Friday, February 29, 2008

Slax is very fast.

I love Puppy Linux because of its speed but Slax is equally fast and it has KDE desktop.

Today I downloaded the latest updated version Slax 6.0.1 which has fixed many bugs in Slax 6.0 which was launched on 13th Feb 2008.

I keep a spare 1 GB partition on my hard disc where I copy the iso and modify /boot/grub/menu.lst file to boot directly from the iso without burning CD.

First I create a "install_cd" directory in /tmp and mount the iso on it by the following commands:
mkdir /tmp/install_cd
mount slax-6.0.1.iso -o loop /tmp/install_cd


Then I copy the contents of the iso on /media/hda8 (hda8 is 1 GB partition formatted in ext3) by following command:
cp -r /tmp/install_cd/* /media/hda8


Then I edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the following line:
title Slax 6.0.7
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=6666 rw changes=/dev/hdd8
initrd /boot/initrd.gz


"changes=/dev/hda8" is the cheatcode for saving configurations since Slax is a Live CD distribution which is loaded into RAM.

After rebooting I could run Slax.

After setting up the Network connection (Slax sets up automatically if it is dhcp but mine is static ip) I went to Slax site and downloaded Firefox module from this page.

After downloading I copied the module to /mnt/hda8/slax/modules so that it is available permanently.

Then I activated the module through Slax Module Manager. It is really very neat.

I have also changed time zone removed many keyboard layouts which are not required added Hindi (IN) Keyboard and installed additional fonts through KDE Control Centre.

It is an excellent distribution and very fast since it runs from RAM.

2 comments:

ZED! said...

u have done a nice job.
can u plz tell me any way to permanently install slax to hard disk
i shall be very thakful to u

Unknown said...

Hello,

I came across your Slax post in the Ubuntu forums when searching for a way to get Slax running on my HD. Though your blog was about how to install the iso, I installed the tar. Where I kept running into problems was following the Slax directions to run the install script after extracting the tar file to the partition. However, I saw that your how-to didn't include running that script, and not using the script is what made the difference! After a number edits in grub, I got Slax up and running. Now it boots to ram, saves the changes and best of all, its quick.

Your how-to is clear, concise and easy to follow. Thank you for the tip!

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