Hello all,

The slax live cd runs really fast! Gosh they do such a great job, even for old hardware, it runs almost faster than a native install on one of my old boxen.

I think it uses squash fs or union fs?

Is there a way to do this / use this file system (if that is what gives slax the speed, I'm not sure) for a native install of slack 11 on an old pentium 2 166mhz?

Sure, but make sure you have plenty of memory. Slax usses the linux-live system (which is a combination of squashfs and unionfs). In a nut shell, it usses an initrd to load a virtual file system into the memory, which is why it is so fast. The init scripts are actually from 10.2 and they are pretty much the same, except for a few changes that disable file system checks at boot. You can get the linux-live scripts from their website which has an initrd tree you can compress.

Quick outline:
1. recompile kernel w/ unionfs and squashfs support
2. create an initrd from the linux-live scripts
3. modify the /etc/rc.d scripts for your slackware install (I used Kompare to see what was different and just merged in the important stuff)
4. modify the lilo.conf to boot from your initrd
5. enjoy

let me know if you run into any snags.


best regards,
...aaron

**edit**
just keep in mind that you are sacrificing speed for stability. But for a non-production server, who cares, have some fun!