My EDC USB thumb drive carries Slackware64-14.2 plus an additional directory carrying a small personal backup. Today I upgraded it to Slackware64-15.0 by dd-ing the ISO image into it. I was surprised when it mounted read only and I wasn't able to copy the additional directory to it. It took me a while to remember that I made the previous version of it (the one for 14.2) with the usb-and-pxe-installers/usbimg2disk.sh instead.

Question 1. I suppose if I want to keep my previous workflow - be able to mount it in read-write mode, use the additional space, I should remake it one more time the same way - by using the usbimg2disk.sh script?

Question 2. I have another, older thumb drive, that's just 4GB. The 15.0 iso is bigger than that, IIRC 4.3GB. I assumed I would be able to chop some stuff off by not including the kdei/ directory, which is like 400MB, but I'm discovering that 15.0 doesn't have a separate kdei/ directory anymore. Is it a working plan to point usbimg2disk.sh to a 15.0 tree without a whole kde/ directory and make a no-KDE 15.0 bootable install USB thumb drive (I could always install KDE later, albeit I'm never using it)? A simple yes or no will suffice.

While I wonder how will the 15.0 setup behave when told to do a full install and not finding the kde/ directory, will it silently skip it, and while I know (in theory, but never actually used) about tagfiles, I don't feel adventurous enough to try going deeper if it requires hacking additional to not including the kde/ directory. So if it just doesn't work, I'll abandon the idea and use the 4GB one for other purposes.

For question 1: Yes. You should probably use the script. Since I only use my installer on EFI capable systems I usually just format it as vfat and manually copy all files to it. usbimg2disk.sh can also install a bootloader for use with non-EFI systems.

For question 2: Yes. You should be able to manually remove one of the series from the tree. I haven't tried this with KDE on 15.0 but in the past it worked for me just fine.

The installer typically handles a missing series reasonably well but this can cause problems for the post-install steps. So be careful.. but in my experience KDE, XFCE, and XAP can all be ommitted without world-ending consequences.

I once studied the Slackware installer, and if I remember correctly, it searches its source medium for the included package sets. It will subsequently offer to install the sets that it found. In other words, if KDE is missing, it will simply not be listed. In fact, should you add, say, a GNOME set to your installation medium, it will merrily let you install that as well. (At least, that's how I remember it.)

Note to myself: while the size of 15.0 install iso file is 4.3GB, content copied to an 15.0 bootable install thumb drive with the usbimg2disk.sh script is ~3.5GB, so a 4GB drive is perfectly fine for that, there's no need to exclude anything from the Slackware tree.