ZipSlack
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ZipSlack is a specially compiled release of the Slackware Linux distribution which is designed to be lightweight and portable. It is distributed in a ZIP archive along with the Slackware release. Installing ZipSlack is generally as easy as obtaining the archive and unzipping it to the place where you want it installed, which means that ZipSlack does not require you to go through the process of reconfiguring your existing partitions to try or install it.
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[edit] Details
ZipSlack uses the “UMSDOS” filesystem under Linux, which means that it actually runs on top of the FAT filesystem, originally widely used by Microsoft operating systems, and commonly found today on various types of removable media such as ZIP disks, SuperDisks, USB flash drives, and Secure Digital cards.
It is unknown whether future releases of ZipSlack will continue to do this after Slackware moves to Linux version 2.6, as support for UMSDOS has been removed from the official Linux kernel sources after some discussion regarding it on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.
ZipSlack is quite lightweight, not including a great deal of the software considered “normal” on an installation of a Linux based distribution today. For example, in ZipSlack, the X Window System is not present, nor are any GUI based web browsers. However, since ZipSlack is essentially just a mini-installation of Slackware, you can use the Slackware package management system to install whatever packages you may need.
[edit] Minimum Requirements
As downloaded, ZipSlack requires approximately 100 megabytes of disk space and an Intel 80386 or compatible CPU. ZipSlack can be run with as little as four mebibytes of memory, with an add-on supplied by Slackware[1]. However, at least eight mebibytes, and preferably 16, should be used; possibly more if the X Window System or other GUI software is going to be used with it.
[edit] Caveats
While this generally should not be much of a problem anymore, the archive which houses the ZipSlack distribution can not be decompressed with a 16-bit application such as the older versions of PKZIP for DOS.[2] Instead, software such as a 32-bit DOS version of Info-ZIP (compiled with a DOS extender), Info-ZIP on Linux, or WinZip, 7-Zip, or another similarly capable utility on Microsoft Windows should be used.
[edit] Other Similar Distributions
There are other distributions of Linux which are made for portability. Some of them include SLAX, Puppy Linux, and DSL.
[edit] See also
- MiniLinux - More information about “mini” Linux distributions.
