SLAX Popcorn Edition

SLAX Popcorn Edition is a pocket operating system which fits on USB Flash Drives of just 128MB. It is based on the XFce desktop and includes software like Mozilla Firefox, beep-XMMS, Gaim, AbiWord and many more.

For those of you who don't know yet what Slax is, it is a small bootable CD containing the Linux operating system, based on the Slackware distribution. SLAX runs Linux directly from the CD (or USB drive) without installing itself to the hard drive.

The SLAX Project:

The primary goal of SLAX is to provide a wide collection of useful software while keeping the CD image small enough to be written to a 185 MB CD-R/RW (small 8 cm disc). SLAX boots directly from the CD or USB devices and it provides a full featured Linux operating system.

Tomas Matejicek is the man behind the SLAX project and the work he's doing for the open source community is much appreciated by many people everyday.

With other Live Linux systems, you're stuck with the type and amount of applications the creator decided to include. With SLAX, you can customize the system to fit your needs, by adding additional software in the form of compressed modules. SLAX itself is very useful without any modules, but you can add a lot of own programs to make it even more suitable for your needs.

Other Live CDs contain all software in a single compressed file. If you run such a Live OS from CD-ROM, the CD drive has to seek back and forth really frequently, because different files are located on different locations of the CD media. This makes the system notably slow.

With SLAX, all conformable parts of the filesystem are compressed to a standalone file, which doesn't contain anything else. For example, all files which belong to Xwindow are packed in xwindow.mo, KOffice related stuff is in koffice.mo, etc. If you work with KOffice, you usually need only files from KOffice and nothing else; and hence all files from that part of the filesystem are separated from the rest of it, your CD drive has to seek only in a 10 MB area. This significantly improves the speed.

What is so special about SLAX Popcorn Edition?

￭ Xfce ￭ MPlayer ￭ Beep Media Player ￭ Firefox ￭ Gaim ￭ Abiword ￭ Xfce Calendar ￭ and the usual Xfce utilities.

Please enjoy some screenshots below: