It has been released by the Bioinformatics Resource Unit of the Life Sciences Institute (LSI), National University of Singapore (NUS) and is bootable from any PC that allows a CD/DVD or Universal Serial Bus (USB) boot option and runs the compressed Slackware flavour of the Linux OS, also known as Slax.

The BioSLAX derivative was created by Mark De Silva, Lim Kuan Siong, and Tan Tin Wee.

In March of that same year, APBioNet launched an industry partnership scheme (AIPS) and partnered with Sun Microsystems to build BioBox for the Solaris platform.

[1] On 4 December 2003, the biobox software packages then named APBioBox (Redhat Linux) and BioCluster Grid (Sun Solaris) were field-tested at a Bioinformatics Workshop was conducted at the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Philippines on the occasion of the 70th Anniversary of the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP).

In July 2004, Dr. Derek Kiong introduced Knoppix as a stable, powerful and small Unix (Debian-based) platform to A/Prof Tan Tin Wee in a workshop organised by the Institute of Systems Science (ISS), NUS.

By September 2004, through Mr. Ong Guan Sin, they were able to create a Knoppix remaster template by building software in APBioBox plus useful applications into a prototype, APBioKnoppix, as a project for the practical course of LSM2104 module of the Department of Biochemistry, NUS.

[citation needed] Because Slax worked by overlaying "application modules" on top of the base Linux OS, it made the entire distribution modular.

The TaveRNA Project aims to provide a language and software tools to facilitate easy use of workflow and distributed compute technology.

However, his main reason for not moving forward was that he was waiting for Squash FS and LZMA to be integrated into the Linux kernel by default, instead of users needing to apply separate patches.

BioSLAX features the Linux Slackware 12.1 operating system with updated drivers for various network adapters including support for many varied wireless cards.

A useful aspect of Slax-based distributions is how easy it is to convert a live OS into a full Linux system installed on the hard drive of any PC, which will use roughly 3.5 GB of space.

In a proof-of-concept endeavour, the developers successfully deployed BioSLAX as instances on a pool of resources using both VMWare's ESXi and Citrix Xen's Hypervisors.

Their aim was to effectively create a "BioSLAX CLOUD" where students and staff may instantiate any number BioSLAX servers dynamically for research and education (conduct bioinformatics practical labs by having students connect to the servers via suitable X Window clients such as X-Win32, VNC, Exceed and NoMachine NX) or deployed in such a manner which when used in conjunction with the UD Grid MPAgent may be used to form a cluster for processing large jobs.

The proof-of-concept was highly successful in being deployed for research and education for the Life Science Curriculum at NUS and in 2011, a number of the BioSLAX cloud instances, both on VMWare's vSphere and Citrix Xen servers, were used in the APBioNet project, BioDB100.

Discussions, however, fell through when it was clear that Amazon would not support full hardware virtualization which was needed to run BioSLAX images on the cloud.