Nice series of screenshots, but I can't figure out what's wrong unfortunately.
Have you attempted to use this instruction to install a custom distro? https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-re...n-on-a-linode/

yes, Alien, i used their instructions for all my Slackware installations successfully - just as this time we are trying to run this *non-persistent* project with liveslak we are running into trouble. for testing i also tried it with knoppix, slax, ubuntu-desktop, and finnix w/o success (same error message). curiously Linode itself uses Finnix too as their rescue OS of choice which runs fine if booted via their web-based GUI menu. as said, and importantly, booting a regular 14.2 slack ISO works fine, the terminal during installation works perfectly in the Glish window !

Linode is by the way one of the few VPS companies that support Slackware out of the box with a Slack v14.2 image in their repository (hopefully v15 soon) - although we usually install our own custom slack

i think i will have to speak to them and see what solutions they can offer. it seems to me that this 'docker-like' approach of using a liveOS quasi as a self-configuring container thrown onto a VPS farm is not something people expect to deal with. perhaps this idea will never work ? or is just something small missing from these liveCDs ?

problem solved - the answer is more complicated, as usual.

regarding booting a liveOS on the Linode VPS farm, i was told that it's (likely) impossible, so we had to drop that idea.

the reason for us for looking into very small slackOS installations in first place was the apparent size limit of 2GB for creating disk images - which was then later increased to 10GB. nevertheless, creating an image of our custom slackware installation never worked in that system, so we had to give up that path.

as last resort another avenue came up, and that's cloning of a disk system to a new VPS, quasi populating it with a proven working OS. so, that last solution using cloning works now pretty fast and reliable on that VPS farm.

for a speedy and flexible scaling of our compute grid we keep the OS size also well below 5GB with the small number of slackware packages installed : a ap d e l n tcl. this way we get a fully featured OS and are well prepared for the complexity of the computing task in our data analysis project.

thanks for helping and advice - i am closing this thread. bye, pisti