Please Keep it Simple - Don't let what happened to Ubuntu Happen To Slax !!!!!!!! I don't care about font shading and crap like that. I cant wait to try the blender moduel tomorrow !!!!! With the hard drive back in I was able to actually navigate to the hard drive directory and view its contents and open and view files - from Slax !!!!!!!!!!! Then when i booted it up the boot stalled searching for /slax file so i rebooted back into ubuntu and draged the slax file onto the Usb. I had to use Unetbooten to make the usb bootable. I tried clicking on that shell script thing that makes the usb bootable but the new Ubuntu I am using (13.04) said it did not recognize the file type. I was not able to make the usb work right away. I treid damb small linux yesterday too and got that working but slax is way better. Simple with NO CLUTTER and runs really fast because things are kept minimal. Your Operating system has everything I have been looking for. Ubuntu recognizes the modem right away and i just click on provider name to connect. Maybe there is a way to grab a package from Ubuntu. Modem Model: Novatel Wireless Qualcomm 3G CDMA (if that means anything to you) - its the standard modem provided by my telephone company. I downloaded it and tried to install it but i'm not a brain surgen. I went to the Novatel website and they sugested Zenwalk Notes. I tried several moduels and activated them.
Only problem now is how to hook up USB Broadband Modem.
I could not believe being able to play flash and mp4 videos ! - and with my harddrive removed and laying on the table !!! - I like how videos and windows go clear when you move them on the screen. I like how the unimportant stuff is simple and the processesing power is saved for the important stuff. I even removed the solid state hard drive to see if Slax would run without it and to my amazement. I got Slax 7.0.8 running on my Thinkpad T42 this evening.
I don't believe this is firmware or chipset related, because iwconfig showed my adapter in 7.0.9, and iwlist scanning returned various networks including my own. When I booted to it, I could configure my network again. I booted back to 6.1.2 (what I usually run on this laptop because I don't have new versions of all my modules) from a different flash drive, downloaded 7.0.5.zip, wiped out the Slax directory on the original flash drive and unzipped and installed 7.0.5 instead. From either /var/log/messges or /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log (forgot which), it looked like the system was briefly associated with the router, then disconnected with a message about "reason=3". From a terminal window, I noticed dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant running, timestamped from when the system booted.
Tried deleting and recreating several times, and various different settings with the same results. After a few seconds, I get a popup saying the network connection failed. I selected mine and set up a connection ("system connection", "enterprise", and my passphrase). Clicking on the network connections icon in the lower right, I could see my network and some of my neighbors. I have a Linksys wireless N router using WPA (or maybe WPA2 not sure how to tell) encryption. It booted up fine (chose X, without changes).
Last night I downloaded the 32bit ZIP version of 7.0.9beta, verified the md5, and unziped and installed it to a flash drive that did not previously contain Slax. I haven't tried the intervening releases. Looks like something broke (at least for my setup) with wifi somewhere between 7.0.5 and 7.0.9beta. My email address is that I'm posting this here btw, I didn't know where else to contact you. Basically the problem is that the USB devices aren't mapped properly to memory without IOMMU and thus all USB devices connected to USB 2.0 ports that depend on IOMMU for remapping are unusable).
This causes problems with people who have motherboards that use IOMMU on 64 bit kernels. If you visit the guide I wrote for installing Funtoo on ZFS, you will notice that I'm using a slightly modified version of SLAX with Native ZFS modules included with a recompiled kernel (Your kernel doesn't support AMD's IOMMU and also has HID compiled as modules rather than built in. I've switched Funtoo's (Improved Gentoo by Daniel Robbins - Gentoo Creator) ZFS Install media from System Rescue CD (I was using my own System Rescue Modules which use AUFS) to SLAX since you also use AUFS and you actually use a pretty vanilla architecture which I very much like. Where can I contact you (email if possible) so I can discuss some development that I'm doing on Funtoo by using SLAX?