Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: live (Page 5 of 12)

New Live ISOs for Slackware-current 20180209

February 11, 2018 / / 13 Comments

blueSW-64pxI have uploaded a fresh set of ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition. They are (of course) based on the ‘liveslak‘ scripts and contain the latest Slackware-current dated “Fri Feb 9 19:59:54 UTC 2018“), which sports the new 4.14.18 kernel which is mitigated against the Meltdown and Spectre v1 vulnerabilities.
The ISO variants you will find at the download URL https://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ (remember to add support for CACert to your system if you see certificate warnings!) are:

  • Full unmodified Slackware (32bit and 64bit).
  • Stripped-down XFCE (32bit as well as 64bit), this ISO will fit on a CDROM medium.
  • Slackware with MATE instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the new 1.20 release of just 2 days ago. Thanks to Willy Sudiarto Raharjo for the packaging!
  • Slackware with Plasma 5 instead of KDE4 (64bit) to showcase the Plasma 5.12 Long Term Support (LTS) release. This ISO also contains LibreOffice 6.0.1 and VLC 3.0.0.

The new liveslak version 1.1.9.6 has seen only a few updates since the previous tag, they are related to the package additions in Plasma 5.

Wayland and X.Org

The PLASMA5 ISO image does not feature Wayland support this time, but if you want you can build an ISO version that does! Download my liveslak scripts and use the following command to generate a PLASMA5 ISO (you will find it in /tmp afterwards) with the additional packages from my ‘testing’ repositories that add Wayland support:

# git clone --depth 1 git://bear.alienbase.nl/liveslak.git
# cd liveslak
# ./make_slackware_live.sh -d PLASMA5 -m plasma5wayland -M -X

If you run a Wayland-enabled Slackware Live, you can login to a regular X.Org Plasma5 session but you can also choose the “Plasma – Wayland” session from the SDDM dropdown menu.

Refreshing your USB stick instead of re-formatting

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. If you want to modify other parameters of your USB stick, use the script “upslak.sh“. It’s main feature is that it can update the kernel on the USB stick, but it also can replace the Live init script. As with most (if not all) of my scripts, use the “-h” parameter to get help on its functionality.

Historical info on liveslak

More detail about the features of Slackware Live Edition can be found in previous posts here on the blog.

Have fun!

What’s new for January? Plasma5 18.01, and more

January 19, 2018 / / 55 Comments

When I sat down to write a new post I noticed that I had not written a single post since the previous Plasma 5 announcement. Well, I guess the past month was a busy one. Also I bought a new e-reader (the Kobo Aura H2O 2nd edition) to replace my ageing Sony PRS-T1. That made me spend a lot of time just reading books and enjoying a proper back-lit E-ink screen. What I read? The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams, A Shadow all of Light by Fred Chappell, Persepolis Rising and several of the short stories (Drive, The Butcher of Anderson Station, The Churn and Strange Dogs) by James SA Corey and finally Red Sister by Mark Lawrence. All very much worth your time.

And then work began in all earnest, and I tried to do the packaging activities for Slackware in the wee hours of the night:

  • wine got an update to 2.21 (the final one before the 3.0 release which I intend to package when the staging patches are also available)
  • chromium was updated to 63.0.3239.132 accompanied by the usual security fixes (these Google guys are pretty good at exposing vulnerabilities… think Meltdown and Spectre most recently)
  • Flash plugins for Mozilla and Chromium based browsers were updated to 28.0.0.137 – also accompanied by a security advisory
  • Lumina Desktop was updated to 1.4.0.p1 and I added two supporting packages as well: poppler-qt5 and acpilight.
  • Pale Moon got an update to 27.7.1

And most recently, I finished the January ’18 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware -current. My KDE-5_18.01 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.42.0, Plasma 5.11.5 and Applications 17.12.1. All based on Qt 5.9.3 and exclusive for Slackware–current because as explained in the previous post, I stopped providing Plasma 5 updates for Slackware 14.2.
There’s again a choice of ‘latest‘ and ‘testing‘ where the ‘testing’ repository contains 17 recompiled packages that provide a Wayland compositor stack. This means you can have a working Plasma5 Wayland session if you use ‘testing‘ as opposed to ‘latest‘.
The ‘testing‘ repository is for… testing. Do not use those packages on a production environment unless you are familiar with Slackware, debugging graphical sessions and know your way around slackpkg/slackpkg+.

I will be short about the updates in this latest Plasma 5 package set: all the major components got stability fixes and it’s all not so exciting. In the ‘applications-extra’ division I updated most of the big boys: digikam, krita, partitionmanager, kstars, and the Kdevelop Suite. The kdevplatform package has been removed as it has been obsoleted.

The accompanying README file contains full installation & upgrade instructions. I have some further reading material in case you are interested in the Wayland functionality of the ‘testing’ repository: README.testing.

Package download locations are:

If you are interested in the development of KDE 5 for Slackware, you can peek at my git repository too.

A new Plasma5 Live ISO image (based on liveslak-1.1.9.5) has been uploaded to http://slackware.nl/slackware-live/latest/ , in case you want to try the new Plasma5 desktop out first in a non-destructive way. And for the curious: I sneakily added a VLC 3.0 preview package to the Plasma5 Live ISO (vlc-3.0.0.rc6 to be precise). Much improved compared to the vlc-2.2.x releases!

Have fun! Eric

Live ISOs for Slackware-current 20171122

November 23, 2017 / / 20 Comments

blueSW-64pxI have released an update of the ‘liveslak‘ scripts. I needed the tag for a batch of new ISO images for the Slackware Live Edition. These are based on the latest Slackware-current dated “Wed Nov 22 05:27:06 UTC 2017“) i.e. yesterday and that means, the ISOs are going to boot into the new 4.14.1 kernel.

The new liveslak version 1.1.9.3 has a few updates. Most are not worth mentioning but these are:

  • CACert root certificates are added to the OS so that you can visit the upcoming blog.alienbase.nl securely without nasty warnings about untrusted certificates.
  • The PLASMA5 ISO image features Wayland support. You can login to a regular X.Org Plasma5 session but you can also choose the “Plasma – Wayland” session from the SDDM dropdown menu. In order to keep the ISO size below the DVD medium maximum size, I had to leave the optional ‘wine’ module out of the ISO. You can still download the wine module from the ‘bonus‘ location.
    FYI, this was the command to generate that PLASMA5 ISO:

    # ./make_slackware_live.sh -d PLASMA5 -m plasma5wayland -M -X

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. If you want to modify other parameters of your USB stick, use the script “upslak.sh“. It’s main feature is that it can update the kernel on the USB stick, but it also can replace the Live init script. As with most (if not all) of my scripts, use the “-h” parameter to get help on its functionality.

More detail about the features of Slackware Live Edition can be found in previous posts here on the blog.

Have fun!

Refreshed ISO’s for Slackware Live Edition, and more

October 1, 2017 / / 10 Comments

blueSW-64pxWhen I released new Live ISO images almost two weeks ago, a bug in the init script which became apparent with the latest Slackware initrd broke the encrypted /home feature. Therefore I am releasing an updated set of ‘liveslak‘ scripts with version 1.1.9.1 .

The latest set of Slackware Live Edition ISOs are based on liveslak 1.1.9.1 and Slackware-current dated “Fri Sep 29 22:58:54 UTC 2017“). That means, the new Live ISOs contain the updates to TexLive and Python3 (well, no texlive in the XFCE image due to its size limit of course).

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. If you want to modify other parameters of your USB stick, use the script “upslak.sh“. It’s main feature is that it can update the kernel on the USB stick, but it also can replace the Live init script. As with most (if not all) of my scripts, use the “-h” parameter to get help on its functionality.

And more:

I built new versions for the palemoon packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current to the latest 27.5.0 version. Someone stated he had issues compiling on slackware-current so I made sure the palemoon.SlackBuild works. The new palemoon package is included in the refreshed PLASMA5 Live ISO image. Note that to compile this on slackware-current you will need my gcc5 package; this software cannot be built with gcc6. Before starting the compile, source the gcc5 profile script:
“. /etc/profile.d/gcc5.sh” – note the dot.

I updated the Chromium package as well.
Chromium had a recent bugfix upgrade to 61.0.3163.100 which I missed initially.

 

And even more:

The recent flurry of activity in the Slackware-current development tree (boost, poppler, python3), caused repeated broken-ness of my own packages. The collection of multilib “compat32” packages was renewed several times. I recompiled LibreOffice 5.4.1 for slackware-current and in my ‘ktown‘ repository for Plasma5 there were multiple updates. I did manage to ‘sneak in’ new versions for Krita and KDEConnect at the same time. This too is all part of the refreshed PLASMA5 Live ISO image.

liveslak 1.1.9 and new ISO images

September 20, 2017 / / 19 Comments

blueSW-64pxThe ‘liveslak‘ scripts used to create the ISO images for Slackware Live Edition have been stamped with a new version, 1.1.9. The updates are significant enough to warrant an ‘official’ update and new ISO images.

The latest set of Slackware Live Edition ISOs are based on liveslak 1.1.9 and Slackware-current dated “Tue Sep 19 20:49:07 UTC 2017“. Just in time (I was already creating ISOS based on -current “Mon Sep 18 19:15:03 UTC 2017“) I noticed that Patrick downgraded the freetype package in Slackware, and I re-generated all of the ISO images to incorporate the latest freetype package – because that one is working and the previous one had serious issues.

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.

I should note (I always seem to forget mentioning this) that there’s also a “bonus” section where you can find a couple of Live squashfs modules that are included in the PLASMA5 Live ISO, and that will be just as useful to people who don’t want to run Plasma 5. These modules can be copied to the /liveslak/addons/ directory of your USB Live stick so that they are automatically loaded on every boot. The “bonus” section contains modules for:

  • broadcom-sta (“wl” module for 4.9.50 kernel) for people whose BCM wireless card does not work out of the box
  • multilib (gcc, glibc and the full set of compat32 packages)
  • skypeforlinux
  • wine (with OpenAL-compat32 already incorporated)

New in the ISOs

The new ISOs are based on the latest Slackware -current with Linux kernel 4.9.50, gcc 7.2.0, glibc 2.26 and X.Org 1.19.3.

The SLACKWARE variant contains the complete latest slackware-current distribution and nothing else. Ideal for testing and for checking out the progress of Slackware’s development.

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). Ideal for hardware compatibility tests.

The MATE variant (a Slackware OS with KDE 4 replaced by Mate) contains packages from the repository at http://slackware.uk/msb/current/ which at this moment gives us Mate 1.18.

The PLASMA5 variant (Slackware with KDE 4 replaced by Plasma 5) is a showcase for the latest Plasma 5 release “KDE-5_17.09” as found in my ktown repository. Additionally you will find several packages from my regular repository: chromium (with flash and widevine plugins), vlc, ffmpeg, libreoffice, palemoon, calibre, qbittorrent, openjdk 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.

The liveslak scripts support three more variants out of the box: CINNAMON (a Gnome3 fork), DLACKWARE (slackware with systemd) and STUDIOWARE (a toolbox for musicians). There’s no ISO image for the Cinnamon and Dlackware variants this time. The Studioware Live ISO can be downloaded from http://studioware.org/iso.php .

What happened between liveslak 1.1.8 and 1.1.9

For your information, a few ‘micro’releases were issued inbetween 1.1.8 and 1.1.9, to accompany the upload of ISO images for Plasma5. These micro-releases did not really add functionality.

  • Support booting from a SD card.
  • Allow syntax ‘livemedia=scandev:/path/to/live.iso’.
    With the ‘scandev’ keyword, liveslak will search for the ISO on all local partitions.
  • Added two new option parameters to the ‘iso2usb.sh’ script: “-l” to list and “-d” to scan for the insertion of removable devices on the local computer.
  • A new script has been added: ‘upslak.sh’.
    This script is primarily meant to be run from within your Slackware Live environment, but with the exception of the “-p” option  – see below – it works just as well on your harddisk installation of Linux and with the USB Live stick inserted into the computer. Upslak can tweak your Slackware Live USB stick in several ways:

    • Update the boot kernel & the kernel modules inside the initrd image using the “-k” and “-m” options.
      You can provide Slackware packages as input to these option parameters, or else a single kernel file and a module-tree in /lib/modules/ are also accepted.
      Note that this will leave alone the kernel and the modules inside the Slackware Live filesystem. You can update the kernel-generic and kernel-modules packages in the Slackware Live OS using the regular Slackware package tools if you wish… but the USB stick will not use those anyway.
      Note: this kernel/modules replacement can be reverted if it turns out your new kernel is not working: using the “-r” option. Your previous kernel & modules are backed up by ‘upslak.sh’.
    • Replace the live init script using the “-i” option.
      There are two reasons you would want this: (1) you re-wrote the init script and want to start using that, and (2) you saw that there is a newer version of the “liveinit.tpl” template and want to use that as your new Slackware Live init script.
    • Create an ‘addon’ squashfs module out of the persistent data store using the “-p” option.
      Your persistent data grows over time, and a lot of that may be caused by packages that you install on top of Slackware Live. Using this option you can create a new squashfs module which will be placed in the /liveslak/addons/ directory so that it will be loaded on every boot of the Live OS. The content of the persistent store will be moved into that squashfs module and then the persistent store will be re-initialized (i.e. wiped clean).
      You can repeat this ‘persistence-to-module’ activity as many times as you like.
    • Change the USB wait time on boot, quite similar to the “-w” option of ‘iso2usb.sh’.
    • Add network modules to the initrd using the “-n” option.
      This should normally not be needed, all ISO images of the Slackware Live Edition have network support included out of the box. But in case of a custom Live USB where network support was initially omitted, this could come in handy if you want to PXE-boot the Live OS.
  • And other small improvements/bugfixes to the scripts.

Download the ISO images

The available ISO variants for Slackware Live Edition are: SLACKWARE (64bit & 32bit), XFCE (64bit & 32bit), PLASMA5, 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.

Read more about liveslak

This blog has quite some posts about the Slackware Live Edition. Check them out: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/tag/live/ – they contain lots of insight and helpful tips.
And this was the original post (which has been edited later on so it could become a proper landing page for curious visitors):
http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/

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

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