Hello all

First time posting here, sort of long time slacker with some gaps in between...

Anyway, I have a sort of question/feature request.

First of all, I fully understand the KISS philosophy from Slackware, and I fully appreciate it.

Story: I co-worker of my was looking for a Linux distro to install into a VM that he would be able to carry around in an USB memory from work to home.
I suggested for him to try slackware.
However, he has a limitation of ~2gb to the installation size, and he doesn't need most of the packages.
With this in mind, I helped him select the more relevants one, but it was a pain to make an installation that both works AND attends the 2gb maximum limitation.

From that experience, and also having in mind the KISS philosophy from Slackware, comes my question/sugestion: why not provide an install option like "Custom Packages Script", that will load a single script file from a USB/mounted partition and install pre-selected packages that a person has selected and build the script from?
This would allow anyone to build a custom Slackware installation and share it with the community.

Thoughts?


PS.: don't judge me by the Windows 7 icon, I'm at work :-)

Kind Regards, Felipe Weber.

As far as I know you may do this with custom tag files. I have never tried it though. Have a look here for more information.

Using tagfiles is the right way to do this.
And if you have a system running that has exactly the packages installed that you want, you can run this script: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tool...e_generator.sh and it will generate the custom tagfiles for you.

Eric

Thank you for your quick answers.

Indeed, tagfiles looks like a more complex and complete implementation of what I am suggesting.
However, it's current use and availability doesn't seem to be what one would expect to solve my "problem" of easy access to custom installations of Slackware (shown to me by a google search for that)

Perhaps my sugestion should be changed to:
Hey all, how about we start making some custom tagfiles and post it to a common repository so we can have a quick way to do custom installation systems

I _think_ the install environment has wpa_supplicant available. I'm sure it has dhcp and wget so you can download your tagfiles from anywhere you are. I don't think it would be possible to add custom tagfiles to Slack mirrors because everyone has different needs. We'd have dozens of those.

Slackware does not have any wireless drivers or configuration utilities in its installer. If you want to do a network install, you'll have to use a LAN cable.

Eric

You know what, this got me thinking...
I wish I currently had the time to build something similar to what Slax does (http://www.slax.org/modules.php) and generate custom tagfiles based on that UI... This would be simply amazing from my point of view.

Off course it's way more fun to select each package on the installation, but this seems fun too :-)

I should put it in my bucket list

Hmm ... I'll state the obvious, you can buy a 8Gb USB drives for less than $10. That would allow you to install everything (who knows what your friend might want in the future), whilst still having some space left for a home directory. Why limit yourself to 2Gb and the fuss of having to trim everything down in this day and age when disk space is so cheap?

Alternatively if there is some extra reason for this limitation that I cannot fathom, I'm going to risk the wrath of some users and the fact that I may be branded as a heretic and suggest that if want a quick 'solution' and space is that limited, you could use one of the Slackware spinoffs that has dependency resolution. Ideally one that stays as close to Slackware as possible, i.e. SalixOS. Just do a "Core" install and then use slapt-get to add the rest.