Liveslak has a slow release cycle these days. It’s ten months since the 1.6.0 release which added full Ventoy support. There were a few minor releases but the last one of those was already half a year ago.
Yesterday I pushed version 1.7.0 to my git repository and used it to generate a fresh batch of Slackware Live ISO images.
New features of liveslak 1.7.0
- Ventoy is now also supported on Live ISOs that are based on Slackware 14.2. Although I don’t think that news will excite a lot of people today 😉
FYI, liveslak implements the “Ventoy-compatible” guideline. This means, any Slackware Live ISO works out of the box on Ventoy, and liveslak even supports persistence on a Ventoy disk. Read the documentation! - The RAM-based Console-OS choice is now supported in the boot menu of all Slackware Live variants.
This “Core OS” is just 555 MB in size and loads into RAM so that you can remove the boot medium after booting it. Core OS offers a Slackware console, no X, with a lot of useful utilities including the setup2hd tool.
Booting Slackware Live is the only way (using setup2hd) to install the official Slackware distro from a network server across a wireless connection. The official Slackware installer only supports wired network connections. - A more user-friendly GRUB timezone selection menu with submenus (UEFI boot) was added.
- Lots of small fixes and enhancements too of course, read the Git log for more information.
Get liveslak ISOs
The various variants of Slackware Live Edition can be found in the “latest” subdirectory at https://download.liveslak.org/ or its US mirror https://us.liveslak.org/ . A fast UK mirror is provided by Darren Austin at https://slackware.uk/liveslak/ .
You’ll be able to download ISO Live images of 32bit and 64bit Slackware proper, also of the small XFCE variant for (both architectures), and then CINNAMON, DAW, LEAN and MATE ISOs that only come in 64bits. All ISOs containing a 64bit Slackware have support for SecureBoot.
Also have a look in the “bonus” subdirectory! There’s a Nvidia binary driver, Wine 8 and multilib modules to add if you use the persistent version of liveslak.
Get liveslak sources
The liveslak project is hosted in git. Its browsable cgit interface is here: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/
A set of the liveslak scripts can also be downloaded from http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ or https://slackware.nl/people/alien/liveslak/
Have fun! Eric
Great Thanks, I am particularly happy for capability to install ISO on a hard drive. I was waiting for new release of Liveslak as this is only way I use Slackware nowadays. I trust your judgment to provide Slackware-current in its relatively stable state.So I jump from liveslak to its new version.
Hello Eric.
Excellent news about Ventoy and that your ISO support it. I did not know it. It’s excellent to boot direct from ISO.
BOOT your ISO on non secure BOOT machines.
HP notebook only have secure boot option, that can not be disabled.
I’ve enrolled secure key from Ventoy to BIOS.
I do not know which file from USB key to select for Hash file to enroll to BIOS and enable BOOTing your Slackware-live ISO.
At booting Ventoy menu offer Slackware and after selecting Slackware boot menu show up.
Entering first one (Start Slackware..), last one show
error: shim lock porotocol not found
error: you need to load kernel first
Entering Memory test return the first error line above.
Regards
It’s a Ventoy issue: https://forums.ventoy.net/showthread.php?tid=2033
Hello Eric.
Thank you for posting a link to Ventoy.
There is one issue regarding Ventoy booting your ISO from USB key:
Try to boot on Notebooks (two HPs) with nvm disks and boot failed:
BIOS boot – Kernel panic, Unable mount root fs
UEFI boot – boots to rescue mode (no live media found)
blkid returns nvm partitions and:
/dev/sda1 LABEL=”VTOYEFI”
/dev/sda2 LABEL=”Ventoy”
If I boot on hardware without nvm disk, ISO boots on BIOS and UEFI modes
I dd ISO to USB key – that way Slackware-live boots on all hardware regardless a type of disks built-in (HD, SSD, nvm).
Other issue on booted ISO:
Partition manager returns error when run as root (live user is nor allowed) in konsole:
QtandardPaths: runtime directory ‘/run/user/1000’ is not owned by UID 0, but a directory permissions 0700 owned by UID 1000 GID 100
this line repeats three times and then:
kf.dbusaddons: Dbus session bus not found. To circumvent this problem try the following command (with bash):
export $(dbus-launch)
run that as root returns:
dbus [3729]: Unable to set up transient service directory : XDG_RUNTIME_DIR “/run/user/1000” is owned by UIOD 1000, not our UID 0
After that partitionmanager started with
three lines repeated as above (QStandardPaths…)
kf.coreaddons: “Could not find plugin kpmcore/”
and then GUI shows up and looks like all works.
all proceeding runs of the program only 3 lines above mentioned appear and partitionmanager GUI starts
My laptop has a NVMe disk, I will try and create a Ventoy disk and put a Live ISO on it to see what happens.
As for partitionmanager, I also tried. You need to run it as user ‘live’ actually, because then kdesu pops up an authorization prompt where you need to enter the ‘live’ password, after which partitionmanager will start. Indeed it will show the warning “Could not find plugin kpmcore/” and then it starts the application but I have not checked how it works. It does show the partitions and enables the tools to modify them.
Hello Eric.
Managed to download your recent slackware64-live-current.iso, size 4.093640.704 from 2. avgust.
Can not find it again, not published.
The same again:
BIOS boot – Kernel panic, Unable mount root fs
UEFI boot – boots to rescue mode BIOS boot – Kernel panic, Unable mount root fs
UEFI boot – boots to rescue mode (no live media found))
on HP laptops.
on Lenovo T580 UEFI disabled, BIOS boot – “no live media found.. trouble ahead”, following rescue mode CLI prompt
And forget to mention, other ISOs boot from Ventoy USB stick.
Hi Eric I hope you and your family are all doing well.
Today you indirectly made a grown man cry tears of joy, ill explain lol.
I used your jackj2 slackbuild script to compile jack2-1.9.22.tar.gz ive been using the same source with a different slackbuild script and jack2 seemed yto be working fine. id downloaded a few other music programs from your repo and looked at your jack version. I decided i would grab your build files and use them with 1.9.22, built perfectly as expected. I uninstalled the other version id been using.
opened up qjacjctl jack-keyboard and surege_xt hit first notes and was totally blown away the change in how surge performed and the output blew me away sounds I knew inside out just came alive. I shed tears of joy when I opened non-sequencer-alien version and played my latest diddly. Out came midi keyboard and then I really heard and felt the difference surge playing had so much more feel and play ability is the only description I can come up with.
Im going to use kompare first to see differences between two build scripts and see whats made the difference.
Thank you its brought even more joy to my humble existence.
SamW UK
Hi SamW,
You make me curious. What do you think makes the difference in your experience of the audio? Is it the newer Jack2? Is it the configuration I ship?
Also, should I build a package for the Surge synth and add it to my DAW collection?
Hi Eric thanks for the reply.
Yes surge_xt would be a fantastic addition to your repo , an amazing synthesizer with huge a spectrum of sounds it can produce. Your imagination being the only limit to it’s scope. With fully featured effects built in and as a standalone effects power house.
SamW
Hi Eric.the best way I could explain the difference in sound would be. A valve one build opened the valve to only 93%, the 2nd fully open to 100%. :-).
With respect to jack2 the sources were identical the only difference was the build scripts used. I first used the sbo build script with the only edit being the source version number. And then I used your’s again the only edit was source version number.
I have gone threw them and #### things standout in your script that are not in sbo buildscript,
1, # Catch unitialized variables:
2, # Save old umask and set to 0022:
3, python3 # used with waf
4, python3 waf configure: the same options used just a different order
5, # Write an entry into fstab for the RAM-based tmpfs that jack wants: # not in sbo script
(cho “none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0” >> etc/fstab) ### Im sure you can see your missing “/”
6 , # Strip binaries (if any): # only in yours
7, # Restore the original umask: # only in yours
I used your version of the build before the /dev/shm was added to my fstab so we can rule that out. My fstab is the default from installation with only edits to my sd* partions mount option’s.
I think the difference in the “python3 waf configure” order, umask removal and restore, and stripping the binaries. I know configure order will mean dependencies will cascade down meeting correct main sub dependency.
What are your thought’s
SamW
Well. the “missing” slash in front of “etc/fstab” is actually correct, since that line of script is part of the generated doinst.sh script which does not necessarily run in the computer’s root filesystem.
Other than that, I can’t tell you why a jack binary built with my script would have different effect on audio perception than the one built with the SBo script. All the differences between the scripts should be irrelevant to the produced code.
I’m currently using an onboard pcie Realtek Azalia (Intel HDA) with ALC892 codec from 2010, playback threw reasonable 2.1 desktop speakers. In terms of change to audio, I think surge is getting more power thus enabling more detail and artifacts in the sound. Increased precision for the effects meaning reverb tails are more apparent, delays are easier to match in timing of additional noted played on keyboard.
Yes finally I’ve got it thinking threw things while doing this reply, The latency/lag of jackd must have seen a good reduction making surge more responsive from core patch playback to effects layer’s. Resulting in a big gain in overall playback quality and play ability in which ever form note input takes. non-seq jack-keyboard or external midi controller.
SamW
.
I was half expecting your answer, so the only thing can be the code just prefers the alienbob touch 🙂
I shall record output from surge_xt using the 2 different versions of jack, and send them to UNFA and see if he can analyse them. To see if he can quantify what I hear.
SamW
Hello Alien! Big fan of your work, but pretty new to Slackware and don’t have too much Linux experience in general. Just had a question I was hoping you could answer.
I’m trying to install Liveslak to the physical hardware using the installation script you provide on the desktop. On your ReadMe documentation you make frequent mention of GRUB, but during the script installation I only see prompts for LILO and ELILO installations. I was wondering if you had switched bootloaders, and I’m looking at an older version of your ReadMe, or if I was missing something?
Thanks for your contributions in this field and for your thorough documentation. It’s made this a great learning experience for me!
Grub is part of oficial Slackware so after installing liveslak open a terminal and do:
# grub-install
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Or continue using elilo / lilo whatever fits your needs
Thank you! 😀
First of all I would recommend to read grub manual. It is quite complex boot loader comparing to elilo. Eg. using grub with btrfs requires some additional work. Best scenario to use grub is having several operational systems, advanced file system. Say with grub I can boot iso images directly from hard drive. This is kind of alternative to use virtual machines.
Good to know, thanks! I was mostly aiming toward GRUB because of the bootloader modification support that it’s community has. I did some research on ELILO to see if it has anything similar, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of resources available for modifying that bootloader specifically.
I think you were able to modify LILO so I suspect ELILO has customization options available, there just are very few resources out on that due to GRUB’s popularity I suspect.
Hi Dave,
As Lazy_slacker already mentioned, you can install Grub with some manual work – the Slackware installer does not yet support it as an option next to (e)lilo. I hope that will change at some point.
The liveslak project *does* use Grub to boot on UEFI systems (and syslinux to boot BIOS systems), so that is why you see it so frequently mentioned 🙂
Thanks Alien!
So just to clarify, is the Slackware Installation on the desktop a script to install Liveslak to disk, or is it the Slackware official installer with some tweaks? I had thought it installed Liveslak to disc, so it would contain most of the same resources and structure of your Liveslak implementation, but based on this discussion and what’s in the readme document I think I am mistaken.
Apologies for the perhaps silly questions, thanks for the assistance! 😀
No honestly curious question is silly.
So, actually the install option on the desktop is a modified Slackware setup script.
The “setup2hd” as this expanded script is called, offers the option to install the content of your liveslak ISO/USB to your computer harddrive. During that installation process, all the “live” magic is removed so that you end up with a regular Slackware. Along with that, you will also get some of the OS and user configuration that your liveslak system offers you out of the box.
But just like the original Slackware “setup”, this “setup2hd” script allows a regular Slackware installation using an online Slackware mirror as the source of packages. That can be a http/ftp server on the internet or your LAN, or a NFS or Samba server on your local network. In this case, there are still some post-install configuration options that you won’t find in the Slackware installer: The “setup2hd” lets you create your non-root user account and it will offer the choice of installing a firewall with some basic rules that you can enable.
Thank you so much for the clarification! The readme suggested that it was a modified script, but your description here of where the modifications come in filled in a lot of the blanks for me! 🙂
Thanks again for the quick responses and for your hard work on this project! Amazing work! 😀
Hi Alien, I hope you are doing well.
I just wanted to report what may be a bug that I’ve discovered with Liveslak current. I was attempting to run your Slackware script installer that we’ve discussed in this thread using the current XFCE iso but was having issues when creating a bootloader entry during the final step of the installation and could not boot into the resulting Slackware OS. No bootloader entry was created, and the drives had no detected operating system on them, even after several installation attempts and a full drive wipe. I noticed I was getting GRUB-related EFI errors during the final step of the installation, right after the ELILO prompts, even after allocating space for EFI in my partitions.
However, using the stable build of v15.0 with KDE, I utilized the same partitioning scheme and configuration settings and did not encounter this error. Instead, the installation worked successfully, and I was able to boot into the resulting Slackware OS.
My apologies if there is a proper medium you have for bug reports here that I am not aware of, I just wanted to provide feedback. It’s entirely possible this is something on my end, but it may be worth logging an incident to look into if you have a bug-tracker. I would attempt the installation with the v15.0 Stable build with XFCE to see if it’s perhaps an issue with my machine, but the only stable build I was able to find was using KDE.
Hi Dave,
The Slackware setup which I morphed into “setup2hd” is still for the most part the actual Slackware scripts. In particular the part where you configure and install a bootloader. There’s nothing there that was added by liveslak.
In addition, if you see Grub-related errors those can not originate from the Slackware setup at all: Slackware setup does not support Grub (yet). It may be that you had installed Grub before on that computer and it was not completely wiped.
By the way, I do not have a bug tracker, because that only causes people to believe that I will fix their bugs.
Good to know, I’ll look into that then, thanks for the pointer! Just wanted to make a note of it here in case it was something you weren’t aware of. 🙂
Have a good weekend!
I appreciate your work on liveslak. I encountered a problem booting liveslak 1.7.0:
SLACKWARELIVE: No live media found… trouble ahead.
SLACKWARELIVE: Try adding “rootdelay=20” to the boot command.
RESCUE mode
Adding rootdelay=20 to the boot command had no positive effect. I found this workaround in rescue mode that got me to the Slackware Live desktop:
# mkdir /mnt/tmp
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/tmp/
# mount /mnt/tmp/slackware64-live-current.iso /mnt/media/
# exit
This issue occurs with Ventoy + liveslak 1.7.0 on a Thinkpad X1C with NVMe drive, but not on a different machine without an NVMe drive. The older liveslack 1.6.0 (on the same Ventoy partition) boots smoothly on the problem machine.
I mentioned NVMe, but I don’t know if it’s the culprit. This issue seems related to the comment by Zdenko Dolar on August 4.
Hi Jeff,
At least knowing that liveslak 1.6.0 based ISO works with Ventoy but the 1.7.0 version refuses to boot, should help a bit with the troubleshooting. Until now, I have not found the time to pick this up.
Note that slackware64-live-15.0.iso boots with Ventoy without any workaround, but with current iso I add as workaround a boot parameter:
livemedia=scandev:/slackware64-live-current.iso
(ie on the grub menu choose your lang/tz as usual, then press e to edit on the boot entry, type similar on the end of the linux… line, and then press F10 to boot)
Zdenko, Jeff, gigglesuk, I believe that I have fixed the issue of booting a liveslak ISO on a UEFI computer using a Ventoy disk: https://git.liveslak.org/liveslak/commit/?id=f58530ceb112d4c018a68e064b73c650d9c493f4
I currently don’t have a BIOS based computer to test, but the changes I made are not affecting how liveslak boots on a BIOS computer anyway.
The next update of Slackware-current will result in a new live ISO at https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/slackware64-current-live/ and https://us.slackware.nl/slackware-live/slackware64-current-live/ with these changes incorporated.
Working fine here (with an ISO made using your update). Thank you very much.
Thanks for testing and confirming!
Thank you Eric.
Today I downloaded and tested your liveslack64-current dated today.
Confirm booting on notebooks with NVMe disks.
Best regards