Fun with SLAX

OK, I've been dropping off enough copies of Knoppix to earn my Geek Scout badge for the last year. Since I'm running Debian this isn't too surprising; it's a hardcore live demo of Debian Sarge, a quick way to get Linux under your fingernails without commitments.

For a change I thought I'd try the latest SLAX live miniCD image. Slax 5.0.6 is a lot more impressive than the last SLAX distro I checked, 4.2.0. Firstly, the 5.x.y releases are based off the 2.6 kernel, so autoconfiguring your sound is easier. I was impressed to see a good selection of basic Internet apps on it... except the newsreader.

Thunderbird's a great email program. It replaced Eudora on my work desktop months ago and I've never looked back. As a newsgroup reader, it's pretty unimpressive. I never tested it much at work because my employer disabled NNTP access a few years ago so as to keep the servers from melting. At home, it's a different story. Mac users are largely stuck with MT-NewsWatcher, which is adequate but not stupendous and not updated often. Windows users are familiar with a collection of shareware and commercial newsreaders, Forte FreeAgent being a popular choice.

Where Thunderbird lags as a newsreader, ironically, is the concept "modern standards." Binaries newsgroups in the late 80s relied on something called UUencoding for attaching binaries to posts, due to the fact that like email, this method of communication was typically a 7-bit medium attempting to carry 8-bit data. One of its better features is the ability to spread one file out across successive posts. Unfortunately, UUencode lacks native file compression. Enter yEnc. Newsreaders started handling yEnc encoding as early as the mid90s, but the Mozilla group seems to have ignored it as a standard. Moreover, Mozilla's newsreaders can't handle multipart binaries.

Enter Pan. Pan is an open source newsreader whose best features are familiar to users of FreeAgent. Because it's OSS, it's available for most Linux distros. It's not in SLAX, though, and a "carry all your tools in your pocket" CD is incomplete without it.

Before this morning, I never customized a liveCD. Knoppix has a method, but it's unpleasant on resources and speed. SLAX, on the other hand, is designed to be modular and comes with both Windows and Linux tools for rebuilding new ISO images once you've tweaked it.

Pan isn't available as a SLAX 5 module (supposedly SLAX 4 modules are incompatible). However, the SLAX CD comes with a command line utility for converting Slackware .tgz installation files into SLAX .mo modules. The Pan package was converted within a minute, added live to the CD and...

Poop. Turns out it has a GNOME library dependency (gnet). Well, no prob with "Bob," I got the library .tgz, ran it through the same converter, and added it live to the CD, entered pan at a shell prompt and BAM! Pan was up and running. The two .mo files were moved to my PC's hard drive, I restarted the PC, and followed the SLAX instructions for rebuilding the SLAX ISO using the modules. Instead of reburning it I tried to put it through Bochs for testing.

Bochs suchs. I'd been told before to get QEMU and I wasn't disappointed. Far fewer configuration options required, network emulation automatic, and lo and behold, SLAX 5.0.6 with Pan installed. Only downside was, it wasn't part of the KDE Internet submenu. I added Pan to the submenu and the icon bar, then opened a shell and executed a one-line command to export all updates and changes to another .mo module, saved it to the HD, and rebuilt the image once more. (The ISO compress/build process itself is less than five minutes.)

This time, the image booted with Pan in the tray and on the menu. For kicks I added it to the equivalent menus in Fluxbox and cooked the image a third time, burning it to a CD/RW I keep around for this kind of last testing.

Getting a pocket-sized liveCD with basic tools is cool. Getting to customize it without recompiling a kernel is sweet. SLAX takes it one step farther by maintaining a webserver you can log into to save your state to, in case you aren't able to burn customized copies. This pimpslaps Windows "profiles" into last week, folks.