I am ready with a new batch of packages for Plasma 5 and to showcase that in a Slackware Live Edition, I stamped a new version on ‘liveslak‘.
Version 1.1.5 is ready, again containing only minor tweaks compared to the previous release. I made a set of ISO images for several variants of the 64bit and 32bit versions of Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak 1.1.5 and using Slackware-current dated “Thu Dec 1 08:49:20 UTC 2016“. These ISO images have been uploaded and are available on the primary server ‘bear‘. You will find ISO images for a full Slackware, Plasma5, MATE and Cinnamon (yes, I did one this time!) variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant.
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 4.4.32.
The SLACKWARE variant contains exactly that: the latest slackware-current and nothing else.
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 still Mate 1.16 (GTK3 version).
The Cinnamon variant (KDE 4 replaced by Cinnamon) contains the latest Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment created from the repository at http://slackware.uk/csb/14.2/ .
The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_16.12” as found in my ktown repository. 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 1.1.4 and 1.1.5
The ‘1.1.5’ tag was applied to accompany the release of the new ISOs so the progress is not stellar – liveslak is quite stable:
- (e)liloconfig are patched when installed, so they work properly when executed from a Live environment through the harddisk installer ‘setup2hd’. I had some issues in the past when installing from PLASMA5 Live to an UEFI based computer and hope that these patches are the cure.
- various updates in package content for the XFCE, PLASMA5, MATE and CINNAMON ISOs.
- the ‘bonus’ subdirectory in the ISO the download area contains multilib related modules which you can copy to either the ‘addons’ or the ‘optional’ subdirectory of liveslak. The two will add multilib capability to your 64bit Live environment. Note that the PLASMA5 ISO already contains these two modules in ‘optional’:
- 0050-multilib-current-x86_64.sxz
- 0060-wine-1.9.23-current-x86_64.sxz
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 CINNAMON. 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.
- Primary location: http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/ (rsync://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/)
- Darren’s mirror (also fast!): http://slackware.uk/people/alien-slacklive/ (rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-slacklive/)
- Willy’s mirror: http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/slackware-live/
- Shasta’s mirror: http://ftp.slackware.pl/pub/slackware-live/ (rsync://ftp.slackware.pl/slackware-live/)
- Tonus’s mirror: http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/people/alien-slacklive/
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
Great work and I really appreciate all that you do for the Slackware community. I hope your new job is working out for you.
God speed!
Alien Bob,
Thanks for all your hard work! Using the plasma version of LiveSlack “as we speak.”
I really, really like the “When you get serious” boot screen. It would nice if Mr. Volkerding could be convinced to use it as the “official” Slackware boot screen. 🙂
As to plasma/kde-5…. well, not in this lifetime, but that is not to take away from the GREAT things you have accomplished with LiveSlack.
Thanks, again.
(And a Very Merry Christmas to you and yours!)
Nice !
I especially like your addition of the new Multilib and Wine Modules.
I am busy backing up my Laptop to a new File Server this morning but I’ll rsync a new copy of the files later today and try them out.
Thank you Eric !
— kjh
cwizardone I will never force Plasma 5 onto you. You did try and formed your opinion, that’s OK. More than OK, you have an opinion that comes from experience.
There is enough other stuff to enjoy. Anyone should find something they like among all those ISO images.
By the way, did you ever do a trial run of LXQT or Lumina?
I’ve loaded up Lumina and taken it for a spin… two or three times and like what I saw, but thought it a little too early in its development to be as useful as I would like.
I was reading up on LXQT just the other day, but haven’t gotten around to installing it.
Mostly I bounce between kde4 (in current) and Xfce. This time of the year I like to be able to run XSnow on the desktop. I don’t know the first thing about programing, but sometimes wish I knew just enough to tweak XSnow so it will run on KDE4.
🙂
Nice!
cwizardone, it is unfortunate that xsnow does not work in a KDE environment.
Therefore, do checkout the package “kwin-effect-snow” which will appear in my repository in an hour. After installing, go to “System Settings > Desktop Effects > All Effects” and enable snow in the “Candy” section. You can assign a key combination to the effect in order to enable or disable it. Not as nice as xsnow (the snow does not accumulate on top of your windows) but it does present that christmas feeling.
Thank you very much!
Greatly appreciated!
Hi , i have a curiosity question.
Why no use grub en the /boot menu ?
I see in EFI/BOOT , but in /boot use syslinux , why ?
I launch the question because i see EFI menu is more easy to do , with dinamically lang kbd etc.
In a normal boot , when select a languaje , the boot starts automatically , no return to selections menu .. when config de KBD , menu returns perfectly but not in LANG ,
That not occurs in EFI menu , in EFI menu can select keyboard and languaje and ever return to main menu.
Thats a bug ?
Thanks for your great work !!!
Not a bug, but a limitation of syslinux.
But I still like syslinux more than grub, so the BIOS boot will remain with syslinux for now. Perhaps in future I will change that, but when I started the project I did not even have EFI boot in mind and just wanted something quick that boots a demo live environment, and syslinux seemed a logical choice to handle boot.
que pasa user amos a recordarle
when a variant with KDE3?? when?
Thanks a lot great work !!!
Thanks for explanation.
I try some tricks for test , like change in lang , the lan_us.cfg to lang.cfg for fun and test.
Not interested in KDE3. It is dead. I never liked it.
Hello. Will there be a version of Slackware NetInstall? Alternatively, an installer gui version live cd?
Best wishes!
tomtom – “netinstall” is a debian thing. For Slackware you can download a mini ISO of ~50 MB which does not contain any package, only the installer. Perhaps that is what you need. The installer supports NFS, Samba, HTTP and FTP as network installation options. See http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackboot/mini/
Your remark “an installer gui version live cd”… I do not understand a word of what you are trying to ask here.
slackware64-live-cinnamon-current.iso doesn’t have the setup2hd script…how can I install slackware cinnamon on HD?
Thanks for your effort and good job!
slackadmin, the script is contained in that ISO as “/usr/local/sbin/setup2hd”. If you type “setup2hd” you must be the root user for the command to be found in the $PATH.
I guess you tried running the command as the “live” user.
Logged as root user (login: root, password: root), I cannot find setup2hd script under /usr/local/sbin ….
I tried also in /usr/bin, /usr/sbin without success …. 🙁
slackadmin , can’t explain what you are experiencing. Try to download the ISO again… or download the .md5 or .asc file and verify the integrity of your ISO. Works here. How are you booting the ISO? Did you do anything to its content?
The setup2hd script is part of the “/liveslak/system/0099-slackware_zzzconf-current-x86_64.sxz” live module.
I can boot properly the http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/slackware64-live-cinnamon-current.iso downloaded…once entered with login: root and password: root, no setup2hd is present…setup2hd is instead present in http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/slackware64-live-current.iso
Anyway, I’ll download again slackware64-live-cinnamon-current.iso …
Thanks alienbob!!!
It worked!!…after downloading again slackware64-live-cinnamon-current.iso now setup2hd is in /usr/local/sbin directory…
I see now that the size is 1.8 GB against the 1.6 GB in my previous iso release …
Thanks again!! Slack rules!
Hi AlienBob,
is it still possible to build a LiveCD based on Slackware 14.2 with your latest code? I tried it, but near the end it fails with:
patching file /mnt/slackwarelive/sbin/liloconfig
patching file /mnt/slackwarelive/usr/sbin/eliloconfig
Hunk #1 FAILED at 75.
Hunk #2 FAILED at 90.
patch: **** Can’t reopen file /mnt/slackwarelive/usr/sbin/eliloconfig : No such file or directory
*** ./make_slackware_live.sh FAILED at line 1355 ***
I could probably just revert the commits where you introduced the elilo patching, but I don’t know if that will break anything. 😛
-Danny
Hi schmatzler… the liveslak scripts should be usable on Slackware 14.2. It looks like I may have to tweak my eliloconfig patching a bit, I will look into that.
Thanks for the bug report and welcome back.
Unfortunately, it grew by 200MB coparing to 1.1.4 and no longer fits on 4 GB thumbdrive – due to the wine in extra. Won’t it break anything if i’ll remove wine and multilib from ISO?
Janis, that is a valid remark. There is no real need to ship wine as part of the ISO, I just thought it was a nice showcase of multilib Slackware. But I can consider making wine available online as a squashfs module in the “bonus” directory on the server. However, that will not be a guarantee that the ISO will not grow in future. In fact, with the release of Applications 16.12 chances are that the size of packages will grow again. Those 200 MB you are talking about are already cutting it close.
Perhaps the fastest solution for your issue is indeed to loop-mount the ISO, copy the files to harddisk, remove the squashfs modules you do not need (multilib and wine) and re-master the ISO. Removing those two does not break the Live OS.
could you please tell me which version has the LXQT & Lumina Desktop
Environment? can you give the ISO name and the URL?
Thanks
what’s the easiest way to install software on slackware?
Analog64, you’re looking for the PLASMA5 variant. That one contains the Plasma 5 desktop (of course) and also Lumina and LXQT. Along with the stock Slackware desktop environment XFCE, but excluding KDE4. What was so unclear about my sentence “The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_16.12” as found in my ktown repository. This ISO also contains the LXQT and Lumina Desktop Environments“?
The article also mentions several download URLs, each of which has a “latest” subdirectory in which there is exactly one ISO with “plasma5” as part of its name. How hard can it be?
Eric —
I promised to report back how Version 1.1.5 worked for me.
It has been working so well I forgot to report back until yesterday when I received a notice about Analog64’s post.
Oops, sorry 🙂
slackware64-live-plasma5-current.iso ( 20161210 (Alien BOB) ) is working VERY well.
Thank you !
— kjh
Thanks kjhambrick for the feedback.
I need to find time to evaluate the new KDE Applications 16.12.x as there’s a lot of package changes. New job is wearing me out, but I hope to find a cadence that allows me to retain enough energy at night to do more than merely answering posts online, watching Netflix and reading books 😉
There’s also a whole new branch of liveslak waiting to be applied and then my next round of Live ISO’s sports one additional variant of Slackware… containing PAM & systemd.
I’ll post more about that once it is ready for release. Remember: you need to study your enemy to find its weak spots 🙂
PAM !
Woo Hoo !!
I have been working on a maintenance Plan for Slackware + PAM for our Customer Machines.
I am anxious to see what you come up with.
Thanks Eric !
— kjh
liveslak is only acting as a vehicle for a Live version of a Slackware spinoff.
That is similar to what happened for Cinelerra Live (https://cinelerra-cv.org/cinelive.php) for which I added the required functionality to liveslak when they asked for it.
In this new variant, you will find Slackware plus PAM and systemd, and with KDE4 replaced by Gnome3. All this is provided by the Dlackware project (https://github.com/Dlackware).
The research and the packaging effort has been done by bartgymnast. I merely QA-ed the packages and scripts so that they meet my level of maturity, added ‘DLACKWARE’ as a supported variant to liveslak, and tested the resulting ISO. Works quite nicely. Wait and see.
Hi Eric, Congrats on the 1.1.5 LiveSlak release. I’ve upgraded my 1.1.4 HD install through slackpkg+. I need to report a bug. When using KDE, about every 30 minutes the main panel will lock and not respond. If I switch to TTY1 and then back to TTY7 the panel becomes attentive again. I’m using nouveau and saw a potential bug also reported in openSUSE usign Plasma5, but it is from spring 2016 and would have thought it corrected by now, requires loading the NVIDIA drivers. What happens is the launcher and panel no longer respond to mouse input and F2 also doesn’t respond, while CNTL+ALT+TTY1 does, so only the open applications (except for window functions like maximize or close) and the switch TTY function respond. It is really odd behavior and doesnt’ seem to be open application associated, since it happens even when I have no applications open. What additional information can I provide or is there a solution short of installing the NVIDIA drivers? Thanks.
Brian, perhaps related to https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338999 or https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kwin/+bug/1440210
That second one also has a suggestion in there which I repeat, slightly changed for Slackware:
# cat < /etc/profile.d/kwin-fix.sh
export KWIN_USE_BUFFER_AGE=0
EOT
# chown root:root /etc/profile.d/kwin-fix.sh
# chmod 0755 /etc/profile.d/kwin-fix. sh
Can you try this (login again to make this effective)?
Eric, yes those are the threads that I found. I had already swtiched to the Oxygen theme and window decorations, since Dolphin started from any other WM had no icons.
I’ve tried the kwin-fix.sh and it does slightly improve the situation. Spcifically video and audio streams continue to play and show within Chromium instead of freezing. My symptoms are still that open apps can receive and send input, but the window functions and panel are frozen to input unless I swich to VT1 and back to VT7. ALT+SHF+F12 and ALT+TAB has no effect.
If this bug is still outstanding with NVIDIA hardware (note the OP of the BUG was using INTEL) I should probably open a bug on kde, but I’m not sure what debugging information to provide and would appreciate your suggestion. Dmesg doesn’t show any errors related.
XFCE doesn’t display these symptoms. I haven’t tried LXQt yet, which I believe doesn’t use kwin but can be setup to use kwin. I should investigate if switch LXQt to kwin WM if the same happens, thus isolating to kwin issue, rather than graphics driver issue?
What is your opinion of the late comments in bug listing of possible issue iwth Xlib?
So I loaded LXQt and changed the window manager to kwin_x11 and restarted session. Freeze happened after about one hour of use. Same symptoms, can interact with open applications but LXQt panel, ALT+TAB, and any Alt+FN is non-responsive. Only CNTL+ALT+Fn to move to VT1 and back to VT7 work to unfreeze the dock panel and window functions of open applications. This seems to point to a kwin issue, but I’m not sure how to report to KDE. Maybe I’ll simply move back to LXQt with openbox and simply watch the KDE Plasma development. BTW I can’t load the NVIDIA blob because my card is too old, so have to use Nouveau drivers with -current’s X server.
Hi Brian,
I guess your test shows that kwin is definitely the culprit. Perhaps there is a lower-layer library which has the actual bug, I noticed that xlib was mentioned somewhere.
In a bug report you can best describe what you did, and what the observations were. You actually have quite a bit of detail to add, if you use the information in the above posts.
Thanks Eric. I’ll setup a bug report based on my experience with symptoms. It seems the KDE team would like output from queues and logs, just not sure what to send them. In meantime I’ve setup with XFCE and can switch to LXQt with standard Openbox windowmanager.
Hi Eric, I’m wondering if you’ve ever written how to properly use setup2hd on a LVM/LUKS HD? I’ve run in to the problem that after:
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 (#my target LVM?LUKS partition)
# vgscan –mknodes
# vgchange -ay
# lvscan
# and then mount /cryptvg/root, /var/, /opt, /tmp, and /home that the setup2hd recognizes the partions but simply writes the new files into the partition folders although I tell it to format the partition during the setup2hd. I expected that if I said to format the partition it would wipe the data and install the LiveSlak files, was that a bad assumption? The added files screwed the installation and I had to re-install from the standard slackware64 14.2 iso, then upgrade to current and then add your ktown and multilib, ..tedious.
Is there anymore information I can provide about what I attempted? Is there a step I missed with the LVM/LUKS drive before starting the setup2hd?
BrianA_MN, i installed the Plasma5 Live to this very laptop I am typing on, using setup2hd. The laptop is fully encrypted using one big LUKS volume and inside that, several LVM volumes.
There were issues with that, due to the setup process still using hardcoded /mnt (a Slackware heritage). Also, (e)liloconfig were writing files into the Live filesystem instead of to the target harddisk.
The upcoming Live ISOs should have a fully functional setup2hd because I spent quite some time polishing the setup files. I managed to use setup2hd to install Slackware Live to a UEFI-based computer yesterday without hassles.
I did not make notes when installing this laptop, unfortunately. But I do not recognize the issues you describe. I largely followed the README_CRYPT.TXT.
Hi Eric, thanks for the speedy feedback. To be clear, my newest issue started after the latest slackware updates. Specifically I lost “X” because the newest libinput from slackware64 didn’t write, anomoly or slackpkg+ config issue not sure which. Then before realizing it was a missing libinput I thought I’d simply reinstall from the 1.1.5 LiveSlak of Dec 12, 2016. That’s when the weird not wiping partition issue started.
Maybe my mistake is that I thought setup and setup2hd would format and wipe/clear all data from a partition if selecting format option during the TARGET DRIVE setup step. I was re-using the ext4 existing format. BTW this same problem is happening with the slackware64 14.2 standard iso also. Is this a bug I should report? It is reproducible. I’ve done it about three times now with 1.1.3, 1.1.5, and standard iso. I’m following the README_CRYPT.TXT steps except that the LUKS/LVM’s already exist so they have to be mounted instead of being created.
Maybe I should change it to ext3 then back to ext4 and see if it removes the data and file index. How did you manage to overcome the hardcoded /mnt and eliloconfig? I tried mounting proc, sys, dev to the LVM’s but that didn’t work and it did look like your liveslak /setup2hd gained /boot instead of the actual target drive /boot partition, again setup process.
When will your latest iso’s be available?
Hi Brian
Your observation “setup2hd gained /boot instead of the actual target drive /boot partition” is one of the issues caused by Slackware’s hard-coded ‘/mnt’ as the location to mount the TARGET media. I fixed all that, hopefully. The online git repository has all these fixes already, and new ISOs will be built soon-ish using that code. I just need to build a new Plasma 5 package set first.
Perhaps I am reading it the wrong way, but you do not have to mount your LVM partitions manually before starting the ‘setup2hd’. All that’s required before starting ‘setup2hd’ is that you have created all the partitions you will need for the installation of Slackware to the harddisk.
When running ‘setup2hd’ (just like the regular Slackware ‘setup’), you will get to the stage where you have to pick partitions and assign them to / , /home , /boot etc. That will be the moment where the setup will create filesystems on these partitions and mount them for you. That’s also the stage where these partitions will be formatted, erasing existing data.
If you already mounted existing filesystems on these LVM volumes before running ‘setup2hd’, then the reformatting will fail (a mounted filesystem will not be reformatted).
I must confess my problem is a result of being inattentive to a simple detail of README_CRYPT.TXT, i.e. that all the commands are being run from root account. I attempted to be a “security aware” user and run from sudo, which caused the problem.
So others learn from my mistake I’ll explain… If you attempt to use /usr/local/sbin/setup2hd from sudo the installation will fail to see the drives unless you use the string of commands in my previous post, which I was doing from sudo not root. Additionally sudo will NOT format the drive, instead it will only overwrites files causing duplicate files of different versions and a mess to fix manually with pkgtool or slackpkg removing the dups.
To properly install on an existing LUKS/LVM volume be aware that after booting to the liveslack you will need to
1: open a xterm and change to root using su –
2. run cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/{device designation} cryptvg
(you can find the LUKS/LVM device designation by running “blkid | grep crypt)
3. then run /usr/local/sbin/setup2hd and follow the prompts.
After setup wants to exit DO NOT REBOOT until you have made a initrd.gz.
4. switch environment by using chroot /setup2hd
then run the mkinitrd generator and also edit lilo.conf. under /setup2hd/etc/lilo.conf
These steps are taken directly from the README_CRYPT.TXT. In that text note the commands are from “#”, indicating the root account. In that document under “Combining LUKS and LVM” for an existing LUKS/LVM volume you only need to act on paragraph 7 (* Open the encrypted partition so that we can start…) and then skip to 14 (Let the installation complete, and after you select “EXIT”…) and finish the steps for making your initrd and lilo.conf in the setup2hd environment.
If you want to keep your /home partition, simply select “No format…” when going through the setup process.
I know many readers of Eric’s blog are intermediate or advanced Linux users and this maybe unnecessary detail. Eric thank you for your support to us who are attempting to become intermediate Linux users and be worthy of your blog and not just users of your great software adaptions.
Cheers!