Disclaimer: all the merits for this amazing XFCE installation with only 2.6GB shall be of Eric Hameleers, who made this minimal live CD for XFCE, used by me for installation.
You heard about LiveSlack? I guess the response is affirmative.
It is an amazing set of multiple ISOs, every one a live Slackware Linux with a theme. You can find there variants from the bare slackware-current to, well... Dlackware. You know, the thing running Sys***D as
PID EINS.
There you will find also a little little
XFCE one, about of size of a CD, around 7
00MB, and our Nuclear Dutch claims to be for hardware testing only, so it has no installer to hard drive, like its bigger brothers.
I guess that in the Slackware Development room is a
Rule 66, which says:
NEVER ENCOURAGE THE USERS TO GET UNDER 10GB INSTALLATIONS, so I do not blame Eric for avoiding shipping the shiny installer on the XFCE live.
Instead, let's see how we can install this XFCE live, with NO additional packages, using only the Dark Side.
First of all, we need The Thing:
http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/sla...ce-current.iso and I recommend to check it with
http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/sla...urrent.iso.md5
Yup, you will get a minimal slackware-current variant, baked with legendary Dutch precision by Eric.
The next step, will be, of course, to transfer it to a CD or a USB stick. I will leave to you the pleasure to read how to do it here:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/ or you can read Eric's many articles on theme, on his blog.
Assuming that you booted it, and you are in the
root account of this live XFCE, first we need to partition the target hard drive.
In my experiments, I used a virtual machine, with 2GB RAM and a hard drive of 16GB.
Then, I chosen to create with
cfdisk, a
14GB bootable Linux partition for system and the rest,
2GB for swap. Formatted then, as usual, EXT4 and SWAP.
Having the target drive prepared, we will notice that Eric mounted on
/mnt/liveslakfs what is the UNION of the SquashFS files used by live.
We will create also a new mount point for our installation:
/mnt/target , where we will mount
/dev/sda1 which is EXT4, the
/dev/sda2 being the SWAP.
Time to start our Voodoo invocations: we will use RSYNC to transfer the files:
Code:
mkdir -p /mnt/target
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/target
rsync -avKHX /mnt/liveslakfs/ /mnt/target
The files transfer will require a relative short time, the entire installation having only
2.6GB.
After files installation, we should take care of system booting.
Yet, there is no LILO or GRUB, and only the SYSLINUX is installed. So, we will use
EXTLINUX, part of SYSLINUX.
BUT, before of all, we need to create the
fstab, more precisely:
/mnt/target/etc/fstab with the following content:
Code:
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext4 defaults 1 1
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
Then, we will prepare the SYSLINUX installation:
Code:
mkdir -p /mnt/target/boot/extlinux
extlinux --install /mnt/target/boot/extlinux
cat /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sda
cp /usr/share/syslinux/menu.c32 /mnt/target/boot/extlinux/
Finally, we need to create the file
/mnt/target/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
Code:
UI menu.c32
PROMPT 0
MENU TITLE Boot options
TIMEOUT 50
DEFAULT generic
LABEL generic
MENU LABEL Slackware Linux
KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz-generic-4.9.50
APPEND root=/dev/sda1 ro
INITRD /boot/initrd.gz
Pretty simple config file, right?
YET, you will notice that we need to use an
INITRD, because the live ships only the generic kernel, and more precisely the non-SMP one.
So, we create it in chroot:
Code:
chroot /mnt/target
mount /proc
mkinitrd -c -k 4.9.50 -f ext4 -r /dev/sda1 -m mbcache:jbd2:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz
That command is a generic one, for knowing one more adapted to your real system, you can run
/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh
Finally, we should take care by the dangling symlink
/mnt/target/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc which should point to
xinitrc.xfce from the same folder.
Now, your installation is ready to boot. Reboot the computer and you will notice the EXTLINUX menu.
You will arrive into console login of your brand new mini-Slackware.
Login as root, with no password, then you should change the password for root, otherwise the graphical login will not permit you to pass.
In other hand, being logged as root, is the perfect time to run
netconfig, to configure your network.
Also, if you prefer to be sent to the graphical login, change the default runlevel to
4 in the
/etc/inittab
Finally, you will need another reboot and arrived the time to enjoy your brand new XFCE desktop, in a Slackware installation of only
2.6GB, brought to you by our Nuclear Dutch.
PS. You have even Firefox to go straight to web.
A full-featured XFCE desktop for net surfing with 2.6GB installed size, aka: How to install the Eric's XFCE LiveSlak on your hard drive
