My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Uploading 15 GB of new Slackware Live Edition ISO images

I finished generating ISO images for Slackware Live Edition 1.3.0.2. These ISOs are all based on Slackware-current “Thu Jan 17 04:52:06 UTC 2019” which means it will boot a Linux 4.19.16 kernel.

Available variants are:

  • Slackware (unaltered complete) in 32bit and 64bit flavors, ~3.5 GB in size
  • XFCE (minimalistic Slackware) in 32bit and 64bit flavors, ~700 MB in size
  • MATE (Slackware without KDE4 but with MATE added) is a 64bit ISO of 2.4 GB
  • PLASMA5 (Slackware without KDE4 but with KDE Plasma5 and a lot of other goodies added) comes in a 64bit flavor at 4.3 GB

The squashfs modules in the XFCE ISOs are compressed with ‘xz’ to keep them as small as possible (so they will fit on a CDROM medium). All of the other ISOs are compressed with ‘zstd’ which gives the Live OS a speed boost of ~20% at the cost of 10% increase in the ISO size.

There’s 15 GB to upload to slackware.nl so it will take a while to get there… even with 3 MB/sec upload speed. Rsync download is possible via rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/ … you just have to be a wee bit patient.

In the meantime, if you feel bored, you can look at the development history in its git repository. If you want to read about what the Slackware Live Edition can do for you, check out https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/ or any of the articles on this blog that followed.

Extensive documentation on how to use and develop Slackware Live Edition can be found in the Slackware Documentation Project Wiki.

Have fun!

14 Comments

  1. Andrew Strong

    Thanks again for this work Eric! A previous version of Slackware Live Edition (Xfce version to be precise) saved me when I suffered an HDD crash a while back, I used the live CD for several days until new HDD arrived. Beautiful work! I look forward to downloading the new version and this time might splash out on the Plasma 5 edition. A big ;thank you’ again…

  2. jaweb

    merci 🙂

  3. KG Hammarlund

    Thanks, Eric – you don’t cease to impress and please your followers.
    And it’s great that you still can find the time to care for those of us who haven’t made the leap to Plasma5 (yet), but continue to offer the xfce and mate versions.
    Since I’ve kept my -current HDD install from January 2018 upgraded and it is perfectly stable, I see no need to make a fresh install at the moment, but it is good to know that fresh ISOs are there when needed.
    And I patiently await your Qt-5.12 upgrade when the 5.12.1 version arrives with bugs in the December version sorted.

  4. Gavin Groom

    I’m wanting to download an ISO but Firefox is complaining about the site’s certificate – https://i.imgur.com/TqzOhhW.png

  5. alienbob

    Gavin, that’s strange. The firefox browser gets a certificate which is meant for ‘bear.alienbase.nl’ which is the primary name for the server. But chrome gets the correct certificate for ‘slackware.nl’.
    I don’t know whether this is a bug in firefox or a configuration issue on my side. Pointers are welcome.

  6. alienbob

    Gavin, can you try again? I changed the SSL definitions in the httpd configuration and my sites are serving the correct certificate now.
    I also checked the “alienbase.nl” certificate signature algorithm and it says “Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption”. I.e. it uses the strong SHA256. When I point my Firefox to the https://slackware.nl/ site I get no errors anymore.
    The error shown in your screenshot would indicate a SSL certificate which was created using the SHA1 algorithm, but I can assure you that this is not the case here.

  7. Kevin

    Can the Slackware Live Edition be used to upgrade an already installed version of Slackware?

    If I have a system that’s currently running -current, but it’s a very old version of -current, could I use the Live Edition to upgrade that installed version of -current to the one on the Live Edition?

    Thanks

  8. alienbob

    Kevin, no, that is not what Slackware Live is meant for. Using the “setup2hd” on Slackware Live will overwrite everything on the partition.
    What you need to do is configure slackpkg to use a slackware-current URL as its origin server.
    Then blacklist the kernel-huge, kernel-generic and kernel-modules packages in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist because you do not want to lose your current kernel in the upgrade (in case the new kernel has an issue you still need to be able to go back to the working kernel)
    Then run (as root):
    # slackpkg update
    # slackpkg upgrade slackpkg
    And again:
    # slackpkg update
    # slackpkg install-new
    # slackpkg upgrade glibc
    # slackpg upgrade-all

    That will take a lot of time if you are running behind on -current.
    Before rebooting, install the new kernel and kernel-modules package by downloading them from a mirror to your local disk
    Run “installpkg kernel-*.t?z” and “installpkg kernel-modules*.t?z” to install these alongside your running kernel.
    Then – only if you want to use the generic kernel – create an initrd image. A suitable commandline can be generated for you. Run;
    # /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -k XXXX -r
    (where XXXX is the version of that new kernel you just installed). This will output a “mkinitrd” commandline which you should copy with your mouse and then run as a command.
    An initrd image will be created and you will have to update /etc/lilo.conf or your elilo or grub configuration to add the new kernel (and the new initrd if relevant).
    Be sure to add the new kernel and leave the lines for the running kernel in place, so you can still boot into that working kernel!
    Then, reboot and hope everything worked out fine.

    • KMC

      I am upgrading to a Ryzen 5 2400G cpu on an AsRock B450 motherboard with a pcie nvme drive. It has been very time consuming to install Slackware since there are numerous little errors one can make. The relevant information is scattered around in numerous places and I seem to be quite able to get something wrong, particularly with UEFI boot. Right now I am trying to create an installation usb with the slackware64-current hybrid iso created by the script mirror-slackware-current.sh. The problem with slackware64-current is that it is liable to change, which makes slackware64-14.2 preferable in my situation, but the 4.4.x kernel doesn’t have the new amdgpu drivers (solvable by compiling a kernel). I suspect I am not alone, so a possible revisit to making a usb installer with a 4.19.xxx kernel and perhaps grub might be a welcome article.

  9. Gavin Groom

    No change on my end unfortunately in Firefox. Also getting an error in Chrome Beta – https://i.imgur.com/aD6sMLj.png

  10. alienbob

    Gavin, I guess that you need to read https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adding-cacert-root-certificates-to-your-slackware/ in order to get rid of that.

  11. Gavin Groom

    It would appear so! Thanks for the help, Eric.

  12. Jorgen

    Hi Eric!
    And thanks much for the live editions 🙂

    I’ve been the plasma5 live edition since January, and it has been working without any major problems.
    Today however, when I ran slackpkg update etc, I ended up with a missing file
    libphonon4qt5experimental.so.4
    File I believe is included in the phonon package(?)

    Upon reading through your repository, I noticed that I am way behind on a lot of things. And this made me wonder if I am missing something here. Missed out on some configuration or such (slackppkgplus.conf etc)
    If I compare the list of packages here
    https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/x86_64/kde/plasma/
    with the what I have installed as of today, I am way behind.
    What cause this?

    Thanks in advance for any info and/or help!
    /mdkdio

  13. Luigi Picaro

    Hi Eric,
    first of all we must thank you for all your work.

    I’m testing liveslak(why “c” is omitted?) to see Xfce 4.14 improvements, and i would to ask if it is possible to persist boot parameters in my usb stick.
    For example, to italianize the distro i must attach “tz=Europe/Rome locale=it_IT.utf8 kbd=it xkb=it” at every boot. In alternative i can re-make the iso with your command “make_slackware_live.sh -d XFCE -l it” but it’s onerous…

    Thank you again,
    LP

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