blueSW-64pxYesterday on the final day of my short holiday (of sorts) I prepped and released version 1.0.0 of my “liveslak” project. It is stable and the bugs that were reported (plus some more) have been taken care of.

The “1.0.0” marker is not the end of its development of course. It means that I consider the project production-ready.  It will be used to create Live Editions of Slackware 14.2 (64bit and 32bit) when that is released. There’s still some more ideas for liveslak that I want to implement and those will become available as 1.x releases.

For demonstration purposes I have generated a new set of ISO images using liveslak version 1.0.0. There are ISO images for a full Slackware (64bit and 32bit versions), 64bit Plasma5 and MATE variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant (also 64bit). They are based on Slackware-current dated “Thu May 12 01:50:21 UTC 2016“.

This weekend I will “re-write” the original blog post on Slackware Live because it is the page that has had the biggest hit rate for the past months. People reading that original article may think that this project is still immature and not usable. I will re-write it into a landing page for anyone who is interested in a Live Edition of Slackware, and copy the original text to a new article for reference purposes. All previous articles about the liveslak project aka “Slackware Live Edition” are accessible through this shortcut link by the way.

The changes between 0.9.0 and 1.0.0

Not much was changed actually:

  • I added a new “tweaks” boot option to tweak various aspects of the system. As documented in the Wiki, these are the currently implemented tweaks (multiple tweak values can be combined when comma-separated):
    • nga – no glamor 2D acceleration, avoids error “EGL_MESA_drm_image required”. Because we now have “tweaks=nga“, the old boot parameter “nga” which did the same thing has been removed.
    • tpb – enable TrackPoint scrolling while holding down middle mouse button (a TrackPoint is found on IBM/Lenovo laptops but not only there).
    • syn – start the syndaemon for better support of Synaptics touchpads.
    • ssh – start the SSH server (it is disabled by default). 
  • The SSH daemon is disabled by default now. The default login accounts and passwords of Slackware Live Edition are too easy to find out. Imagine what could happen if you booted Slackware Live on a public network like an internet café!
    Note that you can still enable the SSH daemon on boot: by providing the “tweaks=ssh” boot parameter.
  • The few bugs reported since 0.9.0 have been fixed and I found a few bugs and enhancements too, which have also been dealt with. Check out the commit log if you are interested.

Download the ISO images

The ISO variants of Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE. These ISO images (with MD5 checksum and GPG signature) were uploaded to the master server (bear) yesterday and should be available by now on the mirror servers.

Have fun! Eric