My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

liveslak 1.1.6 released

blueSW-64pxIt has been a while since I released the last ‘liveslak‘. Usually these releases seem to co-incide with Plasma5 releases in my ‘ktown’ repository.
Today is no different, and liveslak 1.1.6 has been released to produce a new set of Live ISO images.

You will find the usual versions of Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak 1.1.6 and using Slackware-current dated “Thu Jan 26 21:33:41 UTC 2017“. There are variants for a full Slackware (in 64bit and 32bit), Plasma5, MATE and Dlackware (a newcomer). Also the 700MB small XFCE variant (in 32bit and 64bit).

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 4.4.38.

The SLACKWARE variant contains exactly that: the latest slackware-current and nothing else. Ideal for testing.

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 1.17.

The DLACK variant contains Dlackware – this is Slackware (minus KDE4) with PAM and Systemd bolted on, and with Gnome 3.22 as the Desktop Environment. If you have been curious as to how PAM and Systemd would affect Slackware, this is your chance to experience all of this first-hand without having to install it to your harddrive. This DLACK ISO has been created from the repository at http://pkgs.dlackware.com/mirrors/slackware/dlack/current/3.22/x86_64/. Thanks to bartgymnast for creating the packages and letting me help him getting the packages to a quality level where I was comfortable using them in a Live ISO.

The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_17.01” 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, 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.
One word of caution when using the Lumina DE:

  • The network applet is not enabled by default, and you may have to enable the network manually. I used “nmtui” in a terminal window but you can try enabling the networkmanager-applet instead. I did not find out how, yet.

The changes between liveslak scripts 1.1.5 and 1.1.6

  • Most obvious update is the addition of a new supported variant: DLACK, installs Dlackware (i.e. Slackware with PAM, Systemd & Gnome3 instead of KDE4).
  • More fixes to get rid of hardcoded ‘/mnt‘ paths in the version of the Slackware installer files which are used by ‘setup2hd’. Installation to hard disk should finally work properly.
  • Added packages from the restricted repository (ffmpeg, handbrake, lame etc) to the PLASMA5 ISO.
  • various updates in package content for the XFCE, PLASMA5, MATE ISOs.

Multilib considerations

I added a live module to enable multilib support out of the box in the PLASMA5 variant of Slackware Live. Inside the ISO that module-file is called “/liveslak/system/0020-slackware_multilib-current-x86_64.sxz”.
I host a copy of that module online as “0050-multilib-current-x86_64.sxz” so that you can download it and add it to the ‘addons‘ or ‘optional‘ subdirectory of your non-plasma5 liveslak.
Multilib is something you’d need for Wine, so I also added a live module for Wine (including the 32bit OpenAL libraries) as a separate module in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory of the PLASMA5 ISO and made copy of it available in the aforementioned ‘bonus’ directory online.
This is how I created that live module for wine: by installing the 32bit OpenAL libraries on top of my 64bit wine package for Slackware (which contains both 32bit and 64bit wine):

# SCRATCHDIR=$(mktemp -t -d makesxz.XXXXXX)
# installpkg --root $SCRATCHDIR wine-1.9.23-x86_64-1alien.txz
# installpkg --root $SCRATCHDIR OpenAL-compat32-1.17.1-x86_64-1aliencompat32.txz 
# ./makemod $SCRATCHDIR ./optional/0060-wine-1.9.23-current-x86_64.sxz 
# rm -r $SCRATCHDIR

Remember, the modules in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory of liveslak can be loaded into the live OS on boot when you use the “load=” boot parameter in syslinux or grub. Loading the optional wine module for instance, needs this as additional boot parameter: “load=wine” and if you would be using a non-plasma5 based Live OS and have added the multilib module in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory also, then the boot parameter needs to load both multilib and wine: “load=multilib,wine”.
Of course, if you place both modules in the ‘addons‘ subdirectory instead, they will always be loaded on boot unless you want to prohibit that using the “noload=multilib,wine” boot parameter in syslinux or grub.

Download the ISO images

The ISO variants of Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5, MATE and DLACK. 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.

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

41 Comments

  1. Paulo

    Hi Alienbob, thanks for new liveslak isos and new DLACK variant.
    Now I can test my homebank security software that they offer only for
    Debian distros (actually they offer a .deb package for Ubuntu!!).
    They changed from Java plugin to proprietary software.
    I tried to run it on Slackware but it doesn’t run and doesn’t output any messages,
    I think it may depend on systemd.
    Thank you very much, your work is highly appreciated.

  2. steve

    I appreciate all your work.
    Dlackware might be liked for some but i do hope that systemd isn’t being played with with thoughts of inclusion.
    If slackware gets systemd i need to change distro to one without systemd. Pam, systemd, pulseaudio was unthinkable not to long ago when talking about slackware. That said great work.

  3. alienbob

    steve, know your enemy.
    The Dlackware ISO is meant to look at what systemd is and how it makes Slackware behave. You can not discuss something of which you do not have knowledge.
    There is no plan to include systemd into Slackware. There is no need. But I do support the work of people who want to explore using Slackware as a base. Providing a Live ISO for Dlackware is how I show that support.

  4. Bartgymnast

    good luck paulo, thanks for the inclusion eric.

    There are a few reasons why I am building systemd on top of slackware.
    – it is recommended option for gnome3 (which we want to build like the gnome devs intended)
    – and as eric sayd, there is no plan for systemd inclusion in slackware. However it always good to know the behaviour of systemd and test it to the ground shake and prove that systemd is a worthless piece of shit. however untill now it works very nice though.

  5. alex

    Hi Alienbob, liveslack work well on my pc, but it doesn’t boot on macbook pro.

  6. alienbob

    Never touched an Apple product, never will either. No return value for the cost.
    If you find out how to fix it you are welcome to send me patches of course.

  7. Ricardo J. Barberis

    I don’t care that much for Gnome 3 (I’m a KDE guy, myself) but am intrigued by systemd on top of Slackware, even if only as a crazy experiment 🙂

    Thank you both, Bartgymnast and Eric!

  8. D.L.C. Burggraaff

    First and before all: a big thanks!

    I noticed that with the live32, dlack64 and mate64 ISOs, and probably with all ISOs, in /etc/rc.d/rc.M the /usr/bin/glib-compile-schemas invocation is commented out. With addons requiring schemas this is awkward. So why is the compile commented out?
    😀

  9. alienbob

    D.L.C. Burggraaff – it is commented out to give the boot-up of the Live OS a speed boost. Since this is a Live OS, booting off a read-only medium (unless you install to a writable medium but in that case there’s other stuff you should perhaps un-comment).

    The script which generates the ISO, will run the schema compiler and writes the results into a squashfs module (the 0099-slackware_zzzconf-current-x86_64.sxz file) and this is used on boot.

  10. D.L.C. Burggraaff

    Eric: Thks for the explanation.
    From my PartedMagic days I remember that this (and other) caches were also prebuilt. Only when addons/optionals were loaded (or it was explicitely requested) the “cachers” were rerun.

  11. alienbob

    FYI, I did a re-spin of the PLASMA5 ISO to address the library breakage after Slackware-current got updated.
    There’s newer libreoffice, chromium and openjdk in there too.
    I stamped the liveslak release which built this ISO “1.1.6.1” to make it stand out.

  12. Janis

    Hi!
    I see no such file /liveslak/system/0020-slackware_multilib-current-x86_64.sxz in live-palsma5-current image. (downloaded today)

  13. alienbob

    Janis, I guess I forgot to add the “-M” parameter to add multilib. I will see if I can re-spin the ISO sometime this weekend. In the meantime you can download it from the ‘bonus’ directory and add it to your USB stick (not possible for a read-only medium of course).

  14. Darth Vader

    Eric, I noticed in your “liveslak/pkglists” some “systemd.*” configuration files, which contains (also) the glorious and much awaited (by me) LinuxPAM packages.

    Fair enough! I can live with SystemD and even with The Ugly Thing, if you give me the LinuxPAM goodness… 😉

    BTW, your live system could be installed on a hard-drive, to become just a trivial Slackware installation?

  15. Darth Vader

    Eric, I can haz the LinuxPAM goodness without The Ugly Thing, but with KDE4 instead?

    If it come also with SystemD or not, I do not care, do as you like and feel is better! 😉

  16. Nate Bargmann

    I have the Plasma5 image installed to a USB drive. I am trying to connect to my wireless router, I have verified my password is correct and I continually receive a message that DHCP failed within a few seconds of the connection attempt. Trying the wired interface works but it took several tries before the NetworkManager established a connection. It’s as though there is a very short timeout in effect.

    Any ideas?

    TIA

  17. alienbob

    Nate, I have not seen (or heard from others) weird behaviour from NetworkManager. It is difficult to tell you where to start looking when even your wired interface has issues getting an IP address from the DHCP server.
    One thing I can think of is that perhaps your DHCP server has a log which you can access, to see if any errors are in there. Also, NetworkManager will probably write some logs to /var/log/messages .

  18. alienbob

    Darth Vader, I fear that you have not even read the main article. Because if you had read the article, you would not have had to ask these questions.

  19. Nate Bargmann

    I also tried the Xfce version and NM on it is having issues as well. On this version it just gets in a loop with the icon showing a connection and then it displaying a message that it failed and then it connects again and round and round it goes!

    I’ll poke around in the logs and see what might show up.

  20. Darth Vader

    Eric, I read the main article, no worries…

    I was just wondered about a thing, no problem!

    BTW, I’m afraid that looks like someone hacked your blog…

  21. Nate Bargmann

    It looks like I found the solution. The failures shown in the logs all centered around IPv6 which my router provides in response to DHCP requests. The advice provided in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/00-dhcp-client.conf states that dhclient is preferred. So I installed the dhcp package and uncommented the dhclient line and made sure the other two were commented and that did the trick.

    Hopefully, this may help someone else who runs into this.

  22. alienbob

    Nate, perfect. Thanks for the report.

  23. Eugene Wissner

    Darth Vader,

    you can get PAM for slackware with or without systemd from the dlackware repository:
    https://github.com/Dlackware/pam

    These are just a few SlackBuilds that can be built on top of a full slackware installation.

  24. Gene

    I am sure I speak for many when I say Thank you for all of your hard work! Not just on the liveslak, but on everything you do! Thank you!

  25. scootergrisen

    Can you add “dansk” to the lists of languages under Non-US Keyboard selection and Non-US Language selection?
    I guess a lot more other languages could be added.

  26. alienbob

    scootergrisen I don’t care for more languages unless someone needs them. They use space in the ISO and removing languages keeps the XFCE ISO small.
    But since you asked, I will add it to the TODO.
    Note that (except for the XFCE ISO) all Live ISOs have the full language support built in, it’s just not all selectable on the boot screen. If you edit the boot commandline and add “locale=da_DK.utf8 kbd=dk tz=Europe/Copenhagen” you will have your Danish session.

  27. Ralph

    Hi,
    yesterday I installed your LiveslakPlasma to disk, because it’s the easiest way to get a look at PLASMA on a ‘real’ system.
    Hoever in doing so, I noticed my flashdrive kept getting mor and more occupied as nothing was mounted under /setup2disk.
    I had a look at the setup2hd script itself and found that ‘SeTpartitions’ doesn’t know where to mount ‘/’ to.
    In line 87, setup2hd, T_PX is defined but not exported, hence SeTpartitions cannot know it.
    Just add an ‘export T_PX’….
    But anyway great work !
    (looks like you have too much time on your hands 🙂 )

  28. scootergrisen

    I try to help make different distributions better/easier to use in my language.
    Having to remember exactly what commands to write during boot is not so friendly and you have to compensate for incorrect keyboard layout so when i type =-_/ they are not on the correct locations so it just makes it not so much fun. If the user cant/dont set in during boot they have to figure out how to do it in like gnome/xfce or whatever they use and then they have to log out and log in again so i would much prefer to be able to select during boot before gnome or what ever starts.

  29. alienbob

    scootergrisen then please confirm that this defines proper defaults for a Danish desktop configuration:

    locale setting: “da_DK.utf8”
    console keyboard: “dk”
    timezone: “Europe/Copenhagen”

    And if the keyboard setup in X.Org has a different name than “dk” or requires modifiers like “nodeadkeys” (See http://bear.alienbase.nl/cgit/liveslak/tree/languages) then let me know. I am about to generate a new ISO for PLASMA5 and can implement this right now.

  30. scootergrisen

    Sorry that i diddent answer sooner.
    It looks good to me.
    Although i do not know the difference between dk and dk-latin1. But we can always make adjusts later on.
    Let me know when i will be able to test it.

  31. alienbob

    scootergrisen – too little too late.
    I already added dk support AND released a new live image AND wrote a blog post about it.

  32. scootergrisen

    It seems “dk-latin1” is better because it enables dead keys so we can write “éÉ”. So please use that.

  33. alienbob

    Well you should perhaps have answered sooner…

  34. scootergrisen

    I have tested the new ISO file and it looks great.
    It is so much better when the user can select correct langauge/keyboard layout from the beginning during boot. I dont know why the different distributions dont prioitice this higher.
    The login screen (looks like sddm) is in english though. I dont know if this is because translations for it is not included or perhaps the danish translation have not gotten into the sddm code yet. I did some translation for it not long ago.
    If you can include translations for the login screen (sddm or what ever it is) that would be nice, but maybe you already did.

    When i select keyboard layout during boot nothing happens other then that.
    But when i select language the system boots.
    I think i might like it better if when i select language that nothing else happen (the system did not boot).
    Otherwise if i want to select language first and then keyboard layout afterward its to late because now i cant select keyboard layout because the system is booting.
    Just an idea.

    I dont know if you know but if i go highlight a language during boot and hit tab key then it seems to say “kbd=us” for all languages. Maybe it gets overwritten by menu_da.cfg it just seems odd that it would say “kbd=us” when i want to use dk layout.

  35. alienbob

    scootergrisen – so, does the “dk” layout work after all, or will “dk-latin1” be better?
    About the localization in SDDM, this is a two-fold issue. SDDM does not have danish localization, see https://github.com/sddm/sddm/tree/develop/data/translations – but feel free to contribute one, just as I did for the dutch translation.
    But still, there is a second thing to fix and that is for me: SDDM does not pick up the selected language & keyboard layout. But I have an idea how to fix that.

    Finally, about your questions regarding the syslinu boot menu: please read the documentation at http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak#booting_the_live_os , it answers your questions about what the effect is of selecting the various menu entries.

  36. scootergrisen

    “dk” works but “dk-latin1” is more correct/better.
    It don’t seem you can write “éÉ” with “dk”.

    Danish translation for sddm was added recently (da.ts).

  37. alienbob

    OK so “dk-latin1” is what I will use in my next ISOs.
    And when SDDM gets a new release, it will indeed have Danish language support.

  38. scootergrisen

    Sounds good. Thank you.

  39. scootergrisen

    I tried out slackware64-live-xfce-current.iso (2018-09-09 14:25).
    In case you care the two .desktop files for vim and gvim says “Vi IMproved” so “Vim” so its not possible to know which one is vim and which is gvim from Xfce menu.

  40. alienbob

    scootergrisen – that’s just the way the Slackware ‘vim’ and ‘gvim’ packages work.
    Now you know that “Vi IMproved” starts the graphical vim.

  41. scootergrisen

    The graphical version is called gVim.

    Like you can see in:
    https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/vim.desktop
    https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/gvim.desktop

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