Absolute Linux 13.1.2
Posted 07-16-2010 at 11:22 PM by masinick
I installed Absolute Linux 13.1.2 on Friday evening and I've been using it for a few hours now. It features a nicely customized IceWM lightweight window manager, a slimmed down set of Slackware packages. By default, in place of the usual Firefox, you see the Google Chromium Web browser, which is starting to mature nicely. You can block ads now, and you can add a lot of convenience applications.
Slackware was once very much a command line based Linux distribution, very much in the UNIX tradition. In the nineties when it was first created, Slackware had the look and feel of a UNIX workstation on much lighter PC hardware.
Today, Absolute Linux makes the installation process much easier. It does sacrifice a bit of the extreme flexibility and learning you acquire with Slackware, but in return, you get a system that you can install in minutes, configure it in a few more minutes, and then enjoy a really fast system on current vintage hardware or a tolerable system on really old hardware that won't even work with some other heavier operating system and application environments.
Absolute Linux is not my every day system, but it is an excellent test system for me, and it is quite handy when I am doing a lot of forum and blog writing or visiting social networking sites. It is perfect for that kind of thing, and with the handy extensions you can apply to Google Chromium these days, it's all right at your fingertips, something even the old Slackware could not do then, but of course can do today as well.
If you've never heard of Absolute Linux or you have never tried it, perhaps this would be a useful time to take a look. The time needed to download and install it is nominal and the performance and capability of the software are quite good.
Slackware was once very much a command line based Linux distribution, very much in the UNIX tradition. In the nineties when it was first created, Slackware had the look and feel of a UNIX workstation on much lighter PC hardware.
Today, Absolute Linux makes the installation process much easier. It does sacrifice a bit of the extreme flexibility and learning you acquire with Slackware, but in return, you get a system that you can install in minutes, configure it in a few more minutes, and then enjoy a really fast system on current vintage hardware or a tolerable system on really old hardware that won't even work with some other heavier operating system and application environments.
Absolute Linux is not my every day system, but it is an excellent test system for me, and it is quite handy when I am doing a lot of forum and blog writing or visiting social networking sites. It is perfect for that kind of thing, and with the handy extensions you can apply to Google Chromium these days, it's all right at your fingertips, something even the old Slackware could not do then, but of course can do today as well.
If you've never heard of Absolute Linux or you have never tried it, perhaps this would be a useful time to take a look. The time needed to download and install it is nominal and the performance and capability of the software are quite good.
