Before the other day, I'd copied a live CD to ramdisk and run it from there before, but the disk was INX (INX is not X), a live CD based on Ubuntu that runs entirely in the text mode, no GUI. INX is a terrific product: colorful, educational, light, agile, fun to use, and and often damned useful, but when an OS only uses text, you may not notice how much running from the RAM speeds up an OS. Previously, I'd assumed that the best reason to run a Live CD from the RAM was to free up the CD ROM drive. When I started running a full KDE 3.5.10 Desktop from the RAM, it didn't take me long to notice the awesome boost in speed and performance.
Of course, it makes sense. The computer has the fastest access to the data that's in the RAM. (The "A" in "RAM" stands for "access", right?) So the machine is faster.
As the RAM gets larger, I'm sure more and more live CDs are going to offer the RAMdisk option. Right now both INX and SLAX share the characteristic of being exceptionally small CDs, and that makes them well suited for this kind of application. The "minimal" version of Slax, the basic CD without any modules added, is less than 200 mbs, which fits very nicely on my 1024MB RAM. I now use the minimal SLAX cd to initiate the system, and I keep a collection of the modules on my hard drive to copy to the RAM and activate at will.
I'm using Wine here to run my one and only favorite Windows program, a text to speech program called READ PLEASE. Note that I am also running KTorrent, which is uploading from and downloading to my external MyBook hard drive.
Here's a shot of yakuake, which is sort of like Konsole with superpowers. I just upgraded my hard drive KDE system to 4.2.3, and they still haven't fixed Yakuake yet. I know it's been reported, so I'm sure it'll be taken care of.
saikee
05-14-2009, 08:16 AM
Pud is the smallest distro I come across that has a small bit of GUI and loads up faster than anything else.
Small distros are alright but it seems I always hit a buffer to find something I want but missing from these distros.
Slax does not support Grub or chroot and I have to scratch my head for a text editor if I lose its GUI.
blackbelt_jones
05-14-2009, 01:48 PM
Pud is the smallest distro I come across that has a small bit of GUI and loads up faster than anything else.
Small distros are alright but it seems I always hit a buffer to find something I want but missing from these distros.
Slax does not support Grub or chroot and I have to scratch my head for a text editor if I lose its GUI.
Well, you understand that what I'm talking about here isn't a hard drive installation, it's just a different way to run a live CD. I've always been interested in running Slackware, but unwilling to give up my Debian/Ubuntu system, and the biggest reason for that is because with a Debian-based system, I get easy access to acres of software. Well, my Debian System is still on the hard drive, untouched, although I use the hard drive for file storage. It's just a reboot away.
The software that is available for Slax, with its own system of modules and the usual methods of installing, is pretty impressive. Basically, I bet that anything that you can install onto Slackware, you can install onto Slax... if you have the room on your CD, or on your RAM. Besides the modules, you can get software onto your slax system by any of the usual ways. I just compiled irssi from source for my slax system, because for some reason, the irssi module didn't work. I compiled it from the hard drive, so what I'm hoping is that next time I want irssi for slax, I can just cd to the directory where it's compiled and go straight to the make install command. I've also added software to Slax by using kpackage to install slackware .tgz packages. (I had to install the module for KDEadmin.) I think this probably means that you can install anything that's on the Slackware DVD onto a RAM-based Slax system. I haven't run out of room yet. Right now I've got emacs, amarok, opera, wine, irssi, flock, the latest version of firefox and flashplayer downloaded from their respective websites, abiword, mplayer (with added codecs) dolphin, and ktorrent. tthis is all software that I have added. Oh, and I've also got xfce4 installed on this system, so I can change desktops if I like. That's with a gigabyte of RAM on this machine.
As a long term solution, it may not be for everyone. It's a lot of extra work scrapping all your configuration data with each reboot. I spend about fifteen to twenty minutes setting up after booting Slax and copying to the RAM I bet that I'll be able to cut that way down if I learn how to save my configuration data. It would be great if I could run fluxbox on Slax. I'd just copy my files to ~/.fluxbox and I'd be good to go. Fluxbox is installed on every Slax system by default, but it keeps freezing up on me. Maybe I should try compiling fluxbox myself. but anyone with a half a gig or more of RAM who is inclined to experiment ought to give it a go. Overall, it's simply the fastest thing I've ever seen. I could see that within the first two minutes. For some people, it might be a great solution to a short term situation where you need extra performance. To me, it's Slackware, without giving up Debian, or messing with a dual boot.
I have started using a minimal CD (no modules added before download) to boot and install Slax, and keeping a folder stuffed with software on my hard drive to add later. If you were in my position, you might want to keep a module for a text editor on your hard drive for emergencies. emacs, vim, and nano are all available.The command for activating a module from a running slax system is "activate", as in
activate ktorrent-2.2.8-i486-1.lzm (as root)
JohnT
05-14-2009, 05:46 PM
You might want to look at puppylinux's method of saving config files.
blackbelt_jones
05-14-2009, 09:19 PM
You might want to look at puppylinux's method of saving config files.
Well, maybe, but compiling a new version of fluxbox worked like a charm, and in my book, fluxbox makes importing and exporting configuration files very simple and straightforward! I compiled fluxbox from a folder in the hard drive, and that worked out exactly as I'd hoped. When setting up a new Slax system, all I had to do was use the command "make install" as root from the directory where fluxbox had been compiled. No need to compile all over again everytime I want to use Slax with Fluxbox.
blackbelt_jones
05-15-2009, 10:35 AM
Now, to get back to the basics that I may have skipped over at the beginning, running Slax, whether from the RAM or from the CD, like most Slackware-based live CDs that I've tried, has a more traditional user management system than the more popular Debian based live CDs like Knoppix and Sidux. By "traditional", I mean more like an installed system, with a Root User with a password, and an option to create normal users. This means that you can make a live CD run just like an installed system in terms of user accounts.
Slax logs on by default as the root user, with the password "toor". If you want to run securely for an extended period, you should create a normal user with the command
# adduser
and chage the root password with the command:
# passwd root
Then you should logout (end session) but in order to change sessions with Slax, you're going to need to activate or to have preinstalled the KDM fix module. (http://www.slax.org/modules.php?action=detail&id=216) Log back in as the normal user you just created, and you've got a live CD system (whether running from the RAM or the CD doesn't matter) with the security advatages of a hard drive install. And it's real Slackware.
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