You’re tired of windows and all its travails and decide to look around for alternative operating systems (read open source!). What flavor of Linux do you chose, if you’ve never used Linux or any other operating system other than windows? We recommend that you try Slax on your USB flash drive or a CD. That way you’ll always have your boring Windows platform to come back to, if you ever chose to (or even if you had to!!)
Before we download Slax, lets take a look at what Slax is all about. Slax is a Linux operating system build based on slackware linux. You can read more about it at slax.org or on the wikipedia page here. Linux as you might have heard is open source and as a result of which comes in a variety of shapes and sizes such as Ubuntu, Redhat, Knoppix and a hundred others built by people like you and me around the world.
BTW, you would find a lot of links on this page considering that this post was not written for geeks alone. We tried the Slax installation on a 4GB USB drive, although it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle running it from a 1GB USB drive either. But as always, bigger is better. Slax also gives you an option to run completely from RAM (*really fast!) although you need to load it from your USB or CD in the first place.
Head to the Slax website to download the slax installation package for the USB or the CD as you may want to. The first roadblock you may face is the installation file itself. Its available either as an ISO or as TAR package. (no! no Zip files or installers!). Most software for the linux operating system itself is packaged as a TAR package. Now a TAR package isn’t too different from an average Zip file and you can extract if you have the latest version of your File extraction software (if you run into trouble extracting it into a folder, use google!) Copy the contents of the folder to the USB drive (In case of the CD image, just burn the ISO onto any CD).
Ensure the first bootable device on your BIOS is set to your USB or CD as required. Now plug in the USB/pop in the CD and reboot. Now if everything goes fine, it should bootup to load Slax. Linux boots up on the default root account. Connect your PC to the network cable and it should pick up the internet connection just as easily. If not, click on the select IP and click ok to associate the IP with the system. Load Konqueror which is the default browser for the KDE shell(which is the desktop environment for linux; similar to what the explorer means to Windows) go and search for all those software which are available ready to use as slax modules here. You just need to download and click on the files to install them, which you would find installed in your start menu.
You can find a few screenshots here. Now come the gripes, I miss using the Wifi on the HP Pavillion laptop and no matter what, slax did not recognise my wifi card. Of course I was too lazy to pick up an NDISWrapper for my Wifi card’s windows drivers. That should make any windows driver work with Linux and the same goes for Slax.