I'm still laughing, but I have no opinion about it really, just thought I'd share that with you.

But given I'm not a 'Slacker' (but maybe one day), I'm leaving while the going's still good!

Don't get me wrong, I don't have any problem with it. I just don't see the point, other than someone got the itch to create a distro. For example, I'd like to hear why the creator thinks someone should run this instead of Slackware.

I've already grabbed the *.iso.

I'll report back tomorrow.

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It is a slack baby ... good to no !

I was unable to get Cucumber to install in a VM under VirtualBox. I had the 64-bit *.iso, so I created a 64-bit "Other Linux" VM with about a 20GB virtual HDD (dynamically allocated).

I fired up the *.iso and got as far as partitioning the drive with cfdisk. Formatting was not a discrete step in the default installation routine. I got an error that swap could not be mounted.

I deleted the VM and tried again. This time, after creating the partitions, I formatted / with mkfs, then formatted the swap with mkswap. I got the same error.

You can see a screenshot of the "select partition" dialog here: http://pineviewfarm.net/weblog/wp-co...partitions.jpg

You can see a screenshot of the error message here: http://pineviewfarm.net/weblog/wp-co...ber2_error.jpg

I'm pretty much booked tomorrow and the next day, so I won't have a chance to try this on another computer for a few days.

I installed cucumber linux (64 bit) on an unused partition of my main hardrive.

Had some trouble getting the install disk working. Don't remember the error, but
it kept looking for some i386 stuff. It finally booted, though.

Did a full install, returned to my main partition, reworked grub and reboot into
cucumber. Had only a few minutes to play with it, but it seemed to work okay in
a console.

Could not get X to come up. Major problem: startx is missing.

It's new so I expect a few problems, but I think I will still like Slackware better.

1 members found this post helpful.

Is this a Slackware derivative?
From the FAQ:
Imitation is the sincerest from of flattery.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello Everyone,

I'm Scott (A.K.A. Z5T1), the creator and BDFL of Cucumber Linux. Thank you all for taking the time to check out and discuss Cucumber Linux. I see you have some questions and I'm going to do my best to answer some of them.

I originally started Cucumber Linux as a personal Summer project. I have always been a big proponent of the Unix Philosophy and I have been unhappy with how most Linux distributions have been abandoning it recently. I've also been interested in the inner workings of Linux distributions and systems for many years. In May of 2016 I was a student looking for a fun Summer project, so I decided to combine these two passions and create my own Linux distribution. I did this primarily as a learning experience, but I also wanted to have distribution for my personal use that followed the Unix Philosophy and would always be free of Systemd, PulseAudio and all the other crap that flies in the face of the Unix Philosophy.

Now I could have easily just forked Slackware; however, I decided to build a new distribution from scratch, figuring that would provide a much more complete learning experience. I actually initially set out to create a disto based off of Linux from Scratch, not Slackware. There were some thing I thought Linux from Scratch did well, but there were some things I thought Slackware did better. Ultimately, I largely combined the two distributions together, drawing heavily from both distros but also doing certain things my own way. I actually used very few SlackBuild scripts; I wrote most of the buildscripts myself, and if you look at the way they build the packages you'll see they're closer to the Linux from Scratch/Beyond Linux from Scratch buildscripts than SlackBuild scripts.

After I spent over a year working on Cucumber Linux, I figured I may as well make it publicly available in case anyone else happened to find the project interesting.

Being that I wrote most of the buildscripts myself, I have the right to license those buildscripts as I see fit. For the few SlackBuild scripts I did incorporate into Cucumber Linux, I left Pat's original licensing in place. If you look at the Cucumber Linux License page, you will see that I said the distribution is licensed under the MIT license only as far as upstream licensing allows.

Slackware's a great disto, don't get me wrong. I used Slackware for years before I created Cucumber Linux, and I still use Slackware on some of my systems. You're right that I largely did get an itch to create a distro; however, I do believe there is one key advantage that Cucumber Linux has over Slackware: security. I have found that, while Pat does a great job building Slackware, sometimes there are security vulnerabilities that go unpatched on Slackware, and sometimes these vulnerabilities can have a severe impact. There are several vulnerabilities that currently exist in Slackware 14.2 that I have long since patched on Cucumber Linux.

Also, Slackware's lifecycle is a little vague about security and can be deceiving. For example, Slackware 13.37 is still supported; however, it uses a kernel that hasn't been patched since upstream support ended for the Linux 2.6 kernel many years ago. Turns out this kernel is vulnerable to both dirty cow and stack clash, and probably several more vulnerabilities. With Slackware, if you don't dig deep enough, you can easily end up thinking your system is secure when it really is not. With Cucumber Linux, I have a much more clearly defined lifecycle and I make sure that if a version of Cucumber Linux is supported, it is really completely supported and up to date on all security patches, period.

- Scott

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Thanks for taking time to respond here Scott. I suspect we'd see eye to eye on quite a few subjects based on what you've written above. Best of luck with your project.

Agreed! Good luck Scott and keep Cucumber going!

Thanks for the explanation. It's always good to have alternatives in case something ever happened to Slackware.

Care to elaborate?

Agreed, I am sure PV and team would like to know what those vulnerabilities are. Did you ever submit those patches to PV? You said you used Slackware for a long time on several boxes, did you ever participate in LQ, I noticed this was your first post as Z5T1.

Sure.

CVE-2016-1248 arbitrary code execution in Vim via a specially crafted text file.
CVE-2016-9273 and several vulnerabilities in libtiff that were fixed in libtiff 4.0.8 (Slackware is still on 4.0.7).
CVE-2017-3636, CVE-2017-3641 and CVE-2017-3653 all in MariaDB that allow unauthorized access of information and unauthorized inserts, deletes and updates.
CVE-2016-0634 arbitrary shell command execution as any user in Bash via a specially crafted hostname.
CVE-2017-10663 in the Linux kernel allows for arbitrary code execution in the kernel space when mounting a maliciously crafted F2FS filesystem.
CVE-2017-12424 a buffer overflow vulnerability in shadow that could result in a crash and other unspecified impacts, possible privilege escalation.

And I could go on, but I think you get the point . I tried contacting the Slackware security team about some of these, but never got a response. All of these vulnerabilities have been patched in Cucumber Linux. Also, there are some vulnerabilities that have now been patched in Slackware, but went unpatched for several weeks after the upstream patches were released. In these cases, Cucumber Linux was patched within a day or two.

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No I actually haven't posted on LQ before. I've been reading it for years, I just never found anything worth commenting on until today.

Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, I did try submitting some of the patches to the Slackware security team, but I never got a reply from them and the patches ultimately went unapplied. After this happened a couple of times, I gave up on submitting them.

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