Antix has three versions: a full CD with a choice of Icewm or Fluxbox, a half-full CD with Fluxbox and less software (base), and a CLI installation (core). All show the advantages of basing on Mepis: a fast live CD and probably the easiest installer. There were some downloading problems from the Antix server, and the mirrors haven't got the new version yet.

I naturally expected to have a lot of work to do with core, but I did not expect it to be unable to find eth0! There was not much one could do about that.

I then tried base. The first attempt to download was very slow and failed half-way through. An attempt next day produced a file with the wrong MD5sum; it worked, however, so the checksum given must have been wrong. Base has no video player or word processor, but strangely offers three web-browsers and two editors. There's no graphical package installer, but there is one for metapackages! That failed to install video support (dependency problems) but I installed mplayer with apt-get and was pleased to see it came with all the codecs. The initial set-up of Fluxbox was poor: tiny grey letters on a transparent background is not a good choice for a menu.

The full CD also had a bad (or wrong) checksum, but it still installed. This time the GUI was Icewm: better looking and more legible. The fonts look reasonable; in Base I'd had to turn on subpixel smoothing, but I couldn't find where to do it in the full version. Again there were alternative programs: two each for file manager, word-processor, and video player. Gzine was broken (perhaps that explains the checksum) but Gmplayer was fine. This is the first distro I've seen to include DOSbox by default.

AntiX will certainly work on the smallest computers: with 64MB you can run Dillo and Leafpad, or the Ted wordprocessor. You need to put in a bit of work, but the result is good. Any light-weight distro will require more effort than one with a modern desktop; this one is not much different to Vector Light, and easier than a minimal Slackware install.