Slax & Java: So Happy Together. Really!

Ok - so recently I've been toying around with the idea of building my own Live CD, after basking in the glory of Knoppix for the past couple months.

Knoppix is fantastic - an entire OS bundled onto a CD-ROM that doesn't even need to be installed (check out my previous post on Knoppix for more details). But lately, lately I've been getting greedy - and the tools included in the standard Knoppix build just aren't enough. And, what's worse, of all the Live CD distros, Knoppix appeared to be the toughest to customize! What was a poor programmer to do?

What I want is a full Java development studio that is integrated with a small-thumbprint linux Live CD. After doing some googling, I was aghast to find that no one has offered up such a thing (or written about it, if they have attempted it).

What I DID happen to find, however, was a neat little distro called SLAX - a live CD variant of the popular (albeit rather complicated) Slackware distro. With Slax Linux, everything is considered a "module".

You start with one of the base Slax ISO's - "SE- Standard Edition", "Kill Bill", or "Popcorn". Then download any user-contributed modules you might need right from the same site - in my case the Java 1.5 JDK (which is required for our ejb3.0 development).

"But hey..." you wonder aloud, "they don't offer the module I need on their website. What do I do now?" Well, this happened to be my case as well. The Slax website does offer a module for Tomcat, but I needed JBoss (with embedded Tomcat) for full Java EE stuff - and I also needed the latest Eclipse IDE for doing the programming dirty work.

Quick check of the forums, and hey - guess what? There's a small Windows/GUI-based software tool called MySlax Creator (which includes MySlax Modulator) that makes pulling together everything a breeze.

Step 1 - the MySlax Modulator tool can create a Slax module from a windows directory! So, I created a "java" folder, and tossed in my existing folders containing JBoss and my folder with the latest linux version of Eclipse. The MySlax Modulator tool wraps it all up into a module (*.mo) and sweet! Ready for step 2.

Now that we have the JDK module (downloaded from the Slax module page - under the "development" category), and the JBoss/Eclipse module, we open the MySlax Creator wizard and choose the base ISO we downloaded first (I used Standard Edition). It mounts the iso to a local drive letter, and then you just choose all the *.mo's you want to add. It builds the new, custom ISO - and wha-la! Burn that sucker to a CD-ROM (I learned the hard way to use a CDR-W), boot up and rock on!!

I encountered some problems booting the CD-ROM on some of the desktops at work; but after some trial and error, I found that booting up using the cheatcode "slax nodma" (disabling the Direct Memory Access on the CD-ROM drive) booted my custom Slax distro up like a charm.

Now all I need to do is play around with the other config stuff (setting wallpaper, adding menu items, finding some cool games, etc.) and I will have my very own Live JavaSlax distro, usable anywhere there's a bootable CD-ROM drive. If that isn't cool, I don't know what is. :)