Darkelve Posted February 17, 2004 Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 (edited) I was reading an article about LiveCD's and Slacks was mentioned. Now I know of Slackware but it just seemed too geeky/hardcore for me. But, after seeing the review and screenshots of Slax, I am very curious to try it. I visited the site and got a good idea what it is/how it works, but I would like your opinions and experiences with Slax. On an interesting note, Slax could fit on a USB Flash disk. And this I discovered browsing through their To Do list: On their To Do list "- enable booting/starting from USB FlashDisk, this could be very interesting [done - :) ]" Sounds way cool [Edit: yeah yeah I know what you're thinking, just try it. Well, I'm downloading :D ] Edited February 17, 2004 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted February 17, 2004 Author Report Share Posted February 17, 2004 Reporting back... Well, I must say I was pleasantly surprised with Slax. Basically, you have three modes of 'geekiness': - CLI only(Init 3?); well a CLI is a CLI... the included 'ASCII' volume control is a nice touch though... - GUI with Fluxbox (quite practical although I'm still more comfortable with KDE) - GUI with KDE It's nice it boots up on a command prompt, I guess. The explanations are clear enough that any one that can read can get the 'KDE' version going (basically just type "GUI"). It will certainly avoid the trouble caused by malfunctioning hardware detection, etc. and give an option to retry with FluxBox or fix things from the root prompt. It automounts all partitions (automatically scans HD and puts the mount points in /mnt/...), which isn't entirely intuïtive for a N00b, but still nice. Hardware detection for my system was good, only I had troubles with sound (just hearded noise at the KDE startup sound). In the control panel, that was easy to fix though, I just had to switch of autodetect and pick 'ALSA', that fixed it. The sound was still choppy when I was doing other things while listening mp3's (in Noatun) though. When I set it with a higher (I think highest) priority, the whole system stalled. I had a few other minor bugs, occuring both in KDE and Fluxbox. Nothing problematical though. The look and functionality of KDE blew me away though! Things are so much cleaner, more logically placed, more functional etc. etc. it is nice you can see the progress from version to version this well. As for applications, the selection was very smart, although I did mis OpenOffice. I think at least they should have included AbiWord if they thought OOO too heavy. Anyway, this is another great distro to demo to your friends, or just take it with you where you go if you need a comfy Linux system running in no time, and at no risk. As I already said, you can take it with you on an USB flash disk now! At a download of -I think- about 180MB, this distro REALLY, REALLY rocks! Imagine all of that on less than 200 Megs... Well what can I say, I'm impressed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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