AntiX saves the day

In 2003 I started to look at lightweight Live CDs. I tried KNOPPIX and it was OK, but it really was like lugging around a heavy toolchest. Therefore I looked for other tools and found Morphix. Based on KNOPPIX but with a modular set of components, it was really interesting. However, as far as a distro build, 0.41 is as far as it went to the best of my knowledge.

I liked the behavior of Morphix so I started to look around to find something like it. I found MEPIS. In 2003 MEPIS was a lightweight Live CD based system, but it did have the ability to install to disk. In 2004, Warren Woodford transformed MEPIS into SimplyMEPIS, which emphasized ease of use and utilized the KDE - K Desktop Environment.

About a year ago there started to be more efforts to base MEPIS on lightweight technology like in the beginning. That is where AntiX comes in. Not the smallest Live CD by any means, but perhaps one of the smallest ones that really is a full fledged system, just using lightweight window managers instead of heavy desktop managers.

There's more. You can use AntiX as a rescue system when you mess up your MBR or change your partition numbers, requiring you to change your boot loader entries and your disk mount table. AntiX helps you get in, mount your partitions and fix whatever you may need to fix. But then you just may want to continue to run it for a few hours or a few days, or...