I've noticed in the forums that usually when someone suggests slackware to a newbie (like myself) they recommend playing with slax first. I am doing that at the moment and it's actually a pretty clean little experience so far, especially given that it's running off a USB stick. I was just wondering how close slackware 13 for instance would be to slax 6.2.1. I've switched to linux for the last few months to learn something new and from what I understand Slackware seems to be a "learn it or leave it" kind of distro compared to the ubuntu and mandriva I normally use. Is it truely the ordeal to get going that it's sometimes made out to be or more to the point is there a lot to getting a basic kde/firefox/openoffice/amarok/samba system up and running?

SLAX is just a live CD version of Slackware with additional software added (both on the disc, and through additional SLAX-specific modules).

There is no functional difference between the two operating systems, but SLAX is designed to be immediately useful out of the box, as it is a temporary-use OS that people just want to boot up to a desktop and run.

Slackware on the other hand is designed for permanent installation on a variety of different hardware platforms and for a variety of different reasons (servers, desktop, cluster nodes, etc, etc).

The core OS is the same, but they are pre-configured to do different things. Actually, I should rephrase that. SLAX is pre-configured to be an instant-on desktop OS, while Slackware is not pre-configured to do much of anything at all except run reliably. Anything you want to do with Slackware past that point is up to you and on your own terms.

That said, modern versions of Slackware are employing considerably more "friendly" software packages and daemons than in earlier releases, so the learning curve is not really as steep as it once was.

The newest version of Slackware is a delight to run. Slackware 13.0 now auto-detects your video card and sets-up your screen settings for you with little or no effort required for most hardware. I recommend that you do read the book and familiarize yourself with the installation routine. The text-based ncurses installation routine can be a bit daunting at first for some newcomers to Slackware. In other words preparation is the key to a successful first time Slackware installation. The effort is worth it.

http://www.slackbook.org/

Thanks.

This is misleading:
"There is no functional difference between the two operating systems"
There are lots of differences -even though some of them are transparent to the user they are fundamental. LiveCD's use the initrd extensively in ways which a hard-drive instalation does not. And there are, no doubt, other differences which may not be obvious -mostly having to do with the init scripts.

Slax is an AWESOME little distro. I haven't got much use for a live distro right now, but when I did, I remember it being WAY faster than the other live distros I tried at the time. Props to Slax!

Slackware will require a lot more work to get going and customize to your needs. The pay off is that it will be rock solid. Beware KDE4 however, as many people are not liking it very much at all.

If you actually see the contents of /var/log/packages in Slax, you will notice that it includes a very minor set of packages compared to Slackware.
The module structure/linux-live scripts is also something Slax has.
Speaking of modification to the Slackware stuff, it has a lot of daemons in rc.d disabled and some changed scripts.

The question is relative to whom you put it to.
If you install a system and reboot ending up at a black screen with a blinking cursor and don't know what to do from there, it can be an ordeal.
If on the other hand you do know what to do, it's not bad at all.
If you install 12.2 you can expect to set up a normal user with the proper privileges, edit intittab if you wish to boot to a gui, edit xorg.conf for nvidia as well as the scroll wheel on your mouse, learn to install extra packages from slackbuilds as well as wherever else you wish to install them from and learn to update your system to keep things up to date and secure.
There is no synaptic like one would find in other distro's but there is gslapt and slaptget which when installed vaguely resembles synaptic.
There is also a new app called SlackPackage which allows one to do installs in a graphic manner.
If you install 13 you can expect to still configure user with privileges and edit inittab along with learning the install procedures as well as keeping things up to date the Slack way.
All the above sounds intimidating to someone new to Linux.
It can be but there are those willing to take the time to help and answer questions as well as plenty of clear instructions, just be careful where you get them from.
This forum and the handbook are the only two places I would personally recommend.
I made a "cheat sheet" for myself on setting up 12.2 and posted it here somewhere and still have it.
Slax if I remember correctly is preconfigured for most of the above and in my way of thinking wouldn't be a fair comparison as to what it would take to truly run Slack itself.
For me Slax was harder to install the packages to that I needed.
It all depends on ones interests, needs and fortitude to learn to take control of their own system.
The pro to running Slack is that you the end user make all decisions.
The things that are installed on a fresh install are the packages needed to run what you elected to install.
After that, it's entirely up to you which direction to go.
Slack for me is the most stable distro I have ever ran bar none.
By stable I mean everything I install works out of the box.
No slam at Debian, but I couldn't say that even about them.
I made this comment on another forum and I think it holds true,, the people who decide to run Linux as their primary operating system are a special breed.
Those who elect to run a Linux distro such as Slack, Gentoo, Arch or any other that demands they learn the cli are even more so.

Actually everything has been said, I just like to summarise it for the OP:

When installed to a hard disk, SLAX has pretty much the same system architecture and provides the same tools as slackware, to the point, that you can install packages in the original Slackware package format. With a tool named slackpkg it should be possible to turn a SLAX installation on a hard disk into a Slackware Linux easily (but I haven't tried it myself!).

On the other hand, SLAX comes usually with a more "modern" kernel compiled with different settings than Slackware and detects modern hardware a little more reliably. It's probably the most useful derivative of Slackware.

One use case for SLAX for me is this: I have an USB stick with two partitions. The first one is an ext3 filesystem with SLAX installed, the second one is a FAT-32 partition that I encryted with Truecrypt. Of course, I have put the Truecrypt module onto the system partition, and now I can carry my confidential data with me, without being afraid, that I might not be able to access them, just because the next PC I could get hold of has no Truecrypt installed. This way, I can access my data on just about any PC that can boot from an USB stick.

gargamel

The answer is 1.5 days with XDMCP and a grub boot added to the original requirements.

Just one small gripe here about Slax...

When you boot into Slackware, the initialization script can check your partition for filesystem errors. But if you have Slax installed frugally to your hard-drive, then your Slax partition will NEVER EVER get checked for errors. The last time I ran e2fsck on my slax-partition, it faithfully reported that it had been mounted 106 times since the last e2fsck.

The reason here is because Slax's root-filesystem is of type AUFS, a virtual filesystem that must be mounted first by the initrd. In the slax-initrd, the partition containing your modules+changes gets mounted as rw. And these modules will then comprise the branches that aufs stacks together, to make up your root-filesystem. Such that by the time your newly auf-ed root-filesystem finally inits, your slax-partition is already mounted as rw, and no e2fsck check is possible. And since your slax-partition appears in neither fstab nor mtab by default, no e2fsck check is attempted in any case.

A possible solution here would be for the slax-initrd to e2fsck the slax-partition before mounting it. But that would require having a busybox that actually supports e2fsck...

Elsewise, I quite like Slax.

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