Virtual Appliance Marketplace

Average user Rating:37 Ratings (Login to rate)


SLAX Appliance aims to provide fully functional OS running from CD-ROM where all the filesystem changes are saved to HardDisk

Features

Collegiate:
No

One-line Description:
SLAX Appliance aims to provide fully functional OS running from CD-ROM where all the filesystem changes are saved to HardDisk

Filename:
slax.zip

Size Compressed:
200

Allocated Memory:
192

Username:
root

Password:
toor

VMware Tools Installed?:
Yes

Operating System:
SLAX Linux 5.1.6

Applications:
Core Linux utils,
KDE desktop

Description:
SLAX Virtual Appliance
About:
SLAX is small, fast and beautiful Linux operating system with modular approach and eye candy desktop interface. Normally SLAX runs directly from the CD-ROM without installing, allowing read-only CD-ROM filesystem to behave as a writable one, saving all changes to memory (using cow - copy on write).
SLAX Virtual Appliance aims to provide fully functional Linux desktop where the operating system is running from CD-ROM and all the filesystem changes are saved to the Virtual harddisk, thus all the modifications and configurations are preserved between reboots. There is no need to mess harddisk up with any OS installation.
Moreover, the modular approach allows users to download modules with additional software (e.g. from SLAX website, www.slax.org) and insert them into the live filesystem on the fly. What does this mean? Regular Linux distributions use packaging systems where the package must be uncompressed and copied to appropriate directories. But SLAX works differently. The module (package) is simply "used" and it behaves as installed, but de facto all the data remain in the original module all the time. This is done thanks to squashfs (squash filesystem, used for module compression) and unionfs (unification filesystem, used for unioning module data with the root tree).
When new version of SLAX operating system is available, user just download it and replace the old ISO version by the new one. This only changes the underlying system itself but doesn't affect any user's data stored on virtual harddisk, so the upgrade of operating system preserves all the modified files and newly installed applications.
How was it built:
It's very simple, create filesystem on some virtual partition and boot SLAX CD-ROM with "changes=/dev/sda1 boot parameter" to store all filesystem changes to the harddisk instead of memory. Additionally add vmware tools to optimize the system. See the file /mnt/sda1/boot/howto.txt for more.
Usage:
To run SLAX Virtual Appliance, simply boot it and wait until KDE starts. To access the filesystem on host computer, doubleclick the Shared Folders icon on the desktop. To download additional software for SLAX visit www.slax.org in the browser.
License:
SLAX Virtual Appliance and all its componentes are built from Open Source software using GNU GPL License.
Tomas Matejicek
slax.org

Technical Specifications

Operating System:

SLAX Linux 5.1.6

VMware Tools installed: No

Size: 200MB

Allocated Memory (RAM): 192

Applications Installed:

Core Linux utils,
KDE desktop

Virtual Appliance Account Information