to starting X automagically, as I'm able to umount all my partitions before seeing if X is going to lock up as with many livecds.

For 148 megs, I didn't find it as complete as other mini distros of a 1/3 it's size, but it does come with a choice of two window managers. If you prefer Fluxbox to XFCE, then they got you covered. Fortunately XFCE comes with many nice tools including a filemanager and looks really nice. I think I'd personally prefer another color for the default wallpaper other than red, but it's still fairly cute with the image of a popcorn box labeled slax. Thegimp was in the menus, however seemed to be missing from the distribution. An application that large is not expected on a mini livecd, but the menu entry should be removed. I found it stable and responsive in it's livecd format. It had no problems with starting the X server and finding all my hardware. The mplayer came fairly complete as it was able to play an avi movie file, tho the cd player couldn't find any of the cds I put in my drive. Some of them fairly old before copy protection was even given any thought.

So, in summation, it's a nice livecd that could be used as a recovery tool or portable os, especially for the Slackware fan. It has a lot of competition but it has it's Slackware roots going for it. It's a wonderful little os that I wouldn't mind packing up in my bookbag or purse.

Screenshots in the Gallery.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.