Slax, like Knoppix, Puppy, and Saluki, is designed to be run from a USB stick or CD. In fact, there’s no installer: if you want it on a hard disk, it’s up to you to get it there. There are different images for each supported language, each coming as an iso file for a CD or a zip file for USB. The latter includes software to make it bootable. If you use a USB stick, configuration and extra software can be stored on it. They recommend a minimum of 256MB of RAM. It can be loaded to RAM when booting, in which case 768MB would be desirable. This review is actually of 7.0.8, but it did’t seem worthwhile to make a new entry for a minor version.

The desktop is a skilfully de-bloated KDE, which runs well on older computers. The software supplied included Firefox, Pidgin, Smplayer, Juk, Kolourpaint, dial-up internet support, and a few games. Media codecs and the Flash plug-in were also included. All ran from the CLI without serious warnings. Extra software is installed in a rather unusual way. You download a module from the website, click on that in your file manager, and the program is installed. The repository is small but adequate, including things like LibreOffice, VLC, and Homebank. I had one strange problem. Everything worked when I copied to RAM, but the wrong video driver was selected if I tried to run from the disk!

Knoppix, Puppy, and Saluki offer more software; Knoppix needs more RAM than Slax and Puppy less; Slax is multilingual, Puppy largely English-language; Slax uses KDE, Puppy has JWM, Saluki has Xfce, and Knoppix defaults to LXDE. If you want a portable Linux, all four are worth trying.