One thing that is making my efforts with antiX slow and painfull is the fact that my machine of interest is very under powered. That won't be a problem when it's set up but I was wondering whether it would be possible to run the live version on my normal desktop, configure it how I want and then take the USB drive to my not-very-good machine and install it there? Or would the difference in hardware cause a problem? Some things for sure won't carry, like my display settings.

speaking generally-- first of antix then of most gnu/linux distros, it should be very possible to do exactly what you are describing.

the main differences from one machine to another will be:

* whether there is enough ram
* whether the wifi and graphics, etc are compatible
* 64 vs 32 bit

as long as both machines will run antix and have antix-compatible hardware you should be able to switch back and forth. though if either of those machines is 32bit, youll need the 32bit version of antix.

Generally speaking, you can set it up on one machine & then transfer it, but you might have some hardware that will require setting up once installed there.

THX1138 wrote: One thing that is making my efforts with antiX slow and painfull is the fact that my machine of interest is very under powered. That won't be a problem when it's set up but I was wondering whether it would be possible to run the live version on my normal desktop, configure it how I want and then take the USB drive to my not-very-good machine and install it there? Or would the difference in hardware cause a problem? Some things for sure won't carry, like my display settings.

That's exactly how I suggest you do it.  We often tell people to do this.  It's one of the reasons I think the live-usb is an ideal development environment for customizing your system.  Some people only use the live-usb and never bother to install.  The live-usb is designed to run just fine on widely different machines.  We figure out the display stuff on every live boot.  I will frequently use the same live-usb on three or four different machines.  If you need special boot parameters to get the display to work then those won't carry over, of course.  As root, it is easy to edit the file /live/boot-dev/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg to add more bootloader entries so you can have a custom entry for each machine if you want.

Depending on the hardware involved, the live-usb can actually run faster than an installed system, especially if you have enough RAM to use the"toram" feature. 

Also, we have a special feature called live-usb-save that saves certain files across reboots even if persistence isn't enabled.  As root you can edit the lists of files that get saved in /live/boot-dev/antiX/state/general-state-files and machine-state-files.  The general files are shared between machines but the machine files are saved and restored separately for each machine.   For example, if you needed to make  a special xorg.conf file for one particular machine then uncomment /etc/X11/xorg.conf in machine-state-files and that xorg.conf will be used on that machine but not on others.  Likewise, we save the backlight brightness separately for each machine you are on.  Different machines will often require different /etc/modprobe.d/ files to tweak or disable hardware drivers so these files too are saved on a machine by machine basis.

  This may be way TMI but my point is that we probably support running live-usbs on different machines better than any other Linux distro.  We are still learning and every year we try to find new ways to keep pushing the envelope.

hello THX1138
Yes.  BitJam used the word ideal.  Yes.  for all BitJam reasons."[antix] probably support running live-usbs on different machines better than any other ... distro." Yes.  ((though lernstik does it well, it is everything but it is not lean and mean.))