Slack script to take a min install and make it usable, is it possible?

AuroraZero · 10-04-2011, 10:19 PM

I have been gone a long time and in the face of coming back into saddle I decided I wanted a vps. Yes I know a vps why? Well I wanted something to play with and dedi's cost way too much for just play so I went vps. Found an awesome deal and they even had Slackware so I figured why not. I went ahead and bought it had it setup only to discover it is a slack min install. I thought no biggie I will install what I need and/or want. That has gotten old really fast as I had to start with wget and go from there.

Then an idea came to me would it be possible to make a script that could be run on a slack min install to install all these packages? I mean just upload the script and run it and it would go get the packages and install them.
Is this even possible? Can it be done without installing wget manually? Has this type of thing been done before?

I have noticed most hosts say we have Slack but can not tell you the first thing about it. They usually use a Slack min install and let you hang. My programming skills are lacking sad to say. Even if I did do this project would there be a call for it?

Just some things I wanted to run by you guys and get your opinions.

TenTenths · 10-05-2011, 05:56 AM

Erm.... Just follow your own advice in your signature!

The great thing about VPS is that they are pretty likely to give you a "Reinstall O/S" button that will return your VPS to the state it was when you signed up.

I'm not sure how Slack distributes updates but I would think that it would be highly possible to script an install of the packages you need, although, as you say, you may have to install wget manually first.

Give it a try and report back!

kikinovak · 10-05-2011, 02:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AuroraZero

I have been gone a long time and in the face of coming back into saddle I decided I wanted a vps. Yes I know a vps why? Well I wanted something to play with and dedi's cost way too much for just play

15 euros a month for a full-blown dedicated server is too much? The french provider Online has a "Dedibox SC" dedicated server. Only - minor - drawback is Slackware is not in the list of Linux distributions on offer, there's only Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and Mandriva.

I rented one machine anyway, launched the Ubuntu Live Rescue console and... used it to install Slackware. Had to fiddle the best part of a sunny afternoon, but now, everything works fine, and Slackware64 13.37 is running fine on this box.

Here's my documentation:

Code:

$ svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/microlinux/slackware

Take a look in the 13.37/Linux-HOWTOS directory, the document is "Root-Server-HOWTO". Enjoy!

TobiSGD · 10-05-2011, 03:08 PM

I would think that all you need is to get slackpkg running, anything else can be installed with that. I don't know about it dependencies, but you can simply begin with downloading the package with wget and install it with installpkg. I think you will get error-messages about missing dependencies.
Once you figured out which packages you need it should be really easy to make a script of that action.

ponce · 10-05-2011, 03:09 PM

Tobi is right, thanks to slackpkg, to have a full install everything should be as simple as configure a mirror in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors and then

Code:

slackpkg update
slackpkg install slackware

last should be "slackpkg install slackware64" if you are using slackware64.
Then you can also select what to install or not.

but first maybe you want to upgrade the (packages of the) slackware version you got? or do they give you 13.37?

CTM · 10-05-2011, 03:15 PM

Assuming they installed Slackware using the tagfiles at Slack-Minimal, it should be fairly simple to write a shell script that downloads and extracts that tagfiles tarball, compares the packages installed by them with the tagfiles installed by a default install:

Code:

for i in a ap d e f k kde kdei l n t tcl x xap y; do wget -O/tmp/tagfile.$i ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-13.37/slackware/$i/tagfile; done

and which then downloads and installs the missing packages with `upgradepkg --install-new`. It would be a good idea to find out which tagfiles they used during the installation of the VPS though - there's no saying for sure that they were the ones at Slack-Minimal. You could always

Code:

ls -1 /var/log/packages

as an alternative.

AuroraZero · 10-05-2011, 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kikinovak

15 euros a month for a full-blown dedicated server is too much? The french provider Online has a "Dedibox SC" dedicated server. Only - minor - drawback is Slackware is not in the list of Linux distributions on offer, there's only Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and Mandriva. e rub

I rented one machine anyway, launched the Ubuntu Live Rescue console and... used it to install Slackware. Had to fiddle the best part of a sunny afternoon, but now, everything works fine, and Slackware64 13.37 is running fine on this box.

Here's my documentation:

Code:

$ svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/microlinux/slackware

Take a look in the 13.37/Linux-HOWTOS directory, the document is "Root-Server-HOWTO". Enjoy!

For me yeah that is too much. The vps I have has 2 gb of ram (guarranteed not burstable) 50 gig hd 2tb of transfer and 2 usable cores for 7.00 a month U.S. They gave me slack 13.37 I assume also they used the min install script as well. It was NOT the reqs for slack minimal. At least not the site posted.

Wget is not the rub the prereqs for slackpkg have been. When I say minimal I mean minimal. I am surprised ssh is even on this thing. 131.54 MB of 50 GB Used / 49.87 GB Free that is the Slack min install they have.

I plan to try this anyways I just wanted some opinions and to see if there maybe a call for it. I know a lot of people prefer Centos or the like for servers but to those of us who Slack well you all know once you go Slack you can never go back lol.