My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

New ISOs for Slackware Live (liveslak-1.3.4)

I have uploaded a set of fresh Slackware Live Edition ISO images. They are based on the liveslak scripts version 1.3.4. The ISOs are variants of Slackware-current “Tue Dec 24 18:54:52 UTC 2019“. The PLASMA5 variant comes with my december release of ‘ktown‘ aka  KDE-5_19.12 and boots a Linux 4.5.6 kernel.

 

Download these ISO files preferably via rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/ because that allows easy resume if you cannot download the file in one go.

Liveslak sources are maintained in git. The 1.3.4 release brings some note-worthy changes to the Plasma5 ISO image.

PLease be aware of the following change in the Plasma5 Live Edition. The size of the ISO kept growing with each new release. Partly because KDE’s Plasma5 ecosystem keeps expanding, and in part because I kept adding more of my own packages that also grew bigger. I had to reduce the size of that ISO to below what fits on a DVD medium.
I achieved this by removing (almost) all of my non-Plasma5 packages from the ISO.
The packages that used to be part of the ISO (the ‘alien’ and ‘alien restricted’ packages such as vlc, libreoffice, qbittorrent, calibre etc) are now separate downloads.
You can find 0060-alien-current-x86_64.sxz and 0060-alienrest-current-x86_64.sxz in the “bonus” section of the slackware-live download area. They should now be used as “addons” to a persistent USB version of Slackware Live Edition.

Refreshing the persistent USB stick with the new Plasma5 ISO

If you – like me – have a persistent USB stick with Slackware Live Edition on it and you refresh that stick with every new ISO using “iso2usb.sh -r <more parameters>”, then with the new ISO of this month you’ll suddenly be without my add-on packages.
But if you download the two sxz modules I mentioned above, and put them in the directory “/liveslak/addons/” of your USB stick, the modules will be loaded automatically when Slackware Live Edition boots and you’ll have access to all my packages again.

What was Slackware Live Edition and liveslak again?

If you want to read about what the Slackware Live Edition can do for you, check out the official landing page for the project, https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/ or any of the articles on this blog that were published later on.

Extensive documentation on how to use and develop Slackware Live Edition (you can achieve a significant level of customization without changing a single line of script code) can be found in the Slackware Documentation Project Wiki.

Have fun!

15 Comments

  1. Justaname

    Still buggy as heck. Can’t logout, suspend or reboot without the desktop freezing, and have to access a virtual console to force shutdown… Questionable service running, labled “:-0” in task manager. Frequent freezes for several seconds.
    I give up on live slack.

    • alienbob

      Well “Justaname”… this kind of post is totally useless. It contains no information that allows me to try and find out what’s causing your grief and to help you fix this.

  2. thim

    Did this upgrade a few days ago. Everything runs smoothly! Thanks again Eric! My best wishes for the new year – to you and to everyone around here.

  3. justaname

    First of all, I want to apologize for the way I came across. I could have come across better. It was a bad day and has nothing to do with anyone or anything in particular.
    I do appreciate the time spent to create this distro. SystemD is what led me to try slackware ( I don’t like the direction linux is going with systemd, personally).

    I’ve been trying live slack (xfce version) off and on for six months (downloading new versions every month or two), and the same exact thing has been happening.

    I have no debug info to give and I’m sorry I can’t be of better help. I don’t have the disc any more.

    All I know is, every time I try to log out, shutdown or reboot, the desktop freezes completely. I can’t click anything on the desktop or menu. I have to hit CTRL + ALT + F keys to get to a virtual terminal to force shutdown. I can’t even restart Xorg.

    It’s been the same for the past six months since I started trying this distro. I’m sorry I can’t be of better help.

    I _do_ appreciate the work you put into this distro, however. Knowing that all are volunteers in the FOSS community.

    Please don’t ever give in to SystemD.

    • alienbob

      If you ever decide to re-visit one of the Slackware Live ISO images, please check whether ‘dmesg’ shows any relevant errors? Also, /var/log/Xorg.0.log may show some information of use. Also, if it is possible to test on multiple computers, that could give clues. Is your computer equipped with a Nvidia graphics card for instance?
      Also, how are you booting? Was the ISO burnt to a DC or DVD? Or did you transfer it to a USB stick. And is that then a persistent Live OS or not? Etc… lots of questions.

      • justaname

        Will do. Thanks.

  4. gauchao

    Wonderful work, Eric. Thank you very much. I can walk around with my Slackware system in my pocket. Too many features and possibilities yet to be explored by me, one is the encription.

    Thank you very much for all your efforts and a great 2020 for you and your beloved ones.

  5. Regnad Kcin

    Recently an intern in our lab was interested in the power of Linux and I made a PLASMA5 USB variant with persistent data for him. He was so happy with it that we made some space on his laptop and installed Slackware on the SSD directly from the USB. The cool thing is that you get a ready-to-go Plasma5-Slackware with LibreOffice, etc, right off the USB.

    • alienbob

      Cool 🙂

  6. benibela

    Is it possible to add a forth partition (fat32) to liveslak? I want to make a usb stick that can be used for booting and to copy files between windows computers.

    i have a 4 GB stick, and df says after installing liveslak 1.4 GB is free on /dev/sdb3, so I thought I could resize that partition to make it smaller, and add the windows partition behind it. But it does not work: $ resize2fs -p /dev/sdb3 2G
    resize2fs 1.44.6 (5-Mar-2019)
    resize2fs: New size smaller than minimum (957179)

    • alienbob

      Sure, I can add an option to the ‘iso2usb.sh’ script that allows you to reserve an amount of un-allocated space at the end of the drive. Then you can use that to create an additional partition.

      • benibela

        That would be great. Thanks.

  7. DLC Burggraaff

    Dear Eric: I see that on Feb 7 you updated the slackware-live-current.iso, but not the slackware64 one. Any particular reason or just lack of time?
    Also I see that you dropped the mate iso. It was nice for as long as it lasted …
    Kind regards, Dick

    • alienbob

      I made a 32bit Slackware Live ISO for a friend of mine, who owns an old 32bit EEEPC and wanted to run Slackware on that.
      The server space is such that I have to make choices about what to host there. There was no “slackware-live-current.iso”. So in order to be able to upload that 32bit ISO I had to delete the MATE ISO as a consequence.

  8. justaname

    alienbob,

    I just downloaded and tried the latest KDE version, and it works flawlessly on my computer. I was a little hesitant to try the XFCE version, as I posted here I had a lot of problems with it in the past.

    But the KDE version works flawlessly, and I just wanted to say thank you for your hard work in making these distros.

    And I wanted to say (again) I’m sorry for the comment I made before.

    All the best!

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