Vlogcanic

Slackware is among the more venerable active distros –the oldest of them all in fact.

While very apprecieated among expert users because of its design simplicity and transparence, Slackware is, in general, reliable and ligh but not too easy to set up and use. Those very characteristics had render it a good starting point for other distros to build up on usability. Absolute Linux is one of them

Customized Slackware.

Absolute Linux is Paul Sherman’s work, a longtime Slackware user who took upon himself the task to modify the old distro in order to improve user friendliness without losing the good features that have made it so long-lived.

Some of the features in Absolute Linux are:

• Lightness. The system requirements are so friendly to old computers that it can run in almost any system, including the older ones.
• Easy installation. Keeps the text based Slackware installer but its modified in order to make the process swift and easy.
• Desktop oriented. The software included in the single Absolute Linux install CD is selected for the desktop and personal user, not the webmaster.
• Reliability.
• 100% Open Source.

Absolute Linux is aimed towards the Windows user who is sick of blue screens, or having half the system’s resources eaten up by security software trying to keep virii and malaware in check. It’s also a good choice for people with a really old computer they want to bring back to life.

The system requirements to run Absolute Linux are:

• A Pentium or later processor.
• 48 to 64 minimum RAM.
• 3 to 4 GB available hard disk space.
• The ability to boot from a CD-ROM.

Version 12.0.6

Is based on Slackware 12, as announced by Paul Sherman today at the Asolute Linux Webpage, it’s free to download and use, and can be downloaded from ibiblio as a .zip archive or an .iso burnable image.

Have a look at the web page. Among other things it features a detailed installation guide with lots of screencaps.

Among the huge amount of new mini distros getting release these days is NimbleX sub100, an ultra portable Linux distro based on Slackware designed to run from a LiveCD, an USB flash drive or a hard disk.

The sub100 thing is about the fact that the total size of the LiveCD barely scratches the 100MB limit despite its inclusion of a full KDE GUI and an option to run on text mode.

NimbleX sub100 promise a very portable, powerful, light and scalable distro. It offers persistence if installed on a USB flash drive and supposedly can cope with any day to day essential task for the average user on any kind of computer.

Is your curiosity burning to get those 100MB and see if it works as well as it says? Yeah, me too.

Pioneer Linux 3.0, a commercial desktop oriented Linux distro based on Kubuntu, released today. As its progenitor, Pioneer can be used as a LiveCD which also installs itself to a hard drive. It aims to ease the transition from Windows to Linux.

The main advantage to Pioneer Linux is in the seven year technical support available to users buying the packaged version –there is also and unsupported free version ready to download.