Alien Pastures

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Tag: iso (Page 2 of 3)

Kernel 5.13 went into Slackware-current; new Live ISOs to celebrate

July 16, 2021 / / 21 Comments

This week, the Linux 5.13 kernel finally landed in the core distro of Slackware-current after having lived in ‘./testing‘ for a while. Actually it’s the 5.13.2 kernel which had some 800 patches applied compared to 5.13.1.

And with that new 5.13.x kernel series, it looks like a Slackware 15 release is again closer on the horizon.

To celebrate the occasion, I have generated a new batch of ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition. At download.liveslak.org you will find ISO images for the variants based on the latest release of the liveslak scripts (in this case, version 1.3.9.5 of liveslak).
These Live ISOs boot Slackware -current “Thu Jul 15 22:37:59 UTC 2021” with the new 5.13.2 mainline kernel: SLACKWARE (32bit & 64bit), XFCE (32bit & 64bit), CINNAMON, MATE, DAW and LEAN.

The ‘bonus‘ section contains a batch of squashfs modules you can use with your liveslak (copy them into the ‘addons’ directory of your persistent USB drive) if you want to expand the functionality of the Live OS.
Among these you’ll find the binary nvidia driver (already contained in the CINNAMON, DAW and MATE ISOs by the way); the Broadcom STA wireless driver, Wine 6.12, multilib, the DAW package collection, and a set from my own repository (chromium, libreoffice, veracrypt, vlc etc).

Have fun! Eric

Slackware Live Edition 1.1.4 – based on slackware-current of 4 Nov 2016

November 10, 2016 / / 29 Comments

blueSW-64pxToday I conclude my packaging frenzy with a new release of ‘liveslak‘. Version 1.1.4 is ready with only some minor tweaks. Users of the “iso2usb.sh” script on non-Slackware distros should be happy that the script finds all the required programs now.
I made a set of ISO images for several variants of the 64bit version of Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak 1.1.4 and using Slackware-current dated “Fri Nov  4 03:31:38 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 and MATE variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant.

Here are some screenshots of the PLASMA5 variant:

plasma5_login_5.8

SDDM login screen

plasma5_login_5.8_2

The new Plasma loading animation

plasma5_login_5.8_3

Plasma 5.8.3

plasma5_login_5.8_4

The logoff/shutdown

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.

To find out what’s on the ISO you downloaded, try this command:

$ isoinfo -d  -i your_downloaded.iso | egrep “Volume id|Publisher id|Data preparer id|Application id”

And if you want to know what ISO was used to create your USB stick, check the content of the /.isoversion file in the root of its Live partition (partition number 3).

New in the ISOs

The new ISOs are based on the latest slackware-current with Linux kernel 4.4.29.

The SLACKWARE variant contains exactly that: the latest slackware-current and nothing else.

The MATE variant (a Slackware OS with KDE 4 replaced by Mate) has a refreshed ‘msb‘ package content,  I synced my local ‘msb‘ mirror with the official package repository at http://slackware.uk/msb/current/ which means you get Mate 1.16, the GTK3 version.

The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) comes with the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_16.11” 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. The Plasma 5 packages inside the ISO already satisfy most if not all of their dependencies. Let me know what you think of Lumina and LXQT!
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 1.1.3 and 1.1.4

The ‘1.1.4’ tag was mainly applied to accompany the release of the new ISOs.

  • iso2usb.sh: get rid of hard-coded program pathnames in favor of searching a hard-coded $PATH . This should improve the usefulness of the script on non-Slackware distros.
  • make_slackware_live.conf: make the filename ‘min.lst’ customizable for Live distro developers.
  • PLASMA5: use the ‘latest’ instead of the ‘testing’ repository.

Download the ISO images

The ISO variants of Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE. 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.

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

Slackware Live Edition Beta 8

April 20, 2016 / / 42 Comments

blueSW-64pxYesterday I uploaded new ISO images for the Slackware Live Edition. They are based on the liveslak scripts version 0.8.0 (beta 8). This version of Slackware Live Edition is using Slackware64-current dated “Fri Apr 15 20:37:37 UTC 2016” as the base. Indeed, that is Slackware 14.2 Release Candidate 2, we are getting nearer a stable release.

For background info on my project “Slackware Live Edition” please read the previous articles.

I created an ISO for the following Live OS variants:

  • SLACKWARE (full Slackware, no 3rd party software)
  • XFCE (trimmed-down but quite functional version of Slackware, fits on a CDROM media)
  • PLASMA5 (full Slackware minus KDE4, and then extended with Plasma 5 and packages from the AlienBOB repository such as calibre, chromium, ffmpeg, libreoffice, openjdk, p7zip, qbittorrent, veracrypt, vlc)
  • MATE (full Slackware minus KDE4, and then extended with the Mate Desktop Environment)

What’s new in 0.8.0?

The ISO images I mentioned above are all 64bit. This time, to humor the complainer on LQ who felt insulted because I was neglecting 32bit Slackware users, I have added a 32bit version of the SLACKWARE variant too.

New functionality of the Live OS:

  • Two new boot parameters “nfsroot” and “nic” add support for network booting the Live OS (PXE client).
    The Live filesystem will be assembled from squashfs modules located on a NFS export. A network-booted Live OS will have no persistence due to a limitation still present in the overlayfs (no writable filesystem layer on NFS). See the documentation on how to use this new network-boot feature.
    A future version of liveslak will allow you to run Slackware Live Edition as a PXE server as well as a PXE client. You can bring a single USB stick to a LAN party and in a few minutes’ time, all computers (connected through cables and switches) will be running your Slackware Live Edition…
  • The “setup2hd” hard disk installer was largely re-written to address a ‘logical error’ in determining what needed to be installed. This time, the script will really and properly install the full OS minus the Live modifications to your hard drive.
  • More customization options were added to liveslak, for those who develop their own variant of Slackware Live. This includes a “post-installation hook” in the “setup2hd” script which allows you to write a custom post-installation script that does things I do not want to add to the setup2hd script itself.
    The purpose of these customizations is that you do not have to edit the liveslak scripts themselves which makes it easier to maintain your custom product as I keep developing liveslak.
  • The initrd.img file is now compressed with XZ instead of GZIP. This reduces its size with roughly 30% – which is the space I needed to add network kernel modules and firmware to the initrd in order to support network booting. The XFCE ISO still fits on a CDROM!
    I could not detect longer boot-up times due to the switch to XZ compression.
  • An option was added to enable 32bit EFI support in the 32bit version of Slackware Live Edition – however this is disabled by default, since UEFI-capable computers are 64bit machines and you should probably be using the 64bit OS then.
  • Small improvements and bug fixes were applied to liveslak. Check out the commit log if you are interested.

Download the ISO images

As stated above, you can choose between several variants of Slackware Live Edition. There’s ISO images for the SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE flavours using the latest Slackware-current packages available (Fri Apr 15 20:37:37 UTC 2016) as well as the latest Plasma 5 release  which I yet have to upload to ‘ktown‘ (Frameworks 5.21.0, Plasma 5.6.3 and Applications 16.04.0 on top of Qt5 5.6.0). And Mate was updated to 1.14.

Download locations for the ISO images plus their MD5 checksum and GPG signature should be available soon at any of the following locations – look in the “0.8.0” subdirectory for ISOs based on the liveslak-0.8.0 scripts. I made a symlink called “latest” which will always point to the latest set of ISO images.

Good to know when you boot the ISO

The Slackware Live Edition comes with two user accounts: user ‘root’ (with password ‘root’) and user ‘live’ (with password ‘live’). My advice: login as user live and use “su” or “sudo” to get root access.
Note: the “su” and “sudo” commands will ask for the ‘live’ user’s password!

Consult the documentation for assistance with the various boot parameters you can use to tailor the Live OS to your needs.

Slackware Live Edition is able to boot both on BIOS-based computers (where syslinux takes care of the boot menu) and UEFI systems (where grub builds the boot menu, which looks quite similar to the syslinux menu):

slackwarelive-0.4.0_syslinux

I will soon update the original blog article (http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/) because that is what most sites are linking to. The information in there is not reflecting the liveslak’s current capabilities and may present the wrong picture. I will save the original article under a different name.

Spinoffs

  • There is now a Live ISO for people who want to experiment with the Cinelerra CV non-linear video editor. It is using the liveslak scripts and all the customization I enabled in those scripts. It is called CINELIVE, see https://cinelerra-cv.org/cinelive.php .
  • FluxFlux , a Linux Live for older computers, plans to switch to liveslak: https://fluxflux.net/?p=647 but the project seems to be stalled for the moment.

Have fun! Eric

Beta3 of Slackware Live Edition is available

December 24, 2015 / / 97 Comments

blueSW-64pxIt took me a while to get to a level where I could do another public update of my “liveslak” scripts for the Slackware Live Edition. The previous two articles about the Live OS generated quite some feedback and I think I was able to address a lot of those remarks and suggestions in the updated code. My TODO has however only shrunk with one item…

A “Beta3” is what we have now. My milestone for emitting a new Beta was to have a working UEFI boot. And I hope I managed that. Works here… for what it’s worth.

What is Slackware Live Edition?

Please read the previous two articles, “Slackware Live Edition” and “Beta 2” to get a better understanding and so that I do not have to repeat myself too much 🙂

Update 06-jan-2016: please continue reading and commenting in my follow-up article on “Beta 5“.

We’re talking about a “live OS” here, which you can run off a CDROM, a DVD or a USB stick and does not have to be installed to a computer hard drive. You can carry the USB stick version with you in your pocket. You’ll have a pre-configured Slackware OS up & running in a minute wherever you can get your hands on a computer with a USB port. The USB version is “persistent” meaning that the OS stores your updates on the stick. The CD/DVD versions (and the USB stick if you configure it accordingly) run without persistence, which means that all the changes you make to the OS are lost on reboot.

I created “Slackware Live Edition” as a showcase for the development of Slackware. It is not meant as a generic Live Distro generator – it will only support the latest slackware-current. A tool to satisfy your curiosity!

The main script “make_slackware_live.sh” creates an ISO from scratch. The script installs Slackware packages or package sets into compressed “squashfs” modules, configures and optimizes the target filesystem to be run as a Live environment, and then generates an initial ramdisk that will assemble the Live environment when you boot. All that is put into a bootable ISO image file. Thanks to Linux kernel 4.x and the squashfs-tools package added to Slackware-current, the process requires no compilation nor does it need non-standard packages to create a Slackware Live Edition (of course, the Plasma, Mate and Cinnamon flavours do require 3rd party packages). The downside is that the ISO has to be created on Slackware-current (older versions of Slackware do not have the proper tools). It follows that the only Slackware release which is supported as a Live Edition is the “-current” development tree. All future releases will be supported too of course.

The “liveslak” scripts can generate a variety of Slackware flavors. The default script action is to create an ISO from scratch that will give you a complete 64bit Slackware-current Live Edition. The scripts can also create a 700 MB slimmed-down XFCE version with XDM as the graphical login manager which fits on a CDROM medium or a 1 GB USB stick; and for my own enjoyment (as well as yours I may hope) it can create a 3.0 GB ISO image of Slackware64-current but containing Plasma 5 instead of KDE 4, as well as an addition of several other packages I maintain: vlc, libreoffice, calibre, qbittorrent, ffmpeg, chromium, openjdk, veracrypt.

Since Beta 2 the scripts are also capable of generating a Mate and a Cinnamon flavour of Slackware (replacing Slackware’s KDE 4) courtesy of Willy Sudiarto Raharjo’s repositories.

slackwarelive_syslinux_beta2

How to create a persistent USB stick?

The ISO can be burnt to a DVD or copied to USB stick using ‘dd’ or just plain ‘cp’, but that will give you a read-only medium where all changes to the Live OS happen in RAM. You can use the ‘iso2usb.sh‘ script to create a Live OS on the USB device with persistence. Changes you make while running Slackware Live will then be preserved across reboots because the OS will write all these changes to the directory “persistence” in the root of the USB device. Typically you would run the script with an input and an output parameter at a minimum:

# ./iso2usb.sh -i ~/Download/slackware64-live-current.iso -o /dev/sdX

… where /dev/sdX is the device name of your USB stick which will get formatted – erasing all data currently stored on it. The iso2usb.sh script will pause to show you the characteristics of the target device and ask you once more if you really want to continue erasing it. You will not easily destroy your harddrive unless you are really not paying attention!

Booting the Live OS

When you boot Slackware Live on a BIOS computer, Syslinux will handle the boot and show the following menu:

  • Start (SLACKWARE | PLASMA5 | XFCE | MATE) Live (depending on which of the ISOs you boot)
  • Non-US Keyboard selection
  • Non-US Language selection
  • Memory test with memtest86+

You can select a keyboard mapping that matches your computer’s. And/or boot Slackware in another language than US English. You will probably want to change the timezone; syslinux allows you to edit the boot commandline by pressing <TAB> because the syslinux bootmenu does not offer you a selection of timezones.

On UEFI computers, GRUB2 handles the boot and it will show a menu similar (and similarly themed) as the Syslinux menu:

  • Start (SLACKWARE | PLASMA5 | XFCE | MATE) Live (depending on which of the ISOs you boot)
  • Non-US Keyboard selection
  • Non-US Language selection
  • Non-US Timezone selection
  • Detect/boot any installed operating system
  • Memory test with memtest86+

Grub understands variables, which simplified the creation of the menu greatly and allowed me to add a timezone selection menu. Editing a Grub menu is possible by pressing the ‘e’ key. After making your changes to the boot commandline, press <F10> to boot.

Another difference between Syslinux and Grub menus: in Grub you select keyboard, language and/or timezone and you’ll return to the main menu every time. You still have to select “Start Slackware Live” to boot. In the Syslinux menu, only the keyboard selection menu will return you to (apparently bot not actually) the same main menu. The non-US language selection will boot you into Slackware Live immediately without returning to the main menu. A limitation of syslinux, which could only be overcome by generating a lot more syslinux menu files than we already have.

 

Boot parameters & tweaks

You can use the following tweaks to the boot commandline:

  • 0|1|2|3|4|5|6|S|s|single (Select another runlevel to start with; the default is 4 for graphical login)
  • lang=nl_NL kbd=nl tz=Europe/Amsterdam (Example of language, keyboard and/or timezone customization)
  • nop (No persistence, i.e. boot the virgin installation in case your ‘persistence’ directory got corrupted)
  • nomodeset (Boot with kernel mode setting for graphics — needed with some machines)
  • load=nvidia (Load and configure binary Nvidia drivers that are present in some of the ISOs)
  • rootdelay=10 (Add 10 second delay to give the kernel more time to initialize USB – try this if the Live OS fails to boot)
  • hostname=aliens (Change the hostname for the OS; default hostname is “darkstar“
  • livepw=”somestring” (Change the password for the ‘live’ user)
  • rootpw=”somestring” (Change the password for the ‘root’ user)
  • load=mod1[,mod2[…]] (load one or more squashfs modules that are present in the directory “/liveslack/optional”; by default none of the modules in the “optional” directory are loaded)
  • noload=mod1[,mod2[…]] (Prevent loading of one or more squashfs modules that are present in the directory “/liveslack/addons”; by default all of the modules in the “addons” directory are loaded on boot)
  • rescue (After initialization, you will be dropped in a rescue shell where you can perform lowlevel maintenance; the same happens anyway if the OS fails to boot)
  • debug (During init, pause at strategical locations while assembling the overlay filesystem and show relevant mount information)
  • swap (Allow the Live OS to activate all swap partitions it finds on the local hardware; by default, the hard drive will not be touched at all)
  • livemedia=/dev/sdX (Tell the init script which partition contains the Slackware Live OS you want to boot; this can become necessary if you have another copy of Slackware Live already installed to another drive partition)
  • livemain=directoryname (Use this if you copied the content of the ISO to a different directory than the default “liveslak” directory)

Download the ISO images

I have created ISO images for the SLACKWARE, XFCE, PLASMA5 and MATE flavours using the latest packages available today. You can find them at any of the following locations:

Please allow some time to synchronize these mirror servers.

The ISOs have two user accounts: root (with password ‘root’) and live (with password ‘live’). My advice: login as user live and use “su” or “sudo” to get root access.

Can I create an ISO myself?

Certainly! You can download my sources and have a go at it. Apart from the sources & scripts, you will need local copies of the repositories where the packages will be taken from. The Slackware and XFCE ISOs will of course need a mirror of the official Slackware64-current package tree. The Plasma5 ISO requires that you have mirrored my ‘ktown‘ repository as well as my regular SlackBuild repository. The Mate ISO depends on the Slackware mirror as well as Willy’s Mate mirror.

The git repository for the scripts can be found here: http://taper.alienbase.nl/cgit/liveslak/

A checkout of this repository can be found in http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/liveslak/

If you wonder how I created the squashfs module (0060-nvidia-352.63_4.1.15-current-x86_64.sxz) containing the Nvidia drivers:  I used the SBo scripts for nvidia-kernel and nvidia-driver to compile two packages. I then created a temporary directory and installed the resulting nvidia-kernel, nvidia-driver packages together with Slackware’s xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist package all into that directory (using the command “installpkg –root”). Then I ran the “makemod” script with the temporary directory as first parameter and “0060-nvidia-352.63_4.1.15-current-x86_64.sxz” as the second parameter which created the .SXZ squashfs module which you find in ./graphics/. Simple!

Happy hacking! Eric

Slackware Live Edition – Beta 2

November 28, 2015 / / 183 Comments

blueSW-64pxThanks for all the valuable feedback on the first public beta of my Slackware Live Edition. It allowed me to fix quite a few bugs in the Live scripts (thanks again!), add new functionality (requested by you or from my own TODO) and I took the opportunity to fix the packages in my Plasma 5 repository so that its Live Edition should actually work now.

What is Slackware Live Edition?

If you’re new here: Slackware Live Edition is a “live OS” meaning it does not have to be installed to a harddrive and can run straight off a CDROM or DVD medium, or off a USB stick. Slackware Live Edition is meant to showcase the development of Slackware. Therefore it will boot slackware-current and no other OS. It is meant as an ideal opportunity for people who are curious what two years of Slackware development have resulted in. You do not have to erase your current OS, just copy the ISO to a suitable medium, boot from the medium and check it out. The previous article I wrote explains in more detail why I wanted to write my own Live scripts instead of just using one of the available solutions.

What’s with these three ISO’s?

Slackware Live Edition comes in three flavors (for now). There’s a 700 MB slimmed-down XFCE version with XDM as the graphical login manager; then there is the actual complete Slackware-current with KDE4 and using KDM as the graphical login manager (2.6 GB in size); and finally you can download a 3.0 GB ISO image of Slackware-current with Plasma 5 and the SDDM graphical login manager. The Plasma 5 edition has some cool extras like vlc, libreoffice, calibre, qbittorrent ffmpeg, chromium, openjdk, veracrypt… and more from my own repository.

slackwarelive_syslinux_beta2

How do I use the ISO?

The ISO can be burnt to a DVD (XFCE version will fit on CDROM even) or copied to USB stick. Since the ISOs are ‘hybrid’ just copying to the USB device using ‘dd’ or ‘cp’ will get you a fully functional bootable medium, albeit without persistence (it’s still technically a read-only CDROM filesystem that you’ve copied to the USB stick). The OS will not be bothered by this, because it thinks it can write to the filesystem. That is the trick of a Live OS – all these write operations are done to a RAM based filesystem. The changes are gone once you reboot.

But when using the ‘iso2usb.sh‘ script you can create a real Live OS on the USB device with persistence, meaning that the things you change will be preserved across reboots. All your modifications will be stored in the directory “persistency” in the root of the USB device. Therefore you are actually able to use the USB stick as your pocket-OS on the go:

# ./iso2usb.sh -i ~/Download/slackware64-live-current.iso -o /dev/sdX

… where /dev/sdX is the device name of your USB stick. Don’t worry about accidentally overwriting the content of your hard drive – the script will first show you details about the sdX device and wants your confirmation that this is actually the device you want to reformat.

When you boot Slackware Live you will be presented with a Syslinux boot menu:

  • Start (SLACKWARE | PLASMA5 | XFCE) Live (depending on which of the three ISOs you boot)
  • Non-US Keyboard selection
  • Non-US Language selection
  • Memory test with memtest86+

The first entry boots you straight into the Live OS, using US keyboard mapping and a “en_US.utf8” locale. If you have a non-US keyboard layout and/or want your Linux to show itself in a non-US Language, you can use the second and third menu entries to configure one of the languages I selected ( I picked what I thought were the most commonly used). If your language or keyboard is not listed, just hit the <TAB> key and change the values for the “kbd” and “locale” parameters. Likewise for the timezone parameter which by default is associated with your choice of language.

The memtest option was copied from the Slackware installer – it allows you to test your RAM sticks for hardware errors very thoroughly.

More parameters

The syslinux boot menu allows you to modify the boot command line. Press <TAB> to edit the command line. You will see several parameters you can edit but you can also add more. The <F2> key will show a couple of those.

  • 0|1|2|3|4|5|6|S|s|single (Select another runlevel to start with; the default is  4 for graphical login)
  • lang=nl_NL kbd=nl tz=Europe/Amsterdam (Example of language, keyboard and/or timezone customization)
  • nop (No persistence, i.e. boot the virgin installation)
  • nomodeset (Boot with kernel mode setting for graphics — needed with some machines)
  • load=nvidia (Load and configure binary Nvidia drivers that are present in the ISO)
  • rootdelay=10 (Add 10 second delay to allow proper USB initialization)

But there are some others, and some of these have been added after readers of this blog suggested them:

  • hostname=aliens (Change the hostname for the OS; default hostname is “darkstar“)
  • livepw=”somestring” (Change the password for the ‘live’ user)
  • rootpw=”somestring” (Change the password for the ‘root’ user)
  • load=mod1[,mod2[…]] (load one or more squashfs modules that are present in the directory “/liveslack/optional”; by default none of the modules in the “optional” directory are loaded)
  • noload=mod1[,mod2[…]] (prevent loading of one or more squashfs modules that are present in the directory “/liveslack/addons”; by default all of the modules in the “addons” directory are loaded on boot)
  • rescue (After initialization, you will be dropped in a rescue shell where you can perform lowlevel maintenance; the same happens anyway if the OS fails to boot)
  • swap (Allow the Live OS to activate all swap partitions it finds on the local hardware; by default, the hard drive will not be touched at all)

I get errors and booting fails

Booting an OS off a USB medium is tricky. Linux kernel initializes the storage and the usb subsystems in parallel. If you have a fast computer and slow USB medium or you use a USB-1 / USB-2 port, the probability is pretty high that the USB stick is not yet ready when the OS starts its mount attempts. There’s a parameter you can add to the boot command line to give the USB device some extra time to settle – try adding “rootdelay=10” or even “rootdelay=20” which will add 10 (or 20) seconds pause to the boot process. The iso2usb.sh script configures a default delay of 5 seconds which should be sufficient for most computers.

Instead of “rootdelay” you can use the parameter “waitforroot” with identical result.

Slackware Live does not log me on automatically!

Correct. This is a demonstration environment, with the purpose of getting you acquainted with Slackware, remember?

You already saw all these intimidating kernel messages scrolling across the screen while booting the OS, and now you have two choices for login:

  • user ‘root’ with the password ‘root’ (at least that is the default – you can change it using a boot parameter if you want)
  • user ‘live’ with the password ‘live’ (idem about the default value).

I would suggest using the ‘live’ user account to logon to the Live OS, because KDE 4 and Plasma 5 will not appreciate it when you login as root directly. If you need root access, then just run “sudo -i” or “su -” (both commands will request you to enter the password of user ‘live’, not the root password!).

What’s still on the TODO?

There are a couple of items that I did not get to but they should really be looked into to bring this out of Beta:

  • UEFI boot needs to work (must have)
  • Better documentation about how the scripts work (must have)
  • Documentation on all the boot parameters (must have)
  • Slackware installer as part of the ISO, perhaps even Didier’s polyglot installer (nice to have, only in the Plasma5 version)
  • A ‘copy2ram‘ function to run the OS entirely in RAM (nice to have)
  • Persistence directory inside a loop-mounted ext4 container file, so that the persistent USB stick can have a single FAT partition (nice to have)
  • Homedirectory of a persistent Live OS inside a loop-mounted LUKS-encrypted container file, to protect your private data (nice to have)
  • … tell me more! Or post patches!

Download the ISO images

Show me the source!

Git repository for the scripts can be found here: http://taper.alienbase.nl/cgit/liveslak/

A checkout of the repository can be found in http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ and http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/liveslak/

Hopefully soon, I will write a proper README which takes you through the inner workings of the scripts. If you are curious you can of course check out the sources – they are full of comments. But there are some design decisions at the core which you need to be aware of before you start on these scripts.

Happy hacking! Eric

Update 25-dec-2015: please continue reading the follow-up article on “Beta 3“.

Update 24-jan-2016: please continue reading and commenting in my follow-up article “Beta 4″.

 

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