Slax author's Blog

20

October
2012

KDE in 177MB? The answer is Slax

So here it is. Small lightweight KDE, recompiled with as less dependencies as possible.

I'm attending LinuxDays tomorrow (sunday). I'll be interviewed by Petr Krcmar, he should ask (I hope) regarding my progress on Slax. I'm happy I have something to show them :)

I've partially completed my battle with KDE desktop environment. There is a lot of work waiting in the queue, since there are yet no applications except Konsole, however it is ready for wide public testing. I am convinced it was worth the effort. Both 32bit and 64bit versions are ready for testing. The 32bit version is 176MB big, that's really too much, I have yet to remove a lot of stuff.

Anyway, I've configured 4 workspaces. Try to switch between them using your mouse - simply move your mouse pointer to the very top left of the screen. No clicking needed. You should see the effect. Very nice :)

Find below several screenshots.

1) This is how I compiled QT+KDE:

2) KDE desktop default view:

3) The desktop effect I was talking about above

Download:

  • Slax 7.0 KDE preview 32bit: ISO (177MB), TAR (177MB)
  • Slax 7.0 KDE preview 64bit: ISO (183MB), TAR (183MB)
    • User comments
    francois.e 2012-10-20 10:40

    Trying the TAR file by installing it on a fat 32 formatted usb key with:
    [code]:~# mkdir /mnt/sdb1
    :~# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
    :~# cd /mnt/sdb1/slax/boot
    :/mnt/sdb1/slax/boot# ./bootinst.sh
    :/mnt/sdb1/slax/boot#
    [/code]

    Still no message.

    kaiomatico 2012-10-20 10:44

    Awesome job Tomas!

    Troy Banther 2012-10-20 12:52

    Excellent!

    tom 2012-10-20 14:10

    Wonderful project. Keep going :)

    tony 2012-10-20 16:01

    This is looking good!

    Tomas M 2012-10-20 18:35

    @francois.e:
    please make sure you have extlinux installed (syslinux package)

    lachman 2012-10-20 20:31

    amazeballz, tomas. u should be an honorary member of the avengers.

    hopper 2012-10-20 21:28

    Very interesting and good job, Tomas. I like very much the idea to use KDE in as little as possible size. Are there any package managers like slackpkg, slapt-get etc.

    niculinux 2012-10-20 22:32

    hello!

    next slack version will have the new kernel 3.5 or at least support for broadcom wi fi adapters?

    I'm an owner of a x86_64 toshiba laptop (satelite-L655) and I'm havin lots o' trouble to get wi fi working!! >:,( so please would oyu be so king to add that support?

    cheers form italy! And thanks for your hard work!! <3

    LeszekK 2012-10-20 22:36

    Wygl±da ok ale zobaczymy czy da radê u¿ywaæ na co dzieñ. Pozdrawiam, ¿yczê owocnej pracy.

    Victor 2012-10-20 23:32

    The desktop effect seems very similar to "spaces" in Mac OSX. Just watch out for copyrights and stuff...

    Other than that, great work and looking forward to the final version!

    withoutpity 2012-10-21 00:02

    Good work! I 'll test it .

    feckom (at) gmail (dot) com 2012-10-21 01:03

    This release tested on Lenovo G575 (AMD E300, Radeon 6310):
    85.159.104.212/images/lenovo_G575_radeon_6310_Slax7Kde4.jpg

    Sinusoidal 2012-10-21 01:08

    maybe you are wrong :D
    KDE only 31MB, KDEdeps 84MB

    just joke :)

    Wolfi 2012-10-21 04:08

    I have tested it on 7 Computers/Notebooks !!
    My Systems based on AMD E300/350/450 are Foxconn nT 3500,
    HP 625, HP 635 and show the same grizzy screen feckom described in [13], exactly the smae picture.

    My desktop AMD 3800 dual core, with MATROX G650 dual screen
    works fine !!

    Torres 2012-10-21 05:39

    I tried Slax7 on my laptot, network display manager is not avaiable i can't use wifi connection!

    Camacho 2012-10-21 06:26

    I hope you will include the option to convert slackware packages to salix modules!

    Cheers!

    Camacho 2012-10-21 06:29

    Sorry, I wanted to say slax modules!

    nycjv321 2012-10-21 08:10

    I'll test it out on a vm later, once I get a chance I'll test it out on my rig afterwords

    cool!!!

    Wow 2012-10-21 15:59

    It's great Thomas!!

    Joey 2012-10-21 16:04


    OK, I did a lot more playing/testing.

    I mentioned before I saw a link to Wicd.
    My mistake, it was gui_wpa.

    I had no success getting wpa supplicant to work with a pcmcia wifi network adapter. Ifconfig doesn't see the wlan0. Iwconfig sees it OK.

    Anyway, I tried a USB wifi and all is well. wpa suppliment works fine when configured manually. (I had to learn how to set it up).

    After surfing the internet, Konqueror seems sluggish. Even my USB mouse was sluggish. A swap partition I have setup seems to be working fine though. :)

    I'm using a IBM Thinkpad T40. Pentium 1600 m class.
    512+256 MB ram (768 total)

    Take care.



    Jason 2012-10-21 18:10

    Just saw a link to this post on distrowatch!

    miaronyaina 2012-10-21 21:38

    Great job boss! in fact, what I would like to know is when it will be available to customize it with lightweight apps and also libroffice, audacity and so on, and to boot it from usb like before

    zagan 2012-10-21 22:47

    Please add wifi connection.

    kalla 2012-10-21 23:16

    slax is old, this new SLAX 7 is a very welcome thing, but there will be a lot of work making slax what it ones was.. keep up the great work tomas.. I hope people will unite again as in the good old days on the forum..

    Quark1966 2012-10-22 08:02

    Užiteèné vìci budou žít dál s námi, díky!
    Useful things will live with us, great -thanks.

    teoten 2012-10-22 11:58

    Installed in /dev/sdd
    # cd slax/boot/
    # sh bootinst.sh
    . is device /dev/sdd
    Boot installation finished.

    Roxyelsewhere 2012-10-22 14:37

    Why the focus on small filesize at the sacrifice of memory footprint? Storage is dirt cheap and way bigger than you plan to make the final ISO/TAR file.

    Also, where the hell did New Zealand go? It should be on the desktop map. Penguins love it there!

    Tomas M 2012-10-22 19:55

    @Roxyelsewhere: please describe what you mean by memory footprint? The smallest the Slax is, the less memory it uses...

    Gianluca 2012-10-22 20:08

    It works perfectly in qemu/KVM too. Tested on Fedora 17 with virtio network and virtio_scsi disk. Would it be possible to get spice Xorg drivers and agent? How to create an environment to compile them eventually and contribute?

    Aneryan 2012-10-22 21:07

    hi tomas!
    I can't run slax on my notebook......
    the syslinux is error to my aspire one 722!
    can you help me to fix it?

    Tomas M 2012-10-22 21:21

    @Aneryan:
    I can't since you didn't provide sufficient information for me to understand what your error actually is. Please describe your problem better, especially what error you get, what you expect to happen but what happens instead, and so on ... Thank you

    Georg 2012-10-23 02:24

    Hey,
    i would love to try Slax, but it only makes sense for me if there is a way to install some tools. Is it possible to install software from slackware or salix repos in this testing release?

    Georg 2012-10-23 02:30

    and just for interest...could you tell me which blog software you use? :D And is the theme public? It looks great! ;-)

    Roxyelsewhere 2012-10-23 12:57

    I refer to the amount of main memory referenced while running. Your .sb compression method packs small but it is at the expense of cycles and memory no? In any case, you've done an awesome job! Don't forget NZ though.

    tdmsilvino 2012-10-24 00:37

    @Georg ... I believe that the better option should be to get the tools to convert the slackware packages into slax modules. But as Tomas is using Slackware 14 it may be binary compatible with it.

    tibi 2012-10-26 08:07

    Man, make it work on all recent hw and this distro will be a winner.
    So many people are waiting for a distro which is small, fast and all hw is recognised out of the box.
    Great stuff Tomas !!!