Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: kernel (Page 1 of 2)

liveslak-1.3.10 and new ISO images for Slackware Live Edition

September 10, 2021 / / 33 Comments

The previous batch of ISOs for Slackware Live Edition is already a few months old, so I decided to generate new images.
The ISO files are based on Slackware-current of “Wed Sep 8 18:07:38 UTC 2021” and using the liveslak-1.3.10 scripts, where passwordless login is a new feature.

Slackware-current has the label “15.0 Release Candidate 1” since August 16th but considering the amount of non-trivial updates since that date, I wonder whether the phrase “release candidate” has any relevance here. No sign that we are anywhere nearer to a final 15.0 release.

Let’s hope for the best, and in the meantime fresh ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition can be obtained at download.liveslak.org .

I refreshed he ‘bonus‘ section as well. There you find several squashfs modules you can use with your persistent liveslak USB stick. Copy these module into the ‘addons’ directory on the USB drive. They expand the functionality of the Live OS and allow me to keep the ISO file size within reasonable bounds.
Among these you’ll find the binary nvidia driver (already contained in the CINNAMON, DAW and MATE ISOs by the way); Wine 6.12, multilib, the DAW package collection, and a set from my own repository (chromium, libreoffice, veracrypt, vlc etc).

To end this post, I have a question for you regarding liveslak functionality.
At boot you can add any number of parameters to the kernel commandline, and some of these are used by the liveslak initialization. A subset of these parameters cause modifications of files in the live filesystem. For instance, “livepw=” will update /etc/shadow and /etc/passwd to update the password for the ‘live’ user. You can specify a domain name, custom hostname and a lot more which will cause modifications of files in the live filesystem.
Now the crux of the issue: if you have a persistent Live USB stick, do you want these parameters to make permanent changes to your Live filesystem? Or do you want them to be ignored if you are booting a persistent USB stick?
I can see good reasons for a limitation of the scope of these parameters, to just the non-persistent Slackware Live (i.e. when booting from a DVD). I also realize that it would be a functional change that can impact the way some of you work with a liveslak medium.

Let me know (in the comments section below) if you would like liveslak to ignore certain boot parameters if you boot a persistent medium.

Have fun! Eric

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 13.37 Release Candidate 2

March 16, 2011 / / 15 Comments

We have progressed to the second release candidate for the upcoming release of Slackware stable (version 13.37 no less). There is probably not going to be a lot of other updates before final release; the TODO list should be quite short now. The only one to know for sure is Pat Volkerding… I am only speculating of course.

Noticable is that the Slackware -current’s kernel has again been updated – this time to 2.6.37.4. And again, as part of a Slackware kernel update, the glibc packages were rebuilt against the new kernel’s header files.

If you have enhanced your 64bit Slackware-current with multilib capabilities, you can upgrade to the new multilib glibc packages that I compiled for you.

Get the glibc packages for your multilib Slackware64-current at http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/current/ as usual (or visit my mirror at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/multilib/current/).

I also updated the content of the slackware64-compat32 directory. In there you will find a copy of all the packages which are created by running the massconvert32.sh script. Install these packages on top of your multilib Slackware64-current in order to make your computer fully support 32bit applications (or use “upgradepkg –install-new” if you already installed a previous set of these packages).

No idea what I have been talking about?

If you want to know about 64bit Slackware Linux (which is a pure 64bit OS) and how to “upgrade” to a multilib system (supporting 32bit as well as 64bit applications), you should definitelty read http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib …

Eric

Upgrading the eeepc to 2.6.33

March 18, 2010 / / 14 Comments

Last week I finally took the time to upgrade my Asus Eeepc 1000H to the latest Slackware-current.

I had two issues after the upgrade, which were related to the new 2.6.33 kernel.

  1. My WPA-secured wireless connections would not last longer than a few seconds. After days of despair, I finally found out that the 2.6.33 kernel has a new driver for my wireless card, the “rt2800pci”. This driver is being loaded by default now. Slackware’s kernel also ships the “rt2860sta” driver which is part of the Linux “staging area” i.e. not considered fully stable. This is the driver which would be used with Slackware kernels before 2.6.33. It is in fact a very stable driver which never failed me before.
    By coincidence I saw that both modules were mentioned as supporting the Eeepc’s wireless card in the output of “lspci -v”. After I added the line “blacklist rt2800pci” to the file “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf” and rebooted the Eeepc, I had fully functional and stable wireless connectivity again, now using the “rt2860sta” driver!
  2. My sound was gone, or at least working at a very very low volume… I could hear the KDE logout sound if I put my ear to the keyboard but that was about it. Getting normal sound output levels through my headphones was no problem at all, however.
    The ALSA troubleshooting guide for HDA Intel audio hardware pointed me in the right direction: not getting sound through the built-in speakers while the headphone output works well is quite common, and often caused by not raising the correct channel’s volume.
    It turned out that after the upgrade to the 2.6.33 kernel, I need to set the “speaker” channel’s output level to anything non-zero or else there would be no sound…

I have to mention one other piece of strangeness I experienced on my netbook:

It is an issue not related to Slackware-current but rather to my use of the new “netbook” interface of KDE 4.4’s plasma workspace manager. I toyed with the netbook interface a bit, because it lets you use the small screen more efficiently – by removing unnecessary stuff like window elements and task bars. One typical treat is that every application window in the plasma-netbook workspace runs full-screen exclusively – there is no “minimize” button but instead you have to use the application switcher in order to access other running applications’ windows. Unfortunately, when I switched back to the “normal” plasma workspace, the “minimize” buttons did not re-appear in the title bar!
I had to manually re-add this button through “system settings > appearance > windows > buttons” and drag the “minimize” button into the titlebar preview.

Just so you know.

Eric

Compiling a new kernel module for VirtualBox

January 31, 2010 / / 11 Comments

I had installed VirtualBox a while ago on my laptop running my Slackware64 test environment, so I could experiment with the program a bit. Then I forgot all about it.

Today, I upgraded to the latest set of slackware64-current packages, including the new 2.6.32.7 kernel and when I rebooted to that new kernel, I saw an error message scrolling by stating that “the vboxdrv kernel modules failed to load”. Of course… a new kernel needs all external modules to be recompiled.

When installing VirtualBox, I had already noticed that the installer is Slackware friendly; it installed a nice “/etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv” boot script and updated the “rc.local” script so that it runs “rc.vboxdrv” on boot. Well done!

It is easy to rebuild the missing VirtualBox kernel modules using that rc script: you just need to run it once with the “setup” parameter.

root@alienteepee:~# /etc/rc.d/rc.vboxdrv setup
Stopping VirtualBox kernel module ...done.
Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module ...done.
Starting VirtualBox kernel module ...done.
root@alienteepee:~#

That’s all there is to it!

Cheers, Eric

« Older posts

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑