slackware as utility usb stick

captain-sensible

captain-sensible

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@70 Tango Charlie Tango

start here :


First stage download slackware.zip by left click of mouse on "slackware.zip" above.
navigate to Downloads should be in there.

bash-5.0$ cd Downloads
bash-5.0$ pwd
/home/andrew/Downloads
bash-5.0$ ls --color
slackware.zip

//we will move it to Desktop
// replace andrew with your user name

$ mv slackware.zip /home/andrew/Desktop

//next we go to Desktop
$ cd /home/andrew/Desktop


bash-5.0$ ls --color
ZAP_2.9.0 slackware.zip southend.jpg

//unzip slackware.zip

bash-5.0$ unzip slackware.zip
Archive: slackware.zip
inflating: iso2usb.sh
bash-5.0$

that gives us file iso2usb.sh on Desktop
 
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same thing for iso left click on http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/latest/slackware64-live-current.iso link above

move it to Desktop or just navigate and drop and drag to Desktop. So now have iso2usb.sh and slackwarelive iso on Desktop.

Attach a usb stick of 8 to 14 gig to pc. Remove everything else just in case.
lets have a look whats what :

bash-5.0# lsblk -o name,label,size,fstype,model
NAME LABEL SIZE FSTYPE MODEL
sda 58.2G BHT_WR202I0064G_E70290F5
├─sda1 100M vfat
├─sda2 2.9G swap
└─sda3 55.2G ext4
sdb 14.9G SD_MMC_MS_PRO
└─sdb1 extra 14.9G ntfs
bash-5.0#

ok in my case i know that sda is my main PC and sdb is usb stick.


Now prepare script for use:bash-5.0$ su
Password:
bash-5.0# chmod a+x iso2usb.sh
//for bunto's it sudo chmod a+x iso2usb.sh

next for me it would be :

./iso2usb.sh -i slackware64-live-current.iso -o /dev/sdb

//just hit return for all questions


//that will put slackware iso onto stick and partition so that there is persistence.the point of persistence is so that useful software can be installed onto stick
 
will boot up maybe tomorrow and have a look how to install software
 
why would you want to install extra stuff; well from a usb stick booted from a PC that won't boot you can do stuff as in image .
its hows how to find superblock in messed up file system on PC and hint how to fix it
 

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@captain-sensible
Cap,
As I mentioned in the other place, I pressed the F-12 key and that brought up this:
Boot Manager.png


The General USB Flash Disk is the one with slack on it, so I pressed 'enter'.
Then this showed up:

slackware.png


I pressed enter again and it loaded up and I now have a desktop of slack.

Desktop slack.png


Not a very good pic as I took it with my phone and transferred it to my cp.

I have not tried everything on it yet, but will give it a go later today or tomorrow.
Right now I have the Dolphin box on the screen.
I also have the Konqueror screen up.
The live : bash-Konsole works too.

Here's what the screen looks like right now:

Screen.png


I have not done any adjusting to anything yet, except the height of the panel.
I will say that it does look very nice.
I'll give it a good shot and pour the questions to you as they come up.
Gotta go for now. Supper time here.
OG TC
Success!!!!
 
Well....now you have to add "slackware user " to your signature and the custom is when you like a post as a slackware user (that's you now) you click "like" then select a relavent emoij which now will be SLACKWARE
 
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So trail blazer @70 Tango Charlie has successfully completed his mission of getting slackware current live up and running . usually with any mission there is a "De-briefing" where what happened on the mission is reviewed. So first i will have a look at the process Charlie went through where he used his Mint 64 bit OS to get the job done. I'll post that here before moving onto having a look around Slackware and then ways of installing pkgs
 
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De-brief

Really the main problems encountered were, the terminal and the context of, where does the terminal think its working from.

To check at any time, where the terminal is working from just use this command:
Code: 
pwd


When you open up a terminal by default the terminal will start off from your home folder. I like to work from my Desktop so anything you want to work on first you need to get it there and then you need to move the terminal there.

To change directory - i.e cd to Desktop command is:

Code: 
cd Desktop

// note the capital D

Charlie used his PC running 64 bit Mint and one problems running the iso2usb.sh script was:

Code: 
-- Required program(s) not found in search path '/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin'!
-- extlinux

-- Exiting.

So we had to get that installed before moving on, using

Code: 
sudo apt-get install extlinux
Reading package lists... Done

Another issue once the usb stick had the slackware live iso onto the usb stick was correctly booting from it.

When a usb is attached to my PC, that has a live OS on it, for me to
access it from the boot menu, I have to power down (cold boot) and hit the F9 key . You will see what I see at post #6 .

That key may be something else on your PC . Also if you look at post #6 you will see

2 entries for the same usb stick Scandisk. One is going to try and boot via uefi and the last one legacy
 
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Placeholder: i'm going to boot my slackware live OS up and then mention about installing software. Actually i can do a pre-amble here.


In times past you could install software by getting the source and then doing a time honoured

Code: 
configure
make
make install


In order for a computer to keep a grip of whats going on , it needs to know whats installed and what isn't. Thats for one reason is that when new software releases are available on its repo it can tell you , there is a newer version.

if your on a Debian system you can get software in the form of <packagename>.deb and install it manually using :

Code: 
dpkg -i    <packagename>.deb

The main thing as i understand it is that using that, you get software installed and your system is aware of it. using ./configure etc your system hasn't really got a grip on whats going on. This is the reason why a reliable system of packages from repo and installed via say synaptic came about.


Now Slackware is the most unix like so they say and a little conservative.

There are a few ways to install software in Slackware; one way is via a slackbuild an introduction to using a slackbuild is here: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:misc:anatomy_of_a_slackbuild

its by Andy Brookes - i've no idea who that is but obviously hes a genius :^)

Probably next i will do a summary of that if @70 Tango Charlie is up for it - wait his moto is "never say never" so of course hes up for it !
 
captain-sensible said:
Placeholder: i'm going to boot my slackware live OS up and then mention about installing software. Actually i can do a pre-amble here.


In times past you could install software by getting the source and then doing a time honoured

Code: 
configure
make
make install


In order for a computer to keep a grip of whats going on , it needs to know whats installed and what isn't. Thats for one reason is that when new software releases are available on its repo it can tell you , there is a newer version.

if your on a Debian system you can get software in the form of <packagename>.deb and install it manually using :

Code: 
dpkg -i    <packagename>.deb

The main thing as i understand it is that using that, you get software installed and your system is aware of it. using ./configure etc your system hasn't really got a grip on whats going on. This is the reason why a reliable system of packages from repo and installed via say synaptic came about.


Now Slackware is the most unix like so they say and a little conservative.

There are a few ways to install software in Slackware; one way is via a slackbuild an introduction to using a slackbuild is here: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:misc:anatomy_of_a_slackbuild

its by Andy Brookes - i've no idea who that is but obviously hes a genius :^)

Probably next i will do a summary of that if @70 Tango Charlie is up for it - wait his moto is "never say never" so of course hes up for it !
Click to expand...
@captain-sensible
Have another beer!!!
I have to be 'up for it' as I don't know how much more time I will be given. I try to make the most of it while I can. You know the old saying 'one day at a time'.
TC
 
i'm on my slacklive now :

my version is :
live@darkstar:~$ uname -r
5.4.20

i'm going to try to update using slackpkg ; but first a couple of things .

Editor that can be used ( before VIM) for files and config files is nano.

Here is how you can open a file:
live@darkstar:~$ pwd
/home/live
live@darkstar:~$ cd Desktop
live@darkstar:~/Desktop$ ls --color
cracklib-2.9.7-x86_64-1.txz* pam-1.4.0-x86_64-1.txz*
helloworld.cpp slacklive1.png
kernel-modules-5.4.60-x86_64-1.txz tor-browser-9.5.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
libpwquality-1.4.2-x86_64-1.txz*
live@darkstar:~/Desktop$

$ nano helloworld.cpp

you will then see something like like in the attached image . nano is quite good to start with since it has a menu prompt at bottom. The ^ represents the ctrl keyboard key, bottom left on my keyboard. So editing is just a matter of up down arrows to go to line, type in and then to write to file ctrl + o , then ctrl + x to exit editor
 

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So my live slack is now 5.4.48

lets have a look at installing software ,since using Alien Bobs script iso2usb.sh has given us persistence with the live os . We will have a go at installing "geany" which is a text editor with highlighting and also i light IDE.

So we use the network manager top right and connect to our wifi ssd. next via a browser seamonkey we visit slackbuilds.org . IN the search textbox you can type the name for any software and it will , if it finds anything it will present something like slackbuilds1.png

To use a "slackbuild" you have to download two things , the package source and the slackbuild itself. Basically left click on both links indicated by the arrows and get both files onto say Desktop
 

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  • slackbuilds1.png
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So you should have something like slackbuilds3.png (see atachment) you should see geany-1.34.tar.gz and geany.tar.gz this is the point of confusion for most new to slackbuilds.
both represent dir's in compressed form, but only one of them needs to be un-compressed.

The hint which is which is by the 1.34 in geany-1.34.1.tar.gz that is the source code; the slackbuild will always be in the form <software name>.tar.gz

Anyway what we need to do now is uncompress the geany.tar.gz and then drag and drop the geany-1.34.1.tar,gz into the uncompressed directory, if that makes sense.
 

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if you get it right and look into the uncompressed geany.tar.gz and have drag and drop the geany-1.34.1.tar.gz the tree view in slackbuild7.png is what you should see .

the listing in red is the 1.34.1-tar.gz file we dragged in, the geany.SlackBuild is a bash script and the other files are supporting stuff
 

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Now with that geany-1.34.1.tar.gz you could just un-compress it , open a command line and use the time honored way of installing the software:

Code: 
configure
make
make install


However if you installed all your software that way soon it would be an unmanageable mess since only you would know what was installed and deps and any conflicts. What a slackbuild does is first a few checks and basically using another script makepkg is produce a neat package that can be installed simply from the command line and also easily removed.

Also when the package is installed on slackware the package is listed /var/log/packages
config files go to /etc/<packagename> , so its all done in a nice control freak sort of way.

if you want to see whats in a slackbuild and an attempted explanation of each bit you can find it here: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:misc:anatomy_of_a_slackbuild
 
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next we will take a few steps in preparation of running the slackbuild script which will bundle a package for us in our case a geany-1.34.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz file which will be put in /tmp directory ready for us to install.

Now i must point out that slackbuilds is a repo that is maintained on a voluntary basis and that builds have been tested against stable i.e 14.2v and not meant for current. However a lot of the builds will produce packages that run on current; geany is one of them.

so we have downloaded the geany slackbuild, with geany.SlackBuild script Desc and a couple od other files and also we dragged and dropped geany-1.34.1.tar.gz into the directory, with label "geany" .we open a terminal and cd into it. This is what we see:

geany
├── README
├── doinst.sh
├── geany-1.34.1.tar.gz
├── geany.SlackBuild
├── geany.info
└── slack-desc


So the context is from a terminal we are inside geany dir. We are going to run the geany.SlackBuild script. First we need to give it correct permissions :
Code: 
# chmod a+x geany.SlackBuild
[note the # means we are root]

now to run the script its a just a case of :

Code: 
./geany.SlackBuild

Our unpacked directory is on our Desktop but that doesn't matter , the

script will place if the build runs successfully a package in /tmp folder


to install the geany package is either a case of using full path or doing a cd to /tmp directory and then doing :

# installpkg geany-1.34.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
 
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