Slax - Pocket Operating System (Part 2)

In my previous post, I talked about Slax - a compact Linux-based operating system designed to run from removable media (such as flash drives, CDs, etc.). In this post, I will describe the process of installing Slax on a medium, as well as the initial setup, which includes Russification, and introduce some modules that are useful in my opinion. Let's get started ...

1) Distribution
Since the previous post, Slax managed to change several versions, today the current one is 6.0.7. We will use it:

Download Slax 6.0.7: for CD | for USB media

There is basically no difference between these options, just the CD version is presented in an iso-image, and USB - in tar, which is easier to unpack. I will consider installing on a USB drive.

2) Installation
So, the distribution (the file slax-6.0.7.tar in our case) we downloaded, go to the installation. Unpack the contents of the archive on a USB-drive using your favorite archiver, 2 directories should appear - ./boot and ./slax.

Now you need to make the media bootable. There are 2 scripts in the ./boot directory - bootinst.bat for installation from Windows and bootinst.sh for Unix-like systems. Run the one that suits you best and follow the instructions in the console (which comes down to pressing any key =).

Now the system from this media may start, but this may not be enough. It is necessary that the BIOS of the computer provides for the initial boot from USB-carriers before booting from the hard drive. This is done in different BIOSes in different ways, in general, Advanced BIOS Features -> Hard Disk Boot Priority (the media should already be inserted, there will be something like this ), if not, then look for the words “Hard Disk Boot Priority” .

3) Russification
In principle, the system is installed and ready to run. If you want to get Russified Slax, copy the directory ./slax/modules my module rus-slax.lzm. In principle, Russification can be done according to the step-by-step instructions [1], but it is simply more convenient to put a module in which the Russian UTF-8 locale, KDE Russification, and working layout switch are already included.

4) Startup
If you have completed all the steps described above, then you can already boot into the system. Reboot the computer with the USB drive installed. If the boot is successful, the Slax boot menu should appear:



Basic boot modes:

Slax Graphics mode (KDE) - normal system boot with KDE
Slax Always Fresh - in this mode the system does not save files and other changes to the media after rebooting
Slax Copy To RAM- here Slax will copy all the data into RAM, which will increase speed and reduce the load on the flash drive, but only if you have a sufficiently large amount of RAM (advise more than 300 MB)

Select one of these items and wait for the system to load. After starting, you should see the default KDE desktop.

If you copied the rus-slax.lzm module during installation, Russification should be completed. Launch the console and run the command

./install-rus

( Advice for beginners: the console runs autocompletion by pressing the Tab button, so you can simply type “./in” and press Tab - the command will be entered completely)

Now end the session (KDE Menu -> End Session -> End Current Session). KDE will reboot, and after that you will get a Russified system with switching EN <-> RU layouts using the Ctrl-Shift keys.

5) A pitfall in Russification
On removable media and sections of the HDD files and directories with Russian names will not be displayed = (. This problem was fought on the official forum, and a completely working solution for UTF-8 was not found (to solve this problem, you need to rebuild the kernel.) Therefore, I included a small crutch in the Russification module, manually remounting the device in the desired encoding. Its syntax is:

ru-mount [vfat | ntfs] [DEVICE]

The first argument is the file system of the device, FAT or NTFS, respectively (use vfat also for flash drives), the second is the name of the required device. You can recognize it after the device is automatically mounted:



i.e. for this flash drive, the device name is / dev / sdb1. Therefore, in order to make Russian files on it visible after that, you need to execute in the console:

ru-mount vfat / dev / sdb1

And open the USB flash drive again in the same section (System -> Storage media). All this, of course, is not as convenient as we would like, but so far nothing can be done = /.

6) PROFIT! Done!

We now have a ready-to-use handheld operating system. You can set up KDE and other environments, as well as install modules that expand the capabilities of such a system. You can install them, as I already wrote, by copying the module file to the ./slax/modules directory on the media, after which the module will be activated every time the system boots. In addition, the module can be included in the system without installation, for the duration of the current session (before rebooting), simply by double-clicking on the file.

Here are some modules that in my opinion can be useful:

ark-plugin-3.5.9.lzm - add-on for the Ark archiver. It includes integration with Konqueror, adding items for archiving and unzipping to the context menu of files, as well as unrar and rar binaries, to support the RAR Krusader 1.90 format



- a convenient two-panel file manager
mozilla-firefox-3.0.1.lzm - the latest version of the browser Mozilla Firefox
GParted - a program for marking the hard drive, along with all the required libraries. It is strange that such a program was not included “in the box” - it is very convenient to partition the disk using the Live distribution (launch: KDE menu -> System -> Gparted) I

also advise you to visit the unofficial repository of Slax modules - there you can also find a lot of useful things.

Links:
1) Installation and Russification of SLAX on USB Flash
2) The official repository of Slax modules
3) Discussion of Russification of Slax in the official forum