Slax is a minimalist desktop live CD based on Slackware Linux. It boots into a simple desktop using the Fluxbox window manager which offers a small collection of applications, including the Chromium web browser, a text editor and a calculator. Prior to version 9.x, Slax was a Slackware-based live CD featuring the KDE desktop and a wide collection of pre-installed software for daily use together with useful recovery tools for system administrators. After releasing version 11.x with a Debian base, the project returned to a Slackware base for version 15.0.0.
To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.
Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.
Colour scheme:green text = latest stable version, red text = development or beta version. The function determining beta versions is not 100% reliable due to a wide variety of versioning schemes.
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The Debian version of Slax used to be one of my favorite distros. In my opinion it was one of the easiest distos to make a live usb with persistence. It was a reasonably compact distro but not lacking in features like Tinycore. My only real complaint is I don't think its wise to auto-login to root and personally would rather it not auto-mount usbs and cds, although it's easy enough to umount something when needed. One of the reason's I liked it so much is it was incredibly fast to install (no questions asked) or the option to run a cd entirely in RAM. It is still usable and can be upgraded, despite the last update being from 2 years ago, although it's not the same as it used to be when it was maintained, since the cd used to be up to date, so you could just install what you wanted without too manyu updates. I look forward to the next version, i f there will be one.
The website to download it already kicks off with a poor impression, attempting to get your email address (but there is a tiny link to skip that).
I was always a fan of the aesthetic of this distro but after having finally using it, I'm failing to see the point of it.
There are much more well-featured and similar size portable distros out there, this one really doesn't do a whole lot of anything right out of the box, nor is it extensible in any way really either. They mention modules yet there's no way to prebuild an image that has these present? And why would you manually try to get more modules afterwards, every time?
Very out of date too, no recent blog updates in a year either but it looks like the only maintainer has their time occupied by another child.
so far good ! i downloaded the slackware version a while back [probably used etcher or some such to make it bootable] but gave up in favor of Debian. I have always had problems getting persistence to work on either debian or ubuntu and with this distribution it attempts a better method, /usr/bin/savechanges can be run at anytime, but when i first booted i followed their documentation more precisely adding to boot command line perchsize=16G (half of my usb), and perchdir=resume.
Extracting the files from the archive, and running their bootinst.sh [installing syslinux] rather than using some tool to create the bootable usb from an iso is unusual but works !. They provide the program savechanges as well which seems to work better than expecting shutdown to save the changes [which are probably in one or several of the loop files].
here is a list of packages i installed to get the wifi networks to appear in the starup->network Manager (right clicking on desktop) [which is fluxbox].
4 install iw 2025-09-14 02:55:37 UTC 1 root (0)
5 install wireless-regdb 2025-09-14 02:56:00 UTC 1 root (0)
6 install network-manager 2025-09-14 03:02:18 UTC 14 root (0)
7 install network-manager-gnome 2025-09-14 03:08:11 UTC 11 root (0)