Zephix 3.0

A fan of portable, modular distros, Mayank Sharma runs across a relatively new one and wonders how it stacks up against his all-time favourite: Slax.

- Mayank Sharma

IN BRIEF

Zephix is a Debian-based, portable distro that’s designed to be run from a DVD or a USB device. It describes itself as lightweight and modular, in that it ships with just the basics, and prompts users to install any additional programs as modules that can be downloaded and inserted into the distro.

SPECS

CPU: 1GHz Memory: 3GB HDD: N/A Build: 64-bit only

Zephix belongs to the small minority of distros that’s designed to be used from removable media, such as USB drives. In terms of features it can’t match its established peers – Slax, Porteus and Puppy Linux – but it’s not far from the mark, and does bring its unique touch to the field.

Like some of its peers, Zephix ships as an ISO, which you’ll have to loopback mount before copying its contents on to an ext4 formatted disk, capping off the process by running a script from inside the USB drive to make it bootable.