Slax : our Pocket Operating System

Slax is a modern, small and fast Linux operating system with a modular approach and outstanding design. Despite its small size, Slax provides a wide collection of pre-installed software for daily use, including a well organized graphical user interface and useful recovery tools for system administrators.
The modular approach gives you the ability to include any other software in Slax easily. If you’re missing your favourite text editor, networking tool or game, simply download a module with the software and copy it to Slax, no need to install, no need to configure.
If you are a beginner or you’re just too busy to make it yourself, follow a few steps to build your own customized operating system by using web-based interface here.

1. Slax 6 is small

Slax has participated in development of so called sqlzma patches; the code implements 7-zip compression (LZMA) into squashfs filesystem. Moreover, squashfs evolved by the time and it now supports bigger block sizes then before. The combination of these two enhancements makes Slax one of the best-compressed operating systems in the history.
All Slax modules are much smaller then any other compressed packages available nowadays for all other Linux distributions, while the speed of decompression remains usually faster then reading the full data from disk.

2. Slax 6 is portable
Thanks to the AUFS filesystem, the read-only part of Slax (system data and modules) is overlayed by a writable filesystem. You can modify all areas of the filesystem in Slax without any restrictions. Your changes to the read-only parts are transparently copied to the writable branch and stored in memory or in a persistent directory on your disk or even flash drive. Slax is designed to autodetect whether it runs from a writable media, and if that is detected, Slax will save all your changes there automatically.
In Slax, you are not limited to just a persistent home directory – the whole root filesystem is fully writable, so we talk about ‘persistent changes’ (rather then about ‘persistent home’, known from other live distributions). You can modify /bin/bash the same way like ~/kderc.
 
3. Slax 6 is feature rich

XWindow system, KDE desktop with K-Office, Internet browsing, e-Mail, Instant messaging, CD/DVD burning and ripping, Audio and Video encoding, Multimedia players, all and even more is included in Slax.
 
4. Slax 6 is multilingual

There are official releases of Slax in 28 different languages, including Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

From the SLAX website : http://slax.org