Slax Not Slacking

Slax is the brainchild of Tomas Matejicek and is based on Slackware Linux. The current version of Slax is 6.1.1 (as of July 1, 2009), and maintenance releases are offered frequently to squash bugs and add features. Slax is available in 28 languages.

Slax can boot off a USB thumb drive (USB 2.0 provides superior performance) and can be installed on a hard drive. And because Slax is generally very small, it's usually easy to carve out a small partition on an existing Windows system, for example, and copy Slax manually to the new partition (a "frugal install"). Instructions for this dual-boot configuration can be found in the Slax forums.

The initial install of Slax provides a capable suite of desktop applications, including Kopete for instant messaging, K3b for burning media, JuK for music, and KPlayer for playing other media.

Of course, if you need different or additional software, you now know how to build your very own flavor of Linux.