Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: live (Page 9 of 12)

Updated ISOs for Slackware Live Edition

May 29, 2016 / / 49 Comments

blueSW-64pxI am in the process of uploading new ISO images for Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak 1.0.1 scripts and using Slackware-current dated “Fri May 27 23:08:17 UTC 2016”. This version of Slackware-current has several significant changes and fixes, compared to the snapshot I used for the liveslak-1.0.0 based ISO images.

I did not add a “1.0.1” tag to the repository, but the Live OS will report the “1.0.1” on the boot screen so that you can distinguish these new ISOs from the older versions with the same name. If you want to know the characteristics of an ISO after downloading it, try this command:

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

As usual, you will find ISO images for a full Slackware (64bit and 32bit versions), 64bit Plasma5 and MATE variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant (64bit and 32bit versions).

I added a 32bit variant of the XFCE ISO on request because I could see its usefulness when using it on older hardware. Also considering that more and more distributions are abandoning their 32bit OS variants, this addition makes a nice strong statement. There’s still a lot of old hardware out there, in active service.

As announced before, I have “re-written” the original blog post on Slackware Live and saved the old text in a new article so that it does not get lost in history. The URL of the original article is visited a lot and I do not want people reading that original article to think that this project is still in beta, immature and not usable.

The changes between liveslak 1.0.0 and 1.0.1

I can mention a few highlights:

  • Shutdown of PXE-booted Live OS has been fixed (often the computer would hang halfway the shutdown and require a hard reset).
  • Xorriso can be used as an alternative to mkisofs and isohybrid when generating the ISO image. Xorriso has to be installed separately, it is not part of Slackware.
  • A module “broadcom-sta” was added to the “optional/” directory. You should try this one in case the kernel’s support for your Broadcom wireless hardware is not sufficient and wireless does not activate. Use “load=broadcom-sta” on the boot commandline and then the “wl” kernel driver should load and enable your “wlan0” wireless interface.

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) are being uploaded to the master server (bear) at the moment, and should be available on the mirror servers within the next 24 hours.

Have fun! Eric

Stable 1.0.0 release of liveslak

May 19, 2016 / / 29 Comments

blueSW-64pxYesterday on the final day of my short holiday (of sorts) I prepped and released version 1.0.0 of my “liveslak” project. It is stable and the bugs that were reported (plus some more) have been taken care of.

The “1.0.0” marker is not the end of its development of course. It means that I consider the project production-ready.  It will be used to create Live Editions of Slackware 14.2 (64bit and 32bit) when that is released. There’s still some more ideas for liveslak that I want to implement and those will become available as 1.x releases.

For demonstration purposes I have generated a new set of ISO images using liveslak version 1.0.0. There are ISO images for a full Slackware (64bit and 32bit versions), 64bit Plasma5 and MATE variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant (also 64bit). They are based on Slackware-current dated “Thu May 12 01:50:21 UTC 2016“.

This weekend I will “re-write” the original blog post on Slackware Live because it is the page that has had the biggest hit rate for the past months. People reading that original article may think that this project is still immature and not usable. I will re-write it into a landing page for anyone who is interested in a Live Edition of Slackware, and copy the original text to a new article for reference purposes. All previous articles about the liveslak project aka “Slackware Live Edition” are accessible through this shortcut link by the way.

The changes between 0.9.0 and 1.0.0

Not much was changed actually:

  • I added a new “tweaks” boot option to tweak various aspects of the system. As documented in the Wiki, these are the currently implemented tweaks (multiple tweak values can be combined when comma-separated):
    • nga – no glamor 2D acceleration, avoids error “EGL_MESA_drm_image required”. Because we now have “tweaks=nga“, the old boot parameter “nga” which did the same thing has been removed.
    • tpb – enable TrackPoint scrolling while holding down middle mouse button (a TrackPoint is found on IBM/Lenovo laptops but not only there).
    • syn – start the syndaemon for better support of Synaptics touchpads.
    • ssh – start the SSH server (it is disabled by default). 
  • The SSH daemon is disabled by default now. The default login accounts and passwords of Slackware Live Edition are too easy to find out. Imagine what could happen if you booted Slackware Live on a public network like an internet café!
    Note that you can still enable the SSH daemon on boot: by providing the “tweaks=ssh” boot parameter.
  • The few bugs reported since 0.9.0 have been fixed and I found a few bugs and enhancements too, which have also been dealt with. Check out the commit log if you are interested.

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) were uploaded to the master server (bear) yesterday and should be available by now on the mirror servers.

Have fun! Eric

Updates for LibreOffice, Chromium, Calibre, QBittorrent, Veracrypt

May 18, 2016 / / 18 Comments

I have been preparing a stable release of liveslak, and I wanted the PLASMA5 ISO to have up-to-date software taken from my own “alien” package repository. So I downloaded the latest sources and have prepared new packages for Slackware-current on which the Live ISOs are based, for the following:

  • LibreOffice:
    LibreOffice 5.1.3 is a minor update, focusing on bug fixes.
  • Chromium:
    Chromium 50.0.2661.102 is a security fix, addressing 5 CVE’s. Some days earlier I already uploaded a newer version of the PepperFlash plugin for Chromium. Note that Google no longer releases 32bit versions of its Chrome browser, so that the PepperFlash and Widevine plugins will see only 64bit updates.
  • Calibre:
    Nothing really exciting about the new 2.56.0 version. Kovid Goyal keeps improving this e-book library management program at a steady rate. Its GUI uses Qt5 so this is a natural inclusion for the Plasma5 Live ISO.
  • QBittorrent:
    Version 3.3.4 is the latest of this great bittorrent client with a Qt4 based GUI (I have not switched to its new Qt5 based GUI yet)
  • Veracrypt:
    The successor of TrueCrypt when that program stopped being developed. VeraCrypt fixes many (security) bugs that were still present in TrueCrypt. Its development continues with the 1.17 release while remaining compatible with older TrueCrypt containers.

Now we just need to cross fingers and hope that there will be a release of Slackware 14.2 soon, so that I can create definitive versions of Slackware Live Edition.

Packages for the aforementioned software can be obtained from these mirror sites and probably others too:

Cheers! Eric

Slackware Live Edition – final testing please

May 6, 2016 / / 46 Comments

blueSW-64pxMy gut feeling tells me that I should announce a stable release of my “liveslak” project soon. I have implemented much more than I set out to do from the beginning, and no bugs have surfaced for a while.

So it was time to stamp a final beta number on the liveslak sources and generate new Slackware Live ISO images. I want you to give them a spin and report any bugs that you find. Otherwise there may well be an 1.0.0 release after the weekend.

Official liveslak version number is 0.9.0 (Beta9). The ISO images (full Slackware, Plasma5 and MATE variants as well as the lean XFCE variant) are based on Slackware-current dated “Thu May  5 05:17:19 UTC 2016” with the latest 4.4.9 kernel. Again, I added an ISO of the 32bit variant of full Slackware Live.

By now the ISO images have been uploaded to “bear” and ready for your consumption.

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

What’s new in 0.9.0?

  • A PXE server was added, through a script called “pxeserver”.
    When you boot Slackware Live from a Live media on one computer (the server), and preferably load the Live media into RAM using the “toram” boot parameter and start the “pxeserver” script, you enable every other computer in your (wired) LAN to boot Slackware Live over the network. If the “server” has Internet, then so will the PXE clients because the server will act as a traffic router. See the documentation on how to start and use the PXE server.
  • The ISO image is still a “hybrid” ISO, meaning you can use “cp” or “dd” to transfer the ISO onto a USB stick to make that a bootable Live medium. But I changed the parameters of the “isohybrid” program to match the ones used for the official Slackware ISO images – this fixes the problem where my ISOs failed to boot in VirtualBox when the file was larger than one GB. So, every curious journalist out there who wants to give Slackware Live Edition a try will get her chance without complaining.
  • Many other significant improvements and bug fixes during the past weeks. 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. The Plasma5 variant comes with KDE Frameworks 5.21.0, Plasma 5.6.3 and Applications 16.04.0 on top of Qt5 5.6.0. The Mate 1.14 packages have all beeen recompiled by Willy Sudiarto Raharjo to take away any possibility of issues resulting from recent library updates in Slackware.

The ISO images (with MD5 checksum and GPG signature) are available on the master (bear) and should be available soon on the mirror servers. Check out the “0.9.0” subdirectory for ISOs based on the liveslak-0.9.0 scripts. A symlink called “latest” will always point to the latest set of ISO images.

Things to remember 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 is to 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. The syslinux boot has help screens behind the F2, F3, F4 and F5 function keys and the grub boot screen has a “help on boot parameters” menu entry.

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):

liveslak-0.9.0-xfce

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

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