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My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 8 of 27)

Stable 1.0.0 release of liveslak

May 19, 2016 / / 29 Comments

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

Slackware Live Edition – final testing please

May 6, 2016 / / 46 Comments

blueSW-64pxMy gut feeling tells me that I should announce a stable release of my “liveslak” project soon. I have implemented much more than I set out to do from the beginning, and no bugs have surfaced for a while.

So it was time to stamp a final beta number on the liveslak sources and generate new Slackware Live ISO images. I want you to give them a spin and report any bugs that you find. Otherwise there may well be an 1.0.0 release after the weekend.

Official liveslak version number is 0.9.0 (Beta9). The ISO images (full Slackware, Plasma5 and MATE variants as well as the lean XFCE variant) are based on Slackware-current dated “Thu May  5 05:17:19 UTC 2016” with the latest 4.4.9 kernel. Again, I added an ISO of the 32bit variant of full Slackware Live.

By now the ISO images have been uploaded to “bear” and ready for your consumption.

For background info on my project “Slackware Live Edition” please read the previous articles.

What’s new in 0.9.0?

  • A PXE server was added, through a script called “pxeserver”.
    When you boot Slackware Live from a Live media on one computer (the server), and preferably load the Live media into RAM using the “toram” boot parameter and start the “pxeserver” script, you enable every other computer in your (wired) LAN to boot Slackware Live over the network. If the “server” has Internet, then so will the PXE clients because the server will act as a traffic router. See the documentation on how to start and use the PXE server.
  • The ISO image is still a “hybrid” ISO, meaning you can use “cp” or “dd” to transfer the ISO onto a USB stick to make that a bootable Live medium. But I changed the parameters of the “isohybrid” program to match the ones used for the official Slackware ISO images – this fixes the problem where my ISOs failed to boot in VirtualBox when the file was larger than one GB. So, every curious journalist out there who wants to give Slackware Live Edition a try will get her chance without complaining.
  • Many other significant improvements and bug fixes during the past weeks. Check out the commit log if you are interested.

Download the ISO images

As stated above, you can choose between several variants of Slackware Live Edition. There’s ISO images for the SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE flavours using the latest Slackware-current packages available. The Plasma5 variant comes with KDE Frameworks 5.21.0, Plasma 5.6.3 and Applications 16.04.0 on top of Qt5 5.6.0. The Mate 1.14 packages have all beeen recompiled by Willy Sudiarto Raharjo to take away any possibility of issues resulting from recent library updates in Slackware.

The ISO images (with MD5 checksum and GPG signature) are available on the master (bear) and should be available soon on the mirror servers. Check out the “0.9.0” subdirectory for ISOs based on the liveslak-0.9.0 scripts. A symlink called “latest” will always point to the latest set of ISO images.

Things to remember when you boot the ISO

The Slackware Live Edition comes with two user accounts: user ‘root’ (with password ‘root’) and user ‘live’ (with password ‘live’). My advice is to login as user live and use “su” or “sudo” to get root access.
Note: the “su” and “sudo” commands will ask for the ‘live’ user’s password!

Consult the documentation for assistance with the various boot parameters you can use to tailor the Live OS to your needs. The syslinux boot has help screens behind the F2, F3, F4 and F5 function keys and the grub boot screen has a “help on boot parameters” menu entry.

Slackware Live Edition is able to boot both on BIOS-based computers (where syslinux takes care of the boot menu) and UEFI systems (where grub builds the boot menu, which looks quite similar to the syslinux menu):

liveslak-0.9.0-xfce

Have fun! Eric

Bear is live

March 25, 2016 / / 37 Comments

alienIn the evenings of the past few days I have been working hard on getting a new server setup to replace the buckling taper.alienbase.nl server.

I proudly announce bear.alienbase.nl , no longer a virtual machine but a real physical server I am renting at online.net. Thanks to many people donating money to ensure that I can pay the server’s rent for a long time to come, and thanks to kikinovak and the support staff at online.net for helping me with getting Slackware installed (it is not an official installation option). So:

Linux bear 4.4.6 #2 SMP Wed Mar 16 14:17:03 CDT 2016 x86_64
Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2350 @ 1.74GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Bear is running Slackware64 14.2 RC1 and has a 2.5 Gbps (shared) connection to the internet. I managed to get 94 MB/sec downloads from slackware.uk, which means I saturated the full bandwidth of this UK mirror. Downloading content should easily give you speeds in the order or 20 MB/sec if you have that bandwidth at home, meaning a Slackware Live ISO should be downloaded to your computer in about two minutes.

Speaking of Slackware Live Edition, there’s another bounty associated with running a 64bit Slackware-current OS on this server – bear can generate the Live ISOs by itself. So I wrote a script (inspired by mirror-slackware-current.sh) called “create_liveslak_iso.sh” which works the same way: every time there is an update to the Slackware64-current ChangeLog.txt this script will create a 64bit Slackware Live ISO from scratch. It’s already scheduled in cron, and its output can be found at http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware-live/slackware64-current-live/ . Note that the ISO creation process takes roughly two hours, so before starting a download please check the logfile to see if the process has finished (last line should be “— Cleaning up the staging area…“)

This weekend, if I have time (plans for Easter are still prone to change) I will migrate the SlackDocs Wiki (docs.slackware.com) from taper to bear and then taper will no longer run a critical part of my services. The cgit web interface to the git repositories is already up and running at http://bear.alienbase.nl/cgit/ and after Easter, the actual git repositories at taper will stop being accessible on taper when I move them over to bear.

Summarizing: all of you who were using taper.alienbase.nl for downloading Slackware related stuff, please switch to bear.alienbase.nl. The new server offers http, https and rsync access to all content and does not apply black- or whitelisting. Everyone is welcome to use it. The server has unlimited data transfers so I do not have to be afraid of hidden costs.

taper.alienbase.nl will probably also stop acting as a HTTP mirror

March 19, 2016 / / 37 Comments

The virtual machine which runs “taper.alienbase.nl” as well as “docs.slackware.com“is still crashing under the load caused by massive downloads. The server’s rsync access is already limited to a few known sources but when half the community is downloading my Slackware-current install ISOs and the Live ISOs using HTTP, this is still killing the server. I have to hard reset it at least once a week.
On top of that, the bandwidth usage is still between 50 and 200 Mbit/sec continuously, causing financial issues for the person who donated the use of this virtual machine.

I am afraid I have to take additional measures, and prohibit future access to the ISO images. I am thinking about how I can still make the slackware-current install ISOs available – probably they will get mirrored on slackware.uk where you already can download the Live ISOs.

I wanted to rent a small VPS at online.net which offers unlimited bandwidth for a fixed monthly price but they are currently not able to deliver. So currently I have no real options for moving my repositories.

Again my apologies for the inconvenience caused.
However I consider the downtime for docs.slackware.com which is caused by the frequent crashes unacceptable – just as much as I think my pal should not suffer from financial backlash as a result of the growing popularity of these ISO images.

Eric

Beta 6 for my Live ISO images

February 25, 2016 / / 57 Comments

blueSW-64pxYesterday  I uploaded new ISO images for Slackware Live Edition, release “0.6.0“. Then I waited a bit before writing this article to allow the mirrors to catch up with the 8 GB of new files.

Check out my previous articles about Slackware Live Edition for more background information and read the README.txt file provided with the “liveslak” sources to get a grasp on a more technical level of how this all works.

What’s new in 0.6.0?

Still working towards a stable 1.0 release, I think I am mostly there feature-wise and I would like to see bug reports so that I can be sure that a future stable release is going to be enjoyed by everyone – seasoned or aspiring Slackware user alike. If I am not at version 1.0 by the time Slackware 14.2 is released, that event will trigger a Live Edition v1.0 for sure! But we’ll get there before Pat 🙂

The persistent USB variant of Slackware Live is what most people are probably going to use. But the ISO on DVD or a read-only stick is just as awesome, because that variant will be particularly interesting for people who are demo-ing Slackware (because they are new to Slackware or because they want to see how slackware-current performs). For this new beta, I have focused on fixing all the small bugs I ran into, but here are some of the highlights in terms of new functionality:

  • You can now use an encrypted container file to store persistent data. The “iso2usb.sh” script was extended with a new “-C” parameter that allows you to specify a size for this LUKS container file, quite similar to what you already could do for a LUKS encrypted homedirectory. The data on your persistent USB Live will be safe from people who steal the stick from you.
  • A hard disk installer was added to all Live variants except the minimal XFCE. As far as I am concerned, the XFCE version is nice to run as a small Live OS but unsuited for hard disk installation. This works straight from the DVD, and also in USB versions.
    You will be able to install the latest Slackware64-current, or the Plasma5 or Mate version to your computer’s hard drive, in the background while you are working/playing in your Live Desktop.
    From within the Live environment (either at the console or in an X terminal in your running Desktop Environment) you can call “setup2hd” which will guide you. The script is a modified Slackware setup as known from the official install media, but it has already made the choice of package SOURCE for you. Note that you are responsible for partitioning your hard drive before you call “setup2hd”. This aspect is no different from the regular Slackware installer.
    The “setup2hd” script will install all the active Live modules to your hard drive (this encompasses all “system” modules, and furthermore including modules in addons/” and “optional/” which you enabled).
  • Documentation was added. A README.txt file contains all the details of using the Live Edition, as well as technical background on how the liveslak scripts do their work.
  • Customizing the Live Edition has been made easier. You are no longer tied to the choice of “SLACKWARE”, “PLASMA5”, “KDE4”, “XFCE”, “MATE” or “CINNAMON” when generating a new ISO variant. A “custom” variant with its own custom name and custom post-install configuration is now also possible.

Download the ISO images

I have created ISO images for the SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE flavours using the latest Slackware64-current packages available (Tue Feb 23 19:31:59 UTC 2016) as well as latest Plasma 5 and Mate releases.

You can find the ISO images plus their MD5 checksum and GPG signature at any of the following locations – look in the “0.6.0” subdirectory for ISOs based on the liveslak-0.6.0 scripts. I made a symlink called “latest” which will always point to the latest set of ISO images:

These mirror servers should have synchronized by now.

The ISOs have two user accounts: root (with password ‘root’) and live (with password ‘live’). My advice: login as user live and use “su” or “sudo” to get root access (note: “su” and “sudo” will want the live password!).

The ISOs are able to boot both on BIOS-based computers (where syslinux takes care of the boot menu) and UEFI systems (where grub builds the boot menu, which looks quite similar to the syslinux menu):

slackwarelive-0.4.0_syslinux

Have fun! Eric

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