SLAX IS A GIFT FROM THE GODS.
USE SLAX USE SLAX USE SLAX.
Okay now that the motive of this post is evident, allow me to explain myself.
Like most lovers of open source, I distro hop a lot. A proclivity towards seeing new desktop environments and user interfaces meant this was inevitable.
Everywhere I go with my laptop, my Ubuntu live USB comes with me. It’s lovely for troubleshooting during those times when my computer gets in one of its moods and refuses to boot. That is until I destroyed the live install while trying to do an upgrade and killed the process because I got too impatient waiting for it to complete (rookie mistake).
Naturally, after 2 years of having the Ubuntu live stick, I felt the need for change. At the time I went with Ubuntu because it had the best persistence support (that I knew of) and I sometimes plug it into other computers. However, it had a few major flaws. It boots really slow and is one thicc operating system, at least by Linux standards.
So I started a search. I had a few requirements.
i. Should boot fast
ii. Have native persistence support
iii. Small footprint
My search led me to a few options — Puppy Linux, Antix Linux, and Slax.
I quickly discarded Antix Linux. The last kernel upgrade was on 3rd October 2022, nearly a year ago. It also seemed like a little bit of work to get running and I didn’t wanna spend too long trying to get it to work.
I did seriously consider Puppy Linux. However, much like Antix Linux it seemed to have too many things with the potential to go wrong, and it did not have native persistence support. It seems that persistence is easy to enable but I had only around an hour and I needed it to work properly quick quick.
So I went to the Slax website as a last shot before giving up and just sleeping. BUT THE UNIVERSE HAD OTHER PLANS. Slax seemingly ticked all my boxes. It had an iso footprint of about 300 MB, had native persistence support, and claimed to boot quickly. I also loved that it was Debian-based (there is also a Slackware version), so I was already familiar with how to use it because I used ParrotOS for about a year as my primary OS.
The next step was to download and flash (or so I thought).
I downloaded the iso file (you have to give your email and the download link is sent to your inbox). I tried to flash it normally using balenaEtcher, but I got a message saying there are no bootable entries. Confusing but whatever, we roll.
We did not in fact roll. The stick wouldn’t boot because….there were no bootable entries.
Decided to read up (ugh). Turns out Slax is more magnificent than I originally thought.
Here’s how to get Slax to boot. Make sure your USB uses the FAT32 filesystem (just format the USB if it doesn’t):
i. Mount the iso file and copy the slax folder to the USB
ii. In the USB go to the folder /slax/boot
iii. Run the file bootinst.sh
THAT’S IT YOU HAVE SLAX BOOTABLE USB WITH PERSISTENCE SUPPORT ENABLED BY DEFAULT.
Then I booted into Slax. The whole affair was so smooth I almost teared up.
Then I remembered it comes with nothing preinstalled, just xTerm, network manager, file manager, and task manager.
This of course is beautiful because I could do whatever I wanted. However, my agenda was to just have something that could run on whatever hardware, whenever I needed it to. I just ended up downloading Chromium and GCC before calling it a day.
My point is that, if you’re looking for a distro for a live USB that just performs a few functions and is very lightweight, Slax is your best friend.
Happy Tinkering :)
