USING THE SLAPPFESK LIVE DISTRO Variants: Slappfesk comes in four variants: * TORSK (The ORiginal Slackware King) The main edition, featuring Xfce, Wayland and other nice GUI stuff. It is similar to Alien Bob's Live Xfce edition, but with a handful of additional applications and games. (and cli utilities) * SMOLT (Slackware Medium On Live Tty) A TTY only edition, like TORSK, it includes some heavy duty text based usability apps and games and some programs designed to work in the Linux framebuffer. * KRILL (the stuff you feed whales) A small set of Slackware packages that you can install on a standard Slackware installation. It will provide the a motd, wallpaper and quirky Norwegian fortunes. Booting: You can burn the ISO to a DVD or dd'it to a USB stick and boot from it. (it should work on most machines) But a more practical method is to run the script ./iso2usb.sh -i ../slackware64-live-slappfesk-15.0.iso -o /dev/sdX, where "sdX" is the name of your USB drive. (It can be sdb or something else, double *CHECK* that this name is correct!) This will install the live distro onto the USB stick and give you persistent storage. (you can only do this from within a Slackware distribution) Applications (TORSK): Slappfesk tries to provide a lightweight, but well rounded, assortment of applications. These include: * Xfce - a light but modern desktop environment * IceWM - a very lightweight desktop * Firefox - a modern, and slow, web browser * Dillo - a very limited, but super lightweight, web browser * Claws-Mail - an email client * AbiWord - a light word processor * Gnumeric - a light spreadsheet * Zathura - a PDF/PS/DVI/CB reader * WordNet - an English dictionary * MPV - a light but modern video player * MPlayer - a lighter, and older, video player * XMMS - a basic audio player * Geeqie - an image viewer * GIMP - an image manipulation program * Geany - a light, but useful, programming editor * Gvim/Emacs - programming editors for advanced users * Drawterm - for all you Plan 9 users out there! You'll also find a handful of simple games and emulators too. Besides my own peculiar needs, the application choices are largely governed by space constraints. There are no Qt applications to aviod that dependency for instance. Nevertheless, most common desktop tasks should be covered well enough by this selection. By default TORSK uses the Xfce desktop environment, but a large collection of lightweight X11 and Wayland desktops are included as well, you can run xwmconfig to chooce which desktop "startx" should use. To use one of the Wayland desktops, just type their names instead of "startx". (eg. sway, hikari, dwl, labwc, weston or river) PS: Some desktops are more user-friendly then others, and a few of the available options will need configuring before they become useful. Like Slackware, Slappfesk gives you the unaltered vanilla version of these desktops, which usually means that they look bad. Of course, you can configure them to your liking, there's even a wallpaper in /usr/share/wallpapers if you need it. (also, see link below) If that sounds like too much work, then Slackware may not your cup of tea. https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2025/wm_desktop.html Applications (SMOLT): This edition is esentially the same system as TORSK but without a GUI. You'd be surprised, but the Linux console can do a lot of things! * twin - a stacking window manager * tmux,dvtm,byobu - tiling window managers * links -g - graphical web browser * w3m,lynx - text based web browsers * wget,rtorrent - downloaders * mutt,alpine - email clients * weechat,irssi - IRC client * finch - chat client * snownews,slrn - news reader * wordgrinder - word processor * sc-im,sc - spreadsheets * fbpdf,fbgs - PDF/PS readers * wn - an English dictionary * mpv, mplayer - video players Examples: $ mplayer -vo fbdev2 -vf scale=1920:1080 -really-quiet $ setfont -v drdos8x6; mpv -vo caca movie.mpeg $ mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkEgb2UtQJE * mocp,play - audio players * soma - internet radio * fbi,cacaview - image viewers * nano,joe,jed - user friendly text editors * neovim,vim - an advanced programming editor * mc,ranger,nnn - file managers * calcurse,remind - calendars/reminder service * bc - calculator * acpi - battery information * htop - process information * nmtui - network manager There are also a handful of games included, dosbox for example should work as long as it's configured correctly. (see link below) There are a few heavy duty console games, such as angband, crawl, nethack and vms-empire, and an assortment of casual games, such as curseofwar, greed, cpat (card games), nsudoku, nbsdgames, myman, vitetris, etc... https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/console_desktop.html#framebuffer_games To keep this version small, internationalization support has been dropped. LLVM/Clang has been replaced with TCC and Python/Ruby has been dropped. Samba has also been dropped. Package management: Package management in Slackware is somewhat involved. You essentially have two distinct categories of packages, the official packages that are included in the Slackware distribution, and 3rd party packages made by the community. The last category assumes that you have a *full* Slackware installation, if you don't these community packages can break due to missing dependencies. If you plan to flesh out the Slappfesk system it is a good idea to install the full set of Slackware packages first, or at least, the full set of libraries and other basic categories: # slackpkg update gpg # you only need to do this once # slackpkg update # slackpkg upgrade-all # slackpkg install-new # slackpkg clean-system # slackpkg install slackware64 This last change is massive, it will pull in about Gb's of software, including KDE, Texlive, Emacs and other things we may or may not want. (a full Slackware install will take ~16 Gb, or ~8 Gb without a GUI) An alternative would be to install just the package categories we expect to use. I would recommend a, ap, d, l, n and x: # slackpkg install a # core system # slackpkg install ap # command line user applications # slackpkg install d # development # slackpkg install e # emacs # slackpkg install f # old linux docs # slackpkg install k # kernel source # slackpkg install kde # KDE desktop environment # slackpkg install l # libraries # slackpkg install n # networking # slackpkg install t # texlive # slackpkg install tcl # tcl/tk # slackpkg install x # X windowing system # slackpkg install xap # graphical user applications # slackpkg install xfce # Xfce desktop environment # slackpkg install y # command line games Of course, if you know what you are doing, you can cherry pick the packages you need: # slackpkg install joe # slackpkg install soma PS: KERNEL UPDATES Whenever the kernel itself is updatet in this way, you need to manually update your bios. This cannot be done on the live system, but rather on a host Slackware system that contains the liveslak directory. Note the kernel-module and kernel-generic versions that you just upgraded. (eg. echo /var/lib/pkgtools/packages/kernel-* to check), then run a command similar to this: # ./upslak.sh -o /dev/sdX -m kernel-modules-5.15.161-x86_64-1 \ -k kernel-generic-5.15.161-x86_64-1 PS: The upslak script can also be used to upgrade other packages on the USB stick from the host system. It is often more convenient to do the heavy duty package builing outside of the slow live USB environment. As a rule, liveslak is best used in an evironment where you are already using at least one Slackware machine. And the live system should mirror that system. (eg. use a current live system if your main Slackware system uses the current branch) Once the system is reasonably fleshed out in this way, you can go ahead and install 3rd party packages from the community. It would be ideal if there were a large repository of readily compiled binaries out there, but such repositories are rare for Slackware. One exception is Alien Bob's repo. It isn't big, but it contains many of the usual suspects missing from stock Slackware: # slackpkg info libreoffice # note: it requires openjdk17 # slackpkg install openjdk17 # slackpkg install libreoffice # slackpkg install chromium # slackpkg install vlc By far however, the largest repository of community addons are the buildscripts hosted on SlackBuilds.org. It is a lengthy and error prone process to compile software to be sure, but the sbopkg utility tries to ease the pain at least. # sbopkg Sync the repository first, then Browse or Search to find the packages you need. Note the READMES in these packages, especially the REQUIRES line at the end. You are expected to sort out these dependencies yourself. (relax, it's not as bad as it sounds) Add the package you want to the Queue, then go to any of the dependencies and add them to the Queue, then add *their* dependencies to the Queue, and so on. Once you're done, go Back, manage the Queue, Sort it, Reverse the order (so that dependencies comes first). Then finally hit Process and make yourself a cup of coffee as the chain of packages are being compiled. One final point. When Updating these 3rd party packages, it is sometimes necessary to recompile the whole chain of dependencies. To automate this (you should still keep an eye on things as it's very inefficient to recompile the same dependency over and over again), you can use the sqg utility that is included in sbopkg: # sqg -a # generate queuefiles for all packages - takes a while! # sbopkg -i mypackage You'll now be asked if you want to use the (Q)ueuefile, which will compile the full chain of dependencies. Rolling release: Slappfesk is based on the stable 15.0 branch of Slackware, but it is possible to turn it into a rolling release by switching to the current branch. To do so, edit /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. This file contains two lists of mirrors, first is a list of mirrors for the 15.0 stable branch, followed by a list for the current branch. Simply select a current mirror that is located near you. PS! Make sure only *ONE* mirror is uncommented in this list. Once that is done, update the repository, upgrade-all, install-new, clean-system, as described above. PS! Make sure you manually update the boot loader with the new kernel as described above! If you want to keep your 3rd party addons unbroken, you also need to use the current branch for these 3rd party repositories. Edit /etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf so that Alien Bob's repo poinst to the current branch. And in sbopkg, choose Utilities, Repository and select SBo-git (current). Then go back and check for Updates. Likely, you'll need to rebuild everything. As with all rolling releases, you are trading stability for up to date software. So be prepared for breakages and keep the duct tape near by! PS: If you already have Slackware on your daily driver, it is far better to simply copy the liveslak directory, change make_slackware_live.conf to use SL_VERSION="current" and rebuild the ISO with ./make_slackware_live.sh. Harddisk installation: If you want to install Slappfesk permanently to a harddisk, you can do so with the setup2hd program. It is only marginally different from the standard Slackware installer. I would recommend that you run slackpkg install slackware afterwards, or at least install some of the basic package categories, to flesh out the system, as noted above. The live system is trimmed down, but on a regular harddisk there is little reason to conserve space. If you want to "convert" the distro into stock Slackware, you can go ahead and delete the SBo/Dan packages in /var/lib/pkgtools/packages. (just backup the files in /etc/slackpkg first!) PS: Obviously, kernel updates are done in the regular way when you install the distribution to a harddisk. Running lilo or grub-install for instance, depending on which boot loader you are using. How do I support Slackware? You can support Patrick at https://www.patreon.com/slackwarelinux, and any your package builds can be sent to http://slackbuilds.org.