Slackware-based Live CDs: SLAX and STUX [LWN.net]

February 11, 2004

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

As live CDs go, there is plenty to choose from, especially if you are a Debian user, and to a lesser extent, a Red Hat or Mandrake user. But what if your expertise lies in Slackware? Are there any Slackware-based live CDs to carry around and use in case of emergency? Well, the Slackware installation CD itself does serve as a bootable live CD, with basic rescue functions in runlevel 1, but that's not much fun. Instead, Slackware users could consider either SLAX or STUX as a full-featured live CD based on the original work of Patrick Volkerding's famous distribution.

SLAX-Live CD (formerly Slackware-Live and only recently renamed to SLAX, due to trademark issues over the name "Slackware") is the better known product of the two. It is developed by Tomas Matejicek in the Czech Republic. After perusing the project's web site and the final product, it becomes obvious that a lot of design effort has been expended to create an aesthetically pleasing distribution. Similarly, much thought has also gone into the selection of included applications, especially since the downloadable ISO image is less than 200MB in size. This makes SLAX useful as a multimedia distribution - on a computer with as little as 256MB of RAM, the entire CD content can be loaded into memory, freeing the CD- or DVD-ROM drive to play media disks with MPlayer (the libdvdcss library is included).

Choosing to copy SLAX into RAM is only one of the several available options at boot time. Others include loading the IDE CD-ROM drive with SCSI emulation enabled (for burning CDs), disabling probing for USB or other hotpluggable devices and passing of other hardware and screen related parameters to the kernel. The system then proceeds with a normal boot-up and hardware auto-detection routine. As a proper Slackware-based system, it boots into command line mode and awaits the user to log in. Once done, the user has a choice to run one of the two graphical user interfaces: command "gui" will start up a full KDE session (the latest version of SLAX comes with beta2 of KDE 3.2), while typing "guifast" will launch Fluxbox, suitable for machines with limited processing power.

Given the small size of the CD, the number of included applications is on the low side, although the most common KDE applications, as well as KOffice, are all present. Konqueror is the only available graphical web browser, while Kopete is the default instant messenger. You won't find OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Emacs or Gimp on the CD. One of the more interesting aspects of SLAX is that the author provides instructions and a set of scripts to build a custom CD; these can be applied to any Linux distribution, not just Slackware. The project's web-based user forum is very active, making it the best place to seek help.

In contrast to SLAX, STUX GNU/Linux is a fairly new project, created by Giacomo Picconi in Italy. There are two live CDs on offer. The first one (called "STUX") is a full-featured 650MB CD with a complete KDE (including all of the internationalization files), GNOME, WindowMaker, OpenOffice and other major application one would expect to find in a Linux distribution. The second product (called "DINO-STUX") is a small CD reduced to 255MB of data with KDE, KOffice, Mozilla, Samba and Xine, but not much else beyond the base system. Like SLAX, the STUX project also provides tools for building a custom bootable CD image from an existing Linux installation.

An interesting point of STUX is the availability of additional packages directly from the distribution's web site. These can be downloaded from within STUX, installed on a hard disk partition and executed from the main menu. The current list of packages is not very long yet, but it should be of interest to gamers as it includes the NVIDIA driver, WINE and a number of free games or playable game demos: Quake I - III, Unreal Tournament, Doom, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The list of available packages is updated frequently and the author welcomes suggestions for package inclusion.

While talking about Slackware-based live CDs, there are two other related projects worth mentioning. The first is LinuxNetwosix, a specialist live CD designed for system recovery, forensic analysis, penetration tests and other security-related tasks. Created by a 17-year old Italian programmer Vincenzo Ciaglia, LinuxNetwosix 1.0, with kernel 2.6.1 was released and provided for free download last month. The second project is a Slackware-based live USB, called RUNT (an acronym for ResNet USB Network Tester) and designed to run from a 128MB USB pen drive. Developed by the North Carolina State University, RUNT is a complete Slackware Linux on a USB, capable of autoconfiguring networks via DHCP. A boot floppy is required to load the USB kernel modules before loading the rest of the system from the USB pen drive.

To sum up: with its good looks, relative maturity and an active user community, SLAX is probably the most likely candidate for being that perfect Slackware-based live CD to carry around in a wallet. It even fits on one of those 80mm mini CDs.

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