To conclude this week’s batch of updates in my repositories I have re-generated the ISO for PLASMA5 Slackware Live Edition – it is based on liveslak 1.1.6.2 and using Slackware-current dated “Mon Feb 13 06:21:22 UTC 2017“.
If you already use PLASMA5 Live on a 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.
What to expect from the PLASMA5 ISO
This ISO is a showcase for the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_17.02” as found in my ktown repository and in particular the new Plasma 5.9 with lots of improvements – plainly visible as well as under the hood. Read my previous post about the new Plasma 5 if you are interested. Now that I have Plasma 5.9 I was able to move the Slackware entry on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Live_Images significantly upwards.
The recently released LibreOffice 5.3.0 was added to this ISO as well. See my recent post about this 5.3.0 release.
A ffmpeg package with version 3.2.4 from my restricted repository (i.e. including mp3 and aac encoders) is also bundled with the ISO. It replaces the ffmpeg-3.2.3 package which is part of the Slackware core. This should not cause issues but please let me know if some Slackware program stopped working because of it.
The rest of my bunch of packages from my regular repository is again present: chromium (with the latest flash and widevine plugins), vlc, veracrypt, qbittorrent, openjdk, handbrake, dropbox-client, calibre 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.
This PLASMA5 Slackware Live OS is 64bit multilib. By default, no 32bit programs are loaded into the Live environment but if you want to load Wine or Skype into PLASMA5 Slackware Live, all you need to do is add a parameter to the boot commandline in Grub or syslinux. Add “load=wine” to make Wine available. Add “load=skype” to make Skype available in the Live OS. Of course to get them both, you add “load=wine,skype”. Also check out the paragraph below called “Multilib considerations“.
The changes between liveslak scripts 1.1.6 and 1.1.6.2
Not much has changed really – the “1.1.6.2” tag is primarily meant to differentiate the new PLASMA5 ISO from older versions. The boot screen of Slackware Live Edition mentions the version of liveslak it was based on which is useful for bug reports.
- Fixed the “sed” logic in ‘make_slackware_live.sh‘ script to get rid of hardcoded ‘/mnt‘ paths in the modified Slackware installer files which are used by ‘setup2hd’. I tested harddisk installation onto an UEFI computer and that went fine.
- Danish is a new language choice in the boot menu (Grub and syslinux).
- unrar is added to the PLASMA5 variant.
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 Live OS.
Multilib is something would not need except for running stuff like Wine or Skype, so I also added live modules for Wine (including the 32bit OpenAL libraries) and Skype as separate modules in the ‘optional‘ subdirectory of the PLASMA5 ISO and made copies of these 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), and then using the “makemod” script which is part of liveslak:
# 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 are not loaded into the live OS on boot unless 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 these live 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
- 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/)
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
Good Job BOB,
Fantastic.
IIRC, I’ve mentioned this before.
Perhaps, Comcast doesn’t agree with your provider, but I’m on a hardwired 100 mb/s line, but I’m lucky to see better than 240 kb/s from either of the above links. At that speed it would about 6 hours to download the plasma version. Something is not right, but I don’t know at which end of the connection. Just FYI.
(Regardless, thanks for all your hard work. It is greatly appreciated)
One of the servers (bear) is in France while the other is located in the UK. Both are on fat pipes and with different providers. It is highly likely that your US provider is the bottleneck (or the peering arrangements between providers in Europa and the US).
I do not know of any US based servers that carry mirrors of my ‘ktown’ packages, now that my ‘taper’ host is no longer active.
If there’s anyone in the US with a public mirror URL then let me know so I can mention the new mirror in future posts.
Thanks for your great job!
I’ve found a bug and didn’t know where to send it.
NetworkManager cannot save the connections because the directory /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections does not exists.
Ho josemrb, that sounds like an issue which has to be fixed in the Slackware NetworkManager package. To be sure, will configurations be saved after you manually create this directory?
> To be sure, will configurations be saved after you manually create this directory?
Yes, It works fine after I created the directory.
josemrb
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections exists in the latest current package 😉
and also on 14.2 version 😉
Ok, sorry i use my 1.6.2 package, the slackware-current don’t have:
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections
Eric you report this to Pat, or me ?
new 1.6.2 versio, is no affected:
https://github.com/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/d9ebd31d402124f63762302ea653c5443941ea8c
Hi , i think is good idea to add “sdhci” module driver inside initrd , this module add the option to boot with a sdhci cards.
Thanks !
USUARIONUEVO I will do that for the next release of liveslak, no problem.
Thanks eric!
There are the list on involved kernel options, for boot using sdhci card.
MMC
MMC_BLOCK
MMC_SDHCI
MMC_SDHCI_PCI
MMC_SDHCI_ACPI
Kernel configuration options are not so important (because I do not recompile the Slackware kernel for my Live ISO), the dependency kernel modules are. the mkinitrd script will find all the required dependencies for modules which are explicitly mentioned on the commandline, and add those dependencies to the initrd image.
Just tried the latest Plasma5 iso. So far everything has been smooth, except when i tried to run handbrake. Exits with an error: libvpx.so.3 not found. It seems libvpx.so.4 exists instead. Creating a link from libvpx.so.3 to libvpx.so allows handbrake to run. I didn’t try using VP8/VP9.
SouLShadow, I’ll check that tonight. I want to generate a new set of ISOs next week and if handbrake needs a recompile, I will make sure it happens before.
Thanks for all the cool builds Eric. I noticed in the 14.2 plasma latest. kdeconnect was not working so I put a build script of version 1.0
on my git hub “Drakeo” Seems to work fine. you can tweak the script for other versions. my build puts the readme and the slack-desc and info in the build script
Drakeo, kdeconnect is working fine here on slackware64-current. Your “not working” is not a helpful feedback, I can not help you based on just that.
i have tried for 2 days to down load your plasma live iso I give up at 75 mps down speed your server still takes hours Eric i wish you luck. after 3 hours not worth the time.
Drakeo, there are more locations where these Live ISO images are mirrored. They may offer better download speeds from your location.
For instance:
http://slackware.uk/people/alien-slacklive/latest/
http://repo.gsacrd.ab.ca/slackware-live/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/slackware-live/latest/
Perhaps there are more.
thanks for Krusader, It’s a really great file manager! I also use now Double Commander since it is compatible with the Total Commander plug-ins that I need. I would also like to see a livecd based on the Trinity DE as a classic environment for Slackware.
Your latest live iso the user does not have permission for dhcpcd hard to believe no one brought this up Eric hard to believe you did not see the same problem I seen after down loading the iso using your ubs2iso.sh running everything as you wanted as default LUKS and all WTF
Hi Drakeo
Just to be clear, you are referring to the latest PLASMA5 Live ISO? What is the issue or error with dhcpcd exactly?
Also, do I understand you correctly that after installing to your harddisk using ‘setup2hd’ everything is working properly? I.e. the issue you are experiencing is only present in the Live OS and not in the disk-installed OS?
Greetings,
Thank you for your hard work Alienbob.
I just downloaded the XFCE live version and when I try to create the USB with persistence (with iso2usb) it always fails at like 403.
bash-4.3# ./iso2usb.sh -i slackware-live-xfce-current.iso -o /dev/sdg -p
*** ./iso2usb.sh FAILED at line 403 ***
— Cleaning up the staging area…
Any suggestion?
Am currently running slackware-current pre-14.2 in this computer.
Thank you.
Hi again,
Sorry for bothering. It seems it fixed itself…
Created a non-persistant USB and after it, did it again with the -p option and it worked.
weird. and thank you a bunch!
Hi again,
Sorry for tripple posting.. You can delete them all if needed.
Figured out what I did wrong/different: I did not notice that -p required a persistence folder name. so, the second time I tried to create it with the -p i appeded a -v as well to try to find out what was missing. so it created a -v folder.
silly me..
Thank you.
Suggestion: Slacko/Puppy linux persistence management way where you can have multiple persistence folders effectively isolating each “profile” from one another.
Once again, thank you for your hard work.