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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 24 2015, @07:23AM   Printer-friendly
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:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:39AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:39AM (#267810) Homepage

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:23PM (#268175)

    >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.