Introducing Mini Slint

Hello,

just read this blog post: https://slint.fr/blog/introducing-mini-slint.html

Have a good day.

Interesting. I noticed, in the article as I did not download Mini Slint, that your Mini Slint was accessible to the Blind: with, Braille, Speech, capabilities.

Albeit small, minislint is internationalized, accessible with Braille and speech as soon as started, connected to the web, allows to surf with lynx, email with mutt, play music with play.

My mother was blind and read Braille everyday and listened to the cassette tapes (speech for the Blind), all the time. It is my hope that more OS's are set up for those who or blind, or with limited sight, and depend on Braille and / or Speech.

Thank you for your work.

A new version is available and I have edited the blog post accordingly. The new version has more features (still in 2G) like NetworkManager and wifi, makes easier e.g. to copy the image to an USB stick and adapt it to this new context. The compressed image weighs just 302M.

All this is explained in the README but for this specific feature (Slint in an USB stick):

lftp -c mirror http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-14.2.1/minislint/
cd minislint
md5ssum -c slintmini64-14.2.1.3.a.raw.lz.md5 # answer should be "OK"
lzip -k -d slintmini64-14.2.1.3.a.raw.lz
# Now plug in the USB stick then wait 30 seconds and check carefully its name.
lsblk -lo name,size,fstype,mountpoint
I assume that the name of the stick is sdX
cp slintmini64-14.2.1.3.a.raw /dev/sdX && echo "Done."
# now as root:
mount /dev/sdX /mnt
mount -B /dev /mnt/dev
mount -B /proc /mnt/proc
mount -B /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt enlargelastpart

You can then reboot and if your firmware is set to boot off an USB stick you will start minislint. Its grub boot menu is the same in EFI and Legacy modes with these boot entries, the third one making of the key also a rescue media:

Slint Linux
Advanced options for Slint Linux
Detect and boot installed operating systems
Instructions for operating systems detection

As soon as minislint is running a few commands allow to complete it. As root:

slapt-get --add-keys
slapt-get -u
slapt-get --upgrade-all # in case ther have been upgrades in Slackware 14.2 or Slint
dotnew # To handle possible changes in configuration files
list="a ap d e k kde l n t tcl x xap xfce y slint extra"
slapt-get --install-set $list

Indeed there's room for improvement. Planned:

• Provide a version with / handled by a f2fs file system, better adapted to ssd and USB sticks.
• Modify the script (also in the minislint directory) to be able to choose the size of / when enlarging it, which will allow to add partitions later (this can be done from a running system without issue). Currently / is enlarged by enlargelastpart to fill all the available space. Good for a 32G USB stick, maybe not for a 4TB hard drive

To play it safe GRUB is installed in the MBR of the image and in its second partition for EFI (the first one is of type "Bios boot" to allow booting GRUB in Legacy mode as the image is equipped with a gpt), not to fiddle with other drives. It is possible but not advised to write a boot entry in the EFI firmware, unless the drive with Slint be the only one.

All this could be done for a genuine Slackware with some adaptations to the packages list as not all come from Slackware and some are rebuilt or upgraded.