blueSW-64pxNot much news of late about my ‘liveslak‘ scripts. I occasionally tweak them but the modifications these days are fairly minor. I stamped a new version on the repository this week: liveslak 1.1.8 on the occasion that I wanted to generate and upload a fresh series of Slackware-current based Live ISO images. After all, liveslak is meant to be a showcase of what Slackware-current is all about, and with the recent updates to kernel, gcc, glibc and more, a refresh was more than welcome.

The Slackware Live Edition ISOs are based on liveslak 1.1.8 and Slackware-current dated “Tue May  9 23:33:37 UTC 2017“.

If you already use a Slackware Live USB stick that you do not want to re-format, you should use the “-r” parameter to the “iso2usb.sh” script. The “-r” or refresh parameter allows you to refresh the liveslak files on your USB stick without touching your custom content.

New in the ISOs

The new ISOs are based on the latest slackware-current with Linux kernel 4.9.27, gcc 7.1.0 and glibc 2.25.

The SLACKWARE variant contains exactly that: the latest slackware-current and nothing else. Ideal for testing and for checking out the status of its development.

The XFCE variant contains a stripped down Slackware with a minimalized package set but still quite functional. The small size is also accomplished by excluding all documentation and man pages, and the localizations for the languages that are not supported in the boot menu. This ISO is small enough that you can burn it to a ’80 minutes’ CDROM (700 MB).

The MATE variant (a Slackware OS with KDE 4 replaced by Mate) contains packages from the repository at http://slackware.uk/msb/current/ which is Mate 1.18.

The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_17.05” as found in my ktown repository. Additionally you will find several packages from my regular repository: chromium (with flash and widevine plugins), vlc, ffmpeg, libreoffice, palemoon, qbittorrent, openjdk and more. This ISO also contains the LXQT and Lumina Desktop Environments. Both are light-weight DE’s based on Qt5 so they look nice & shiny.

The liveslak scripts support three more variants out of the box: CINNAMON, DLACKWARE and STUDIOWARE. There’s no ISO image for the Cinnamon and Dlackware variants this time. The Studioware variant is new, and you will find the download location for an ISO further down (in the “Download the ISO images” section).

What happened between liveslak 1.1.6 and 1.1.8

  • A boot-time tweak ‘nsh’ was added so that you can disable freetype’s new sub-pixel hinting if you are no fan of how the fonts look in slackware-current by default now.
  • I ensured that the XFCE ISO will again fit on a CDROM medium. Apparently the recent updates in Slackware cause packages to swell up. This reduction in ISO size required the sacrifice of quite a few packages (many X bitmap fonts, the TTF Sazanami font, the XFCE weather plugin, and GhostScript).
  • Studioware was added as a supported Live variant. From their web site: “Studioware is a project aimed at providing build scripts and packages of the best open source audio, video and photo editing software available for Slackware Linux.“
  • The liveslak scripts will now download everything they need, including a local copy of the Slackware package tree if that’s missing.

Download the ISO images

This time, the ISO variants I uploaded for Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE (64bit & 32bit), XFCE (64bit & 32bit), PLASMA5, MATE. These ISO images (with MD5 checksum and GPG signature) have been uploaded to the master server (bear) and should be available on the mirror servers within the next 24 hours.

There is another Slackware Live ISO, but it is not hosted by me – I simply do not have the free space for it. It’s the STUDIOWARE Live ISO and you can find it at http://studioware.org/iso.php . It’s filled with many audio, video and photography manipulation applications and you should definitely give it a try!

Read more about liveslak

This blog has quite some posts about the Slackware Live Edition. Check them out: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/live/ – they contain lots of insight and helpful tips.
And this was the original post (which has been edited later on so it could become a proper landing page for curious visitors): http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/

Download liveslak sources

The liveslak project can be found in my git repository: http://bear.alienbase.nl/cgit/liveslak/ . That’s all you need to create a Slackware Live ISO from scratch. Documentation for end users and for Live OS developers is available in the Slack Docs Wiki.

Have fun! Eric