Introducing StripSlack, a minimal configuration of Slackware
 

Hi,

I've recently built a LiveCD based on Slackware, which actually works quite well, except for the fact that there is way too much bloat included. So I started to give a sane minimal configuration for Slackware some thought.

Vincent Batts has a page about a minimal Slackware configuration, and the french Slackware users site sports an outdated article on the subject. I fired up a VM, bookmarked the LFS and BLFS documentation and then spent a few rainy afternoons reading and experimenting.

Here's a first version of StripSlack:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/stripslack-14.1/

Here's a detailed introduction with a HOWTO:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/s...lack-HOWTO.txt

I'd say this is a usable beta. Everything is working fine, there don't seem to be any showstoppers, though there are still some rough edges and some missing things.

In the past, the need for a "basic" Slackware installation has repeatedly been voiced in this forum. I hope my little project can answer these requests.

Test it and feel free to report your findings and suggestions, so we can work on making it perfect.

Cheers,

Niki

Thanks for the effort Kikinovak!

Just one comment: it might be worth making clearer what exactly is included in your stripslack as I don't think you include a desktop seeing your tagfiles and this might not be everyones understanding of a minimal enterprise desktop, so better to be clearer about this on your webpage. In particular as determining which packages need to be installed to get a minimal XFCE + some specific applications isn't obvious.

I for example do this by using Salix's dependency repository with a bash-script to generate a specific tagfile for a XFCE desktop with only the applications I use, which works well enough for me.

Nice work Kikinovak! Might check this out in a VM soon myself.

At the moment this is only useful for someone who wants a minimal console-system. Desktop users definitely don't want to use this.

That being said, I have an idea that's slowly growing at the back of my head. Something similar to 'yum groupinstall <package_group>' on RHEL/CentOS or 'tasksel --install <package_group>' on Debian, only for Slackware. This will take some time, though, since my skills to do that aren't sufficient for the moment. But I'm working on it.

I didn't understand at first that you were referring to the h1 page title. I just changed it to avoid any further confusion.

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/

Thanks for the heads-up.

Not sure what you aiming for, but generating the appropriate packages to install for a given minimal desktop system is not difficult to do using the salix dependency tree.

What I typically do is start with a similar file as you have as your stripslack.sh then add the package-names of things I know I want to add and run this through a simple script that fills in the missing packages using Salix's hard work. This gives me a complete list of packages to install on that system. With that list I can generate the tagfile using gust.

Initially I thought it would be hard to add packages, but in reality I find slackpkg sufficient to deal with the things I need to add. As a result I never extended the quick and dirty script for step 1 although in reality it would be no more than taking a diff between the list of installed and to_install packages.

That's why I wrote a detailed document about the subject and linked to it in my initial post. Please take at least one minute to read it before starting to speculate.

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/s...lack-HOWTO.txt

Here's what it says:

Cheers,

Niki

I am glad you kept bsd-games.

Got it running OK in VirtualBox. Thanks, Niki. :hattip:
It's been on my ToDo list for ages: setting up a minimal Slack in VBox, but I'm afflicted with chronic laziness. :redface: :D

This is great. Would it be possible to include a blacklist for slackpkg so updates don't undo it all ?

Slackpkg only updates whatever you've got installed.

Nice work.

If you aren't aware there is tracepkg, a great tool to track package dependencies.
Last time it was discussed here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...on-4175490991/.
And that's the version I use http://www.bisdesign.ca/ivandi/slackware/PAM/tracepkg/

BTW you don't need any X libs. Groff is used only by man and it works fine w/o X. And I am not sure why you need the netkit stuff. You have to add portmap and eventually inetd to make use of it. Telnet and tftp-hpa make me wonder too.

Cheers

And here is a simple script I use in conjunction with slackpkg and tracepkg to get rid of the bloat in /l.

Cheers

For clarity: I referred to the "idea" that was "growing" in your head, not what you now posted, hence the quote above. Bottomline, please be careful in misreading replies...

Just for clarity: what you currently have is in itself very useful for many already, which is why I thanked you for this effort!

Right, sorry, it was a misunderstanding indeed.

Cheers,

Niki