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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:
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 24 2015, @12:07PM
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