As I’ve said reviewing previous versions, Absolute is one man’s system made publicly available. It may work for you, it may not.

The installer is that of Slackware, without customisation. The Lilo boot-loader failed to install with either configuration I tried. I didn’t try to debug this, but booted from my main Linux’s Grub. As with Slackware, you have to create a user after rebooting, but the system is in GUI mode and has a control centre available. If you aren’t American, you will also have to set the locale and keyboard and then reboot again.

Icewm has been set up with workspaces enabled, but no pager or obvious way of adding one. Other partitions have to be mounted manually. There are few programs installed. Compared with Slackware, you get a usable word-processor (Abiword) but no email client. Media codecs are not installed. The tool for adding or removing software only appears in the menu if you log-in as root. It’s a complete mystery: no indication of what’s installed and what’s available, no classification of packages, and no search facility.

If you want a small Linux with Icewm, get AntiX or Swift; even if Lilo installs, this is a waste of time.