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MEPIS on July 9 announced the “Spartacus” release of antiX, a community-built, ultralight derivative of the MEPIS Linux distribution. AntiX (pronounced “Antics”) is the personal project of MEPIS community member “anticapitalista,” who engineered it as a free version of MEPIS aimed at old 32-bit PC hardware.
AntiX runs a 2.6.15 kernel and offers a choice of Fluxbox or IceWM as a desktop environment. It is architected for i586 and x86_64-bit machines and only has about a 400MB footprint.
AntiX is built using the MEPIS Linux 6.5 core, but mostly it has a different set of default user applications.
Despite its small footprint, antiX features a long list of applications. Some of the key ones are:
- Abiword text editor
- Firefox 2.0 browser
- GAIM 1.5 instant messenger
- Mplayer media player
- Xchat chat client
- GIMP 2.2.13 graphics editor
- xpdf
Also included are: Gnumeric, Sylpheed-claws, Dillo, Links2, LeafPad, Nano, Irssi, Raggle RSS reader, Gtk-Gnutella, BitTorrent, Audacity, Xine, “Midnight Commander,” Rox-filer, Xarchive, XCdroast and Graveman.