Very odd, and I can't understand how different DEs can create different zoom behaviour. Mate is my DE since 2016 or so, and I've never run into problems connecting with zoom.
AFAIK, the mate (and cinnamon?) liveslak contains xfce as well. Could you try switching to xfce and see what happens?

I'll give it a go. I feel sure I'm being tripped up by some security thing. Zoom is in persistence. Mind you, the Library is in persistence too, and that works

Any LiveSlak I've checked with e2fsck has to recover the journal even though it closed cleanly, and has to correct a few block counts, whatever that means. I presume LiveSlak unmounts itself cleanly? It appears not to.

Interesting.

I discovered disk sync was a big issue here. The usb disk was running behind on the install & startup stages, particularly. One thing was that I was plugging the usb in the back of my pc, and as an invalid, I couldn't see that. But with my mobile phone's front camera, I could see this was the layout: And only the one in bold is usb-3.2. There's plenty of usb-3.2 around, but not where I was plugging things. They are usb-2.0. Also installing zoom involves writing 655MB to usb disk. So that rsync trick (rsync -avc <zoom on liveslak> to zoom on my box sorted my slowboat usb.

In summary, once I avoid KDE, I have no choice - Only Cinnamon takes zoom online. Every install option let the Watchtower Library online, also in persistence, so I don't understand it. I installed the same version of zoom as I had on the pc, and I could check the install with rsync -avc <arguments>. Mate & XFCE isos won't take zoom online. Cinnamon isn't too bad to live in. I even managed to get my big red pointer. But something else I did lost the 'big' and that stopped working. I did find a gimmick, though. I could hit 'Control' and it located the pointer with a circular visual effect.

EDIT: I rooled one last time and got my big pointer on the speedy usb. The pointer varies in size, though. Setting up now... (& posted from LiveSlak).

Footnote:

After all the dust settled, and my new better speed usb disk arrived, I tried the Mate option again. I made the new live usb, was careful with the disk syncing. I installed zoom after getting online and ran 'rsync -avc <arguments>' to do a file compare with a known good install.

This time, I could get online, join a meeting, get a meeting password approved, and got admitted, although there was no meeting going on at that time. I could test, and have video & sound in Zoom. The only thing I couldn't do was sign in to zoom.us. The routine is: you type an email as username, and as soon as you start typing the password the "Sign in" button goes from grey to blue. You need to sign in to zoom.us (and be approved) to host a meeting. Anyhow, I couldn't do that. But I could connect as a participant, which is good.

With the (somewhat insane) limitation that I can't log in to Zoom to host a meeting, it's doing what I want and I even have my 4 VTs back . I could sign in on my mobile, start a meeting, join it on the live usb, and then leave on the mobile, assigning my pc as the host.

I presume the live usb is missing some protocol or other?

While I was waiting for slow operations today, I made up the XFCE variant and tried to get Zoom running. I set $LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/profile. It was unset when I logged in. I set it in rc.local, but it was still unset. I set & exported it in ~/.bashrc but it remained unset. I repeated in an xterm, exported it, and immediately ran /opt/zoom/ZoomLauncher. $LD_LIBRARY_PATH was still unset and couldn't find libraries. So I followed the rule my first R&D manager gave me

What do you mean by 'couldn't find libraries'? Did it give you an error message like '/opt/zoom/ZoomLauncher: error while loading shared libraries: libWhatEver.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory'. It it did, what was the error message?

By "logged in" I assume that you mean "logged in to a graphical environment"?

Once in such an environment you probably start your favorite terminal window. That terminal window will spawn another process, your favorite shell. Unfortunately, by default in Slackware, those shells started in terminal windows are not "login shells" and will not start by executing any login scripts.

Most terminal windows has some "point and click" interface for settings. In those settings, it is a very good idea to check a box which says something like "Run command as login shell". Some terminal windows does not have such a setting, but instead let you choose how your shell is called, if so, make sure that your shell is called with the "-l" switch to start a login shell.

Xterm does not have point and click interface for settings, you can start xterm with the parameter "-ls" or you can have the X server resource *loginShell set to True for xterm to give you login shells which will read your login files.

Other things that could go wrong is if your shell dont use the login files that you think. Of course tcsh or ksh doesn't car about any .bashrc and no shell cares about the startup scripts in /etc/rc.d.

A good place to put custom settings like this might be in files below /etc/profile.d where there are different files for different types of shells.

regards Henrik

It couldn't find the libraries in /opt/zoom, There's 3-4 for ZoomLauncher and about 9 for /opt/zoom/zoom.

@henca: If you check post #35, I think you'll find I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH everywhere, /etc/profile, rc.local, ~/.bashrc and I set it in a terminal, exported it just before I called /opt/zoom/zoom. It's as if the setting is totally ignored

You typed command '/opt/zoom/ZoomLauncher' and it told it couldn't find 3-4 libraries? It doesn't work like that. It will give an error message about the first library it can't find even if there are several missing. How do you know it didn't find 3-4 libraries?

No. That was the o/p of ldd <program> |grep found. Zoom always exits on libxcb-image.so.0 not found. Now I'm no longer taking these slowboat usb disks too seriously, as they are not even keeping abreast of background writes. You can run a sync on them after every command, and they write for a few seconds before returning a prompt. Things go crazy regularly. The journal is never up to date. I can fsck one, and starting up wrecks it again. That said, this error is repeatable.

In other news, putting LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/profile seems to pass it on after a reboot. But slackware-15.0 doesn't set LD_LIBRARY_PATH either. As you'll see from the above exchange, I did tuck /opt/zoom into the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so it's safe to say it's being ignored.

It might be an idea to stick a few sync commands in the liveslak init files? They wouldn't cost time if they weren't needed. and they seem to be needed even on the faster usb disks. Regular journal recoveries are needed there too.

/usr/lib64/libxcb-image.so.0.0.0 is part of package xcb-util-image-0.4.1-x86_64-1, so if you install that, maybe zoom will start working.

To see what other libraries may be missing try this:But use that LD_LIBRARY_PATH only for that ldd command. In particular, LD_LIBRARY_PATH should not be set in any profile scripts or similar. The zoom package provides a lot of libraries for its own use but it finds them itself without help. There are many libraries in the zoom directories with the same names as Slackware stock libraries. If you set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the zoom directories, your other programs will use the zoom libraries, which will probably make those programs not work any longer.

I don't know if that xcb-util-image lib is installed in the XFCE image, but that's not what bothers me. I can fix that easily. I'm certain that zoom messes with the library search path after I call a program, yet it's not reading /opt/zoom/cef/ or /opt/zoom/Qt/lib/. And that's only on the Liveslak XFCE iso.

On the Mate one, I can do everything I want except sign in and host meetings. On the Cinnamon one, I can do the lot. So I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of wondering why the XFCE liveslak image is able to read subdirs of /usr/lib64, but not /opt/zoom. Mate & Cinnamon are 3.9GB, XFCE is only 1.1GB. I was trying to get to the bottom of the library madness to see if the XFCE image could sign in, and the answer seems to be that there's no bottom to the library madness, just like there's no bottom to worse.

So thanks for your thoughts & answers, but I'm leaving this broken. I will get used to other desktops.

Yes, zoom does read libraries in /opt/zoom/cef and /opt/zoom/Qt/lib just fine. You only miss the libxcb-image.so.0 library which is not bundled with zoom but is provided by Slackware, except not by your image.

It'd be best to test/use zoom on a full slackware install, which is not the XFCE Slackware Live iso.

It is no wonder you have problems with that iso since its like 25% the size compared to a full install iso. Basically you use that iso for exactly whats on it (along with the 'daw' and 'lean' variants). If you want more out of it (e.g: zoom), use a better iso or build a custom one with the liveslak scripts. Those isos are made to showcase what the liveslak scripts can do. Not all are suitable as "daily drivers".

Edit: If you want an XFCE iso, download the full 15.0 or -current iso, add persistence, and set sddm or w/e display manager to use xfce. That will be a much more flexable system to add software to.

First, let me correct myself: I can't log in to zoom.us on any liveslak variant, except possibly the kde one. Somebody else can try that! But Mate & Cinnamon allow me to join meetings, run wine, etc. Given the dialog malfunction, I was very much expecting some missing library issue, but then something wouldn't start... I don't know how those things are done but do when to stop. I should have stopped at least 20 posts ago .

I wouldn't mind a regular install with mate or even cinnamon. It would make a change from kde's 'everything including the kitchen sink' approach, or XFCE's 'bargain basement' take on matters.I gather the packages for both desktops are maintained. Are they available somewhere?