That's true... but he could always try to build a module of the latest Chrome + dependencies, which includes a rather shoddy, but working, PDF reader. Chrome worked great this way in Fedora 16; I haven't tried this out on Slax yet, though. At any rate, kPDF I believe is in Slax--if so, he could use that to view his PDFs.
As for the crashes, he may have bad or insufficient RAM. @OP: See if you can run memtest in Slax or another Linux distribution; if your RAM is working, make a swap file or partition using mkswap and the swapon commands. See the link to the post below to see how to do that:
