SLAX

This is a work in process...

Acknowledgement: I want to thank all the SLAX forum people and the SLAX website for supplying much of the information found here. Without it, this document would not have been possible.

Introduction

SLAX is a fast, portable, flexible, small distribution of the Linux operating system which fits on a small (8mm) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing to Hard Drive. If there is a compatible swap partition on the system hard drive, SLAX can utilize that as well. SLAX is based on the Slackware Linux distribution, created from Linux Live scripts. SLAX uses the Unification File System (also known as Unionfs), which allows a read-only file system to act as a writable one by committing all changes to memory and it also uses the Squashfs, a compressed read-only file system allowing more packages to be offered without the risk of being changed.

With SLAX you have the ability to boot and work in your custom personalized Operating System whether you are at home, at school, or at work. You can now carry all the tools you need for personal communication, entertainment, and productivity, all on a CD or USB key. By using a LiveCD or write protected USB key, you can feel safe that your environment can't be maliciously changed.

How does it work?

When your computer boots from the SLAX boot media, the kernel and the rootdisk are loaded into RAM. All the other directories are mounted directly from the boot media. This setup accomplishes 2 things: first, maximizing the amount of RAM available to you to use and second, any undesirable changes are only written to memory.

Why use SLAX?

· SLAX will easily install to almost any media: USB drives including USB Sticks, Zip, Hard Drive, CDRom, DVD Rom, it can even boot from a network.

· Booting from CD, SLAX can either load the OS core into memory and the remainder will run from CDRom. This is very useful since you may have 650MB of software on the CD you wish to run. Or you can boot totally into RAM, so that the CD drive can be used for other purposes such as playing music.

· Booting from CD, SLAX can save all your changes back to the CD, a Network File System, a network service, or to any media available for mounting.

· Since SLAX is a Linux Live derivative, it runs from memory and writes to Flash media don't happen unless they are your final changes. Since writes are minimized the life of the Flash device is greatly extended.

· SLAX will be extremely friendly for All people.

· SLAX is easy to configure.

· SLAX will boot up and run extraordinarily fast.

· SLAX can be configured to have ALL the applications and resources needed for daily use.

· SLAX just works, no hassles. That way you can spend your time being productive, not crashing or configuring.

· SLAX will breathe new life into old computers.

· SLAX is portable.

· SLAX is easily upgraded and enhanced to suit your need. New software is achieved by loading a package module.

Getting SLAX

Currently, you can obtain SLAX by:

· Download the ISO image via ftp, http, or Bittorrent and burn a CD or install it to a USB drive. To download the SLAX ISO the main site for all the SLAX and its special editions go here.

· If you have an ISO image of a previous version of SLAX, you can download a bsdiff file. This diff file can be applied to the older ISO and bring it up to the current version. This option is usually a good choice for people without a fast Internet connection.

· Purchasing a CD from the Linux Store. This option is a good option for people without a fast Internet connection.

The .iso file is the SLAX image that you burn to CD, the md5sum can be used to verify that the SLAX .iso file that you downloaded was not damaged or corrupted during the download.

Installing and Using SLAX

SLAX was designed to run from a CDRom but that is not the only way it can run. It is also capable of running from a USB Key, a Hard Drive, a Network, and with an Emulator Image.

Burn a CD/DVD

If you have a CDRom burner the preferred way to run SLAX is to burn the SLAX iso to a CD. Preferably you should burn the SLAX media as a multi-session CD which will allow for future saves to the CDRom. Then boot the computer directly off of the CDRom. If you don't have a CDRom burner, then you still have a few other options available to you to ejoy the SLAX experience.

Run SLAX in an Emulator

Probably the quickest way to get running is to download an Emulator such as Qemu and boot straight from the ISO image. Check out the instructions for booting all the methods here . You can also use other emulators such as VMWare or Virtual PC.

Creating a USB stick and Bootloader CDRom

Creating a USB stick is quite straightforward and allows easy saving of settings and documents to it. The only tricky part of a USB stick is that not all Computers have USB boot capability and even if they do, it might still not work with your USB stick. The solution is very easy, a Bootloader CDRom- which can be put even on a BusinessCard CDRom. This of course requires you to have a CDRom burner.

Install to a HardDrive

This is a very straightforward setup but requires you to have a harddrive to install to. The setup is extremely fast and has many benefits.

Boot From a Network

This is the most complex to setup, but can be a great use especially in a smart home/appliance setup or in a Classroom environment.

Appliances and embedded systems

[TBC]

Support

Getting Support

In order to get support, you can get it on the Internet at http://www.slax.org/forum/

By joining the forum, you become an active member of the SLAX community and can get answers from many knowledgeable people or the developers.

Giving Support

Spread the word!!!

If you use and enjoy SLAX tell your friends about it. Burn them a copy of SLAX. Burn a few copies and give them out at a Linux LUG Meeting. You can even place the hyperlink http://slax.linux-live.org/ onto any of your own web pages.

Join the SLAX Forums

By joining the forum, you become an active member of the SLAX community. While there, you can report bugs, contribute suggestions, post fixes and improvements, create modules, or learn to be a SLAX evangelist.

Purchase SLAX logo merchandise

Another way how to support SLAX is by ordering stuff from cafepress store. SLAX creator will earn $10 for each item you buy, so don't be thrifty! ;) Shipping to US costs $4, international shipping is about $15. Delight yourself and support SLAX at the same time! Thank you.

Buy a postcard

SLAX itself is totally free and will always be available for free for everyone. If you enjoy and use SLAX please consider supporting it financially, buy a signed postcard with SLAX logo. Each postcard contains the author's signature, greeting message and the amount you bought it for. The shipping to your address is realized within 5 business days. You can buy a postcard for $500, $200, or $100.

Buy an item with a SLAX logo

Another way how to support SLAX is by ordering stuff from cafepress store. The SLAX Creator will earn $10 for each item you buy, so don't be thrifty! ;) Shipping to US costs $4, international shipping is about $15. Delight yourself and support SLAX at the same time! Thank you.

Purchase CD/USB Distribution

Purchase a Mini-ITX computer with SLAX pre-installed.

Requirements

SLAX is not pretentious, nevertheless it requires some minimal hardware to run properly. It depends on what do you wish to use SLAX for, of course. The most important thing is memory. You need at least 32 MB of RAM to boot SLAX. More detailed description follows:

Medium

either IDE connected CDROM (to boot from the CD)
or USB FlashDisk (to boot from the mass storage device)
or maybe some harddisk (to boot SLAX from the disk)

BIOS

either non-emulation booting enabled (to boot from the CD)
or USB FlashDrive booting enabled (to boot from the mass storage device)

Memory

36 MB to boot slax.
96 MB to run Xwindow with fluxbox
144 MB to run Xwindow with KDE
328 MB to be able to use copy2ram cheatcode

Processor

i486 or better, Pentium or AMD are both OK.

Peripheral devices

some keyboard
PS/2 or USB connected mouse (required for Xwindow only)
serial (COM) mouse is not automatically recognized, but can be used

Harddisk

No harddisk is required

Features

The primary goal of SLAX is to provide a wide collection of useful software while keeping the cd's image small enough to be written to a 185 MB CD-R(W) medium (small 8 cm CD). SLAX boots directly from the CD or USB devices and it provides a full featured Linux operating system.

Modularity

With other Live Linux systems, you're stuck with the type and amount of applications the creator decided to include. With SLAX, you can customize the system to fit your needs, by adding additional software in the form of compressed modules. SLAX itself is very useful without any modules, but you can add a lot of own programs to make it even more suitable for your needs.

Speed

Other Live CDs contain all software in a single compressed file. If you run such a Live OS from CD-ROM, the CD drive has to seek back and forth really frequently, because different files are located on different locations of the CD medium. This makes the system notably slow.

With SLAX, all conformable parts of the filesystem are compressed to a standalone file, which doesn't contain anything else. For example, all files which belongs to Xwindow are packed in xwindow.mo, KOffice related stuff is in koffice.mo, etc. If you work with KOffice, you usually need only files from KOffice and nothing else; and hence all files from that part of the filesystem are separated from the rest of it, your CD drive has to seek only in a 10 MB area. This significantly improves the speed.

Other features

New SLAX 5 is the most inovative and promissing SLAX ever. It switched to 2.6 kernel line. Zisofs compression was replaced by SquashFS, which provides better compression ratio and higher read speed. Ovlfs (which was the most amazing and exciting feature specific only for SLAX) was replaced by unionFS. And finally, slax-installer GUI was created.

SLAX CD contains

- Linux kernel 2.6 offering excellent hardware support
- the newest ALSA sound drivers
- ndiswrapper for loading Windows drivers for WIFI cards
- madwifi drivers for native support for WIFI cards (Multiband Atheros)
- X11 (xorg) Xwindow system, supporting many gfx cards and wheel mice automatically
- KDE 3.4, an excellent desktop software
- webconfig feature allowing you to save your session data to slax' web

Click here for the full list of all installed packages

Cheatcodes for SLAX

Boot parameters (also known as cheatcodes) are used to affect the boot process of SLAX. Some of them are common for all Linuxes, others are specific for SLAX only. You can use them to disable desired kind of hardware detection, to start SLAX from harddisk, to skip the login prompt and start GUI, etc.

Reboot your computer and wait several seconds until nice graphical slax logo appears. (it's there usually for less then 5 seconds only). You will see "boot: " prompt at that time, under the graphical logo (at the bottom of the screen). Start typing one of the following options immediately to be faster than the timeout, or press F1 for brief help.

boot: slax nohotplug

disable almost all hardware autodetection in the case of hangups. Your hardware won't be detected at all, you'll have to use "pcimodules" command after logging into SLAX and you'll have to try to modprobe all needed modules from the list manually

boot: slax nopcmcia

boot: slax noagp

boot: slax acpi=off

skip desired hardware detection in the case of hangups

boot: slax passwd=somepass

boot: slax passwd=ask

set root's password to "somepass", or ask (with =ask) for a new password during the boot, before starting slax (don't worry, the new password won't be shown at the login screen)

boot: slax copy2ram

boot: slax toram

copy all files (all required and optional modules) to RAM. You'll need at least 384MB of RAM to do this and boot SLAX properly. This will slow down the boot phase but it will speed up SLAX! Only the used modules are copied, see load and noload cheatcodes.

boot: slax changes=/dev/device

all changes you made in SLAX are kept in memory until you reboot. But with this boot parameter, you tell SLAX to use different device then memory for storing changes. You can, for example, format your disk partition /dev/hda1 with some Linux filesystem (eg. ext2) and then use changes=/dev/hda1 to store all changes to that disk. This way you won't loose your changes after reboot.

boot: slax ramsize=60%

all changes you made in SLAX are kept in memory. By default, SLAX never uses more than 60% of your RAM to save changes, downloaded files, etc. The rest of memory is never used to store files so it's available for running applications. You may use percentage value (for example ramsize=80%) or size in bytes (eg. ramsize=100M to use max 100MB).

boot: slax load=module

boot: slax load=module[1];module[n]

load optional modules from /optional/ directory on SLAX CD. You can use full module name (module.img) or you can skip the extension. Moreover it's possible to use asterisk (*) as a special character, so for example, using load=wine* will load all modules starting with 'wine', like 'wine-hq.mo', 'wine123.mo', etc.

boot: slax noload=module

boot: slax noload=module[1];module[n]

disable loading of any modules specified. This affects all the modules on SLAX CD, including /base and /modules, so using noload=*kde* will disable loading of all modules with 'kde' in the name. It is useful with copy2ram cheatcode, because any un-used module is not copied to ram.

boot: slax autoexec=...

boot: slax autoexec=startx

boot: slax autoexec=xconf;startx

Execute specified command(s) instead of SLAX login. In this example, skip slax login prompt and automatically start XWindow system. Use semicolon (;) as command separator.

boot: slax debug

enable debug mode (start bash several times during the boot). Hit Ctrl+D to continue booting

boot: slax floppy

enable floppy automounting during startup. This option also causes that settings saved by "configsave" command will be restored from the floppy diskette too.

slax noguest

disable guest user so he can't log in

boot: slax webconfig=passphrase

boot: slax webconfig=ask

enable SLAX webconfig feature, which allows you to save your modifications to SLAX website.
Read more at slax webconfig dedicated webpage

boot: memtest

test RAM with memtest (instead of starting SLAX)