My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Slackware Live Plasma5 edition ISO available (based on liveslak 1.3.3)

Yesterday I uploaded a new DVD-sized ISO for the Plasma5 variant of Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak scripts version 1.3.3. The ISO contains Slackware-current “Tue Nov 12 23:08:45 UTC 2019” with my KDE-5_19.11 and boots a Linux 4.19.83 kernel.

Download this ISO file slackware64-live-plasma5-current.iso 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 1.3.3 release has some fixes for PXE booting older hardware.
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!

31 Comments

  1. Jen

    Liveslack saved my ass last June when my computer died. 🙂

  2. slackaddicted

    Hi Eric

    thnx a lot as usual for the great work!

    just an advise to whom is trying the iso2usb.sh from a fresh kubuntu 19.10 > if you recieve (like me) the missing requirements in /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin is probably the lack of “extlinux” > in this case just > sudo apt-get install extlinux

    have a nice day and thnx again!

  3. alienbob

    The other Live ISOs have been refreshed yesterday evening so that they now are all based on liveslak-1.3.3 and yesterday’s Slackware-current.
    Note that unfortunately I do not have the disk space available on my server to also host a Live ISO for Slackware-current 32bit. I was looking at replacing the current host with one that has twice the storage but that would nearly triple the monthly cost for rental.

  4. jean-étienne

    Hi,
    I know how to mount the iso for modifying it
    but I don’t know how to rebuild it !
    can you explain the way to do
    thanks

    • alienbob

      This is Slackware so I expect you to consult the liveslak documentation and scripts first, and then ask about what you do not understand.
      The commands to create the ISO are somewhere in make_slackware_live.sh

  5. Yochanon

    Still loving this live edition thing after these few years. Wanting to try the very latest though, but having trouble finding the latest iso2usb.sh script. Where does one download that from?

      • Yochanon

        I spent *at least* an hour looking all over your sites. Over and over many times at the same places thinking I missed it somehow, somewhere. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything to read that will help me understand how to use ‘git’, even though I went there too hoping maybe it would somehow jump out at me suddenly how to find and use it.

        Plus, reading this article yesterday, it seemed, to me, to lean toward there being some kind of script that was updated along with the new live edition, so I kept looking for newly dated iso2usb.sh scripts and only finding the last one being made in May of this year. What made that stick in my head was when I was at the git site, I noticed that the script *is* new(ish) by seeing it had some kind of thing ‘fixed’ in it. I simply didn’t know where to get the ‘fixed’ version.

        Anyway, sorry if it bothered you, that was the last thing I meant to do. I do the best I can, getting old and my sight getting worse doesn’t help, but I apologize for you going out of your way when I know you’re quite busy all the time. I am also very grateful that you did, though, so, thank you and thank you for all the work you put into our Slackware and especially liveslak.

        Take care, stay warm.

        • alienbob

          If you look at the log of all modifications to ‘iso2usb.sh’ (see https://git.slackware.nl/liveslak/log/iso2usb.sh) then you notice that indeed the last modification was in may. The log page also shows the commit-message, i.e. the reason for the modification.
          The ‘upslak.sh’ script had more recent modifications though (see https://git.slackware.nl/liveslak/log/upslak.sh), perhaps you confused one with the other.

          I don’t think that you should be able to use git in order to use my cgit repository interface. The browser based access makes it easier to track the changes over time, and if you need to download individual files, you can always click the ‘plain’ link in a page to get the raw data displayed or downloaded.
          And there’s always the whole set of scripts and bitmaps to download from eg. http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ or any mirror. No git needed.

  6. John Wilson

    It’s nice to see Slackware is not fading into obscurity. Though to claw back the huge user base it once had; it needs to release a stable version every year to 18 months. Some of us actually need a stable fixed platform from which to work from and a lot of recompiling is a bit of a pain. However, please keep up the good work!

    • alienbob

      I too, wish that the stable releases would come more frequently… but Pat Volkerding has his own demons to battle I guess. Some decisions on Slackware’s future are not easy to make.

  7. markus

    Hey Eric,

    You should make this better known to others – many think slackware is dead.

    You are not the only one working on slackware spin-offs by the way, there are at the least two more up-to-date slackware distributions. One I think is from a swedish developer; the other is … either slackel and/or absolute linux (I am sorry, I forgot which one). And there may be another one… also zenwalk falls a bit into this.

    IMO it would be great if you guys could all get together and perhaps work together on “one slackware future to rule them all”. Anyway, great work here by you!

    • alienbob

      You are missing the point of liveslak obviously. This is not a spin-off.

      Other people who created actual Slackware spin-offs will surely have had their reasons. I see no point at all in folding the work of all of those individuals into “one Slackware”. A spin-off is not Slackware, period.

  8. markus

    By the way, can you offer a torrent? This may help for the download of the .iso since it is quite large.

  9. manciuleas

    Hi,

    Has anyone else experienced issues booting the latest Slackware Live Plasma image? I’ve transferred the image to an USB stick using iso2usb.sh but the booting would stop with an error in init saying the ‘blkid’ is not found. I’ve checked initrd.img and found that all executables from /sbin that should point to /bin/busybox are actually pointing to bin/busybox and that’s the reason why blkid is not found.
    I tried to rebuild the initrd.img after fixing the symbolic links but with the new initrd the kernel panics because it doesn’t find the rootfs.

    • alienbob

      I assume you tried to create a Live USB stick on a Slackware-current computer? I can reproduce it there. The original ISO’s initrd is just fine but the re-packed file is broken.

      It looks like the latest cpio which entered -current this month not only strips “/” but now also “../” from any link while extracting.
      I’ll have to look for a fix.

    • alienbob

      Removing “–no-absolute-filenames” from all cpio commands seems to have fixed it.
      The cpio 2.13 implements a fix for CVE-2015-1197 but this breaks extaction of the initrd.
      I have since uploaded the fixed scripts and also committed the changes to git: https://git.slackware.nl/liveslak/commit/?id=9616efdbb807c06ba9be6bea3087ef6e39f75c83

  10. Anon

    tks.

  11. manciuleas

    Hi alienbob,

    Indeed, I was using the cpio from Slackware current.
    Thank you for fixing the issue so quicky.

    Regards

  12. manciuleas

    Hi alienbob,

    Since you removed “–no-absolute-filenames” from your scripts to make it work with cpio from current won’t that break things with Slackware 14.2?

    • alienbob

      I tested extracting and re-packing the initrd on a Slackware 14.2 virtual machine before I pushed these changes.
      I also researched how other distros do this and found out that Red Hat (who applied the patch already to their cpio 2.12) also leave out the “–no-absolute-filenames”

      • manciuleas

        Great! Thank you.

  13. vadim

    Hi,
    After install setup2hd all work propertly, but first update and reboot change screen resolution and totaly hang on sddm scren?
    need help!

  14. Saleem Khan

    Can this Live ISO be installer to hard disk? Does it have an installer?

    • alienbob

      Yes, and yes. RTFM.

  15. Francisco

    HI Erick.

    As a Slackware newcomer, I manage to setup liveslack to my Hard Disk.

    Update process by means of slackpkg V2.83. Every update had been smooth and without problems.

    But update process, I did yesterday, that included recent changes mentioned in changelog for NetworkManager particularly, broke some functionality in my Install:

    1). kde sddm login y really slow. I got this from dmesg:

    [ 3694.724172] traps: upowerd[6390] trap int3 ip:7f6af34577e5 sp:7ffefdd5b840 error:0 in libglib-2.0.so.0.6200.3[7f6af341f000+7d000]

    2.) I cannot activate my WiFi connection by means of NetworkManager. I get this: “Not authorized to control networking. ” message.
    I got this bringing up wifi using nmcli as root:
    Warning: polkit agent initialization failed: Error initializing authority: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1: Launch helper exited with unknown return code 127.

    It seems there are problems with PolicyKit. Consolekit is a running process PolicyKit not polkit…

    Finally I am afraid to make changes “playing” with my install. This broken points are key infrastructure, so Please give me some hints to make some progress on this.

    My System:
    ————
    Slackware 14.2
    Post 14.2 current
    kde plasma version 5.17.2 – Framework 5.64.0
    QT Version 5.13.2 – Kernel 5.4.2
    OS Type 64-bit.

    ~

    • Ricardo

      Make sure to install mozjs60, which is a new dependency for the updated polkit package (if you use slackpgk, always make sure to run ‘slackpkg install-new’ to receive newly these added packages).

      The -curent changelog from 2019/12/11 reads:

      l/mozjs52-52.9.0esr-x86_64-2.txz: Removed.
      This was used only by polkit-0.115.
      l/mozjs60-60.9.0esr-x86_64-1.txz: Added.
      This is needed for polkit-0.116.
      l/polkit-0.116-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.

      And beware of the boost upgrade from yesterday, it might break even more things:

      l/boost-1.72.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
      Shared library .so-version bump.

      Chhers!

      • Francisco

        Hi Ricardo!.

        Thanks for your help!!!!. Easy and enough hint, to fix a problem with a bad face!.;-)!! Many thanks.

        I missed completely to: ‘slackpkg install-new ‘. mozjs60 was installed.

        Slackware Changelog should be analized carefully. Lesson learned!.

        Both problems were fixed (NetworkManager and dmesg message).

        No pending updates now. I only see Firefox very slow in pages… Apart from checking logs… is there any other advice to check in general slackware “health status” after an upgrade? or is it just a matter of fixing issues when you find them using a particular functionality.

        Again, thanks Alberto and Eric for helping me in my learning curve.

        Regards and Happy Holidays!

        Francisco.

        • Francisco

          Hi Eric and Ricardo.

          Having no pending updates, my system is slow, it seems due to some problems with my i915 driver for my gfx adapter as dmesg reports (see messages below).

          My Laptop is a Dell XPS-9370

          Any advice or hint to fix this?

          Thanks in advance, Francisco.

          [ 766.957696] i915 0000:00:02.0: GPU HANG: ecode 9:1:0x00000000, hang on rcs0
          [ 766.957698] GPU hangs can indicate a bug anywhere in the entire gfx stack, including userspace.
          [ 766.957698] Please file a _new_ bug report on bugs.freedesktop.org against DRI -> DRM/Intel
          [ 766.957698] drm/i915 developers can then reassign to the right component if it’s not a kernel issue.
          [ 766.957699] The GPU crash dump is required to analyze GPU hangs, so please always attach it.
          [ 766.957699] GPU crash dump saved to /sys/class/drm/card0/error
          [ 766.958733] i915 0000:00:02.0: Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0
          [ 766.959466] [drm:gen8_reset_engines [i915]] *ERROR* rcs0 reset request timed out: {request: 00000001, RESET_CTL: 00000001}
          [ 766.959518] i915 0000:00:02.0: Resetting chip for hang on rcs0
          [ 766.961416] [drm:gen8_reset_engines [i915]] *ERROR* rcs0 reset request timed out: {request: 00000001, RESET_CTL: 00000001}
          [ 766.962174] [drm:gen8_reset_engines [i915]] *ERROR* rcs0 reset request timed out: {request: 00000001, RESET_CTL: 00000001}
          [ 796.909696] i915 0000:00:02.0: Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0
          [ 804.909686] i915 0000:00:02.0: Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0

          • Francisco

            Hi Eric and Ricardo.

            There was a kernel update yesterday.

            a/kernel-generic-5.4.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
            a/kernel-huge-5.4.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
            a/kernel-modules-5.4.3-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
            d/kernel-headers-5.4.3-x86-1.txz: Upgraded.
            k/kernel-source-5.4.3-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
            EFI_RCI2_TABLE y -> n

            It seems it fixed my i915 driver errors. Problem Solved.

            Is this normal between kernel updates?. After all, 5.4 is not the latest kernel.

            Thanks and happy holidays.

          • Ricardo

            Good to know that the new kernel fixed your i915 problems, I also have an Intel integrated GPU but so far no issues with kernel 5.4.2, let’s see tomorrow after I upgrade 🙂

            I think the i915 driver is a bit messy, I had the same problems several months ago using Slack64 14.2, so I installed -current’s kernel to “fix it” (later, with Plasma 5 being only available to -current I made the switch).

            BTW, Eric uploaded a new boost-compat today, so upgrading/installing it alongside -current’s boost upgrade should be safe now.

            Cheers!

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