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On 14 Nov 09 at 4:33, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

>> I am in constant lack of time and have to use
>> a bigger distribution - Slax - these days
>
>Is Slax working well for you?  Would you recommend
>it to BL3 users who need something more capable?

Hi Steven,

as far as Slax is concerned:

- It is definetely not a distribution for lower resources PCs The
up-to-date versions contain the latest Slackware kernel. The emphasis
is put, however, on RAM size, rather than on CPU speed.

- But the modular approach makes it possible to run it quite well
on a notebook with 256 MB RAM. With this HW you will not be able to
run all your applications at the same time, though.

- Slax is running very fast, if it can load its modules entirely into
RAM. But you are free to run Linux applications from the hard disk as
well.

- The author of the distribution Tomáš Matějovský is Czech, many other
contributors from several countries provide good localization for
office applications.

- Anybody who has become acqainted with Slackware structure, eg.
through BL, will probably feel at home. There is an easy way to
create modules from Debian packages as well. As the libraries are
quite up-to-date there is a high probability that they will run
right out of the box. If not, you can very easily bundle programs
and create your own modules that are loaded at startup or by a small
script at request.

- Standard GUI for Slax is KDE - I almost never used that. Instead I
installed fluxbox window manager and menu system, that offers
plenty of customization and use of keys.

- I use all my previous DOS applications under dosemu, pmail from BL,
Firefox, OpenOffice and Scanner in Linux. So I have almost no reason
to boot into DOS, these days. Unfortunately the OCR program runs only
under Windows and forces me to keep a W98 copy on this computer.

- You can try Slax without installing from a live CD.

Regards,
Christof

________________________________________________________________

Christof Lange, Evangelical Theological Seminary of Prague
Stoliňská 41a, 193 00 Praha 9 - Horní Počernice, Czech Republic
phone: (+420) 777 893 292 - e-mail: christof.lange AT etspraha.cz