from the first-ever-Slackware-test-drive-version dept.
With Slackware Linux, it had always been necessary to install the distro to your hard drive to try it out. That is changing.
Eric Hameleers blogged
I have been irritated by past distro reviews where the reviewer complained that Slackware did not have a Live version. Meaning, to give it a test run they would have to install the distro to an actual computer--which would lead to the usual moaning about the arcane installer and "Slackware not keeping up with time".
[...] I am far from done [building the ISOs] and I would consider the current state of things at most to be "Beta Quality".
[...] When I feel confident enough I will probably upload the XFCE and Plasma 5 versions, and when the feedback is OK (and I fixed all the glaring bugs you guys will surely uncover) I will also release the scripts.
A week later, Eric continues with some details of what is in the release, more background on its development, and links to where you can download it:
[More after the break.]
With the abandoned ConsoleKit replaced by ConsoleKit2 (which is actively maintained by the Slackware-friendly XFCE crew) and Gentoo's eudev taking the place of udev, we are well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while.
[...] How to celebrate the occasion? Easy! By releasing a first public Beta of the Slackware Live Edition.
[...] I have two ISO images, created by a single script: The full Slackware64-current contained in a 2.6 GB ISO image and a 700 MB stripped-down version with Xfce as the Desktop (fits on a CDROM!). Unfortunately, Plasma 5 is currently broken due to the icu4c upgrade in -current, or else I would also have included an ISO with a Slackware64-current & Plasma5. But that ISO will come once the broken packages have been recompiled.
The ISO images are hybrid, which means you can either burn them to DVD, or use dd to copy the ISO to a USB stick. Both methods will give you a live environment which will allow you to make changes and "write them to disk". The changes will be kept in a RAM disk, so a reboot will "reset" the live OS to its original default state i.e. there is no [persistence].
I want your feedback to get the bugs out of the boot-up stages.
[...] Based on your feedback, I will release a second Beta somewhere soon, and those new ISOs will be accompanied by the scripts I used to create them. One of those scripts, "iso2usb.sh" will write the ISO content to a USB stick, after partitioning the stick (erasing all data). That USB stick will have persistency! [That is,] the things you change while Slackware Live is running are not kept in RAM but written to the USB stick and that will survive a reboot.
[...] Get the ISOs here:
Related Stories
The Finnix project and DistroWatch are observing the 25th anniversary of the Finnix live distro a few days ago:
From Finnix:
Today is a very special day: March 22 is the 25 year anniversary of the first public release of Finnix, the oldest live Linux distribution still in production. Finnix 0.03 was released on March 22, 2000, and to celebrate this anniversary, I'm proud to announce the 35th Finnix release, Finnix 250!
Besides the continuing trend of Finnix version number inflation (the previous release was Finnix 126), Finnix 250 is simply a solid regular release, with the following notes:
From DistroWatch:
The Finnix distribution is a small, self-contained, bootable live Linux distribution for system administrators, based on Debian. The project's latest version is Finnix 250 which marks the project's 25th anniversary.
Other live distros come and go. However, Finnix is a special live distro because it contains so many pre-installed system administration tools that it has been a goto tool for system recovery and repair for two and a half decades.
Previously:
(2016) Refracta 8.0: Devuan on a Stick
(2015) Slackware Live Edition Beta Available
(2014) Snowden Used Special Linux Distro for Anonymity
Eric Hameleers blogs once again:
It 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 [by] one item...
A "Beta3"[1] 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?
[...] 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.
[1] The link in TFA for "Beta3" doesn't appear to be what was intended (DIY rather than ready-to-go ISOs).
Previous: Slackware Live Edition Beta Available
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2015, @07:35AM
Slackware is the shit distro for posers who wanted to install Linux From Scratch but were too fucking stupid to follow simple instructions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Tuesday November 24 2015, @07:43AM
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday November 24 2015, @08:15PM
I'll never forget the day that I realised that I was running Slackware on my desktops, and Ubuntu on my servers.
On servers: The dependencies nightmares are easily solved, Ubuntu packages are easy to find, and you don't care about the desktop junk so it hardly matters, plus other people are familiar with it. Ubuntu is perfect.
On desktops: I'm happy to compile and tweak to get exactly what I want and no more, I don't want things changed underneath me, don't want someone else's idea of what my desktop should look like, and want the distro to do exactly what I tell it and nothing more. The GUIs don't get in my way and it doesn't matter to anyone else as I'm the only person who uses those computers. Slackware is perfect.
And SLAX et al have been around forever - nobody who's used Slackware long-term would want to boot it live, really. Want to trial it? Run a VM, you dope. Nobody dual-boots any more. I mean, there's nothing stopping them doing so, it's just ISOLinux with a loopback root filesystem. But a specific distro support for such things? Don't bother, and focus on keeping patching out that systemd shite instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Chromium_One on Tuesday November 24 2015, @07:52AM
Excellent project, can see this being incredibly useful. Have used Slax in the past as a recovery environment and so on, but having the full install available (and hopefully some way to easily add from Alien's package repo and/or similar) would increase the utility dramatically.
Eric, keep on rockin' it. I owe you and Pat a couple kegs by now.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 24 2015, @12:07PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2015, @01:41PM
You currently have two choices (that I know of):
* https://connochaetos.org/wiki/slack-n-free [connochaetos.org]
* http://freeslack.net/ [freeslack.net]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2015, @06:12PM
It's linux
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @09:17PM
Wake me up when Windows finally gets to alpha.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:39AM
I don't think it's acceptable to have a distro without dependency management in this day and age. Yes, I could look up the list of dependencies, then recursively look at each of those packages for their dependencies, and then install all of them, or I could have the package manager do all of that for me, like any sane distro. Then there's automatically removing dependencies on uninstall, and making sure those dependencies aren't required by other packages... No thanks.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:23PM
>I don't think it's acceptable...
Slackware is clearly not for you.
Please don't go on a rampage though, and try to take it away from those of us who
do enjoy it. Your post seems to indicate something more than simple dislike. It almost
sounds like you're going to start some kind of "destroy Slackware" fundraiser....or some
alternative init system...
You are not required to approve things that other people like and support.
I mean, what do you even care? Why did you bother to even post that?
"Stop liking things I don't like"??? I do hope you find a way to reach maturity and shed this
Jackbooted opinion gland of which you seem so proud. And if it so happens that you already
have reached maturity, please do us all a favour and attempt to get a life.