anyone try hacking into the slackware installer?

I've tried burning my owm slackware installation cd from the current files successfully, but I am still trying to work out howto make changes to the installer itself.

I am guessing cfdisk and setup are somewhere in the initrd.img file in /isolinux. THat image was made with mkinitrd i think. Next step is working out how to mod it.

You could try mounting the initrd.img and see what's on it... you could probably also modify the contents if you mount it as read-write.

You can find on this site how you can modify slackware: http://cookingupsomeslack.com/

Thank you so much killer bob and SVN. Wow! cooking up slack is the nirvana for customizing slackware! that is so cool.

I am thinking of making a Slackware derivative so it is important that I remove all mentions of Slackware in order to comply with the licence. I will look into that webpage and fiddle around with the initrd.img.

in the meantime, i really should be working on my essay!

thnx guys!

hmmm...i can't seem to even mount the initrd.img file.

I do mount -o loop initrd.img /mnt/initrd.img and i keep getting

mount: could not find any free loop device

I tried going to /dev and ./MAKEDEV all

also tried modprobe loop, all to no avail:
modprobe: can't locate loop

The link above no longer exists in that location. The new location, which should *take up some slack* (sic), is now here: http://web.archive.org/web/200512011...someslack.com/

Odd pondering... I wonder if it would be feasible to offer a software package of pre-compiled binaries of SlackBuilds' packages on a CD that one could boot then install to their slackware partition O.o. Not that one couldn't simply download the ones they need from a repository. It would be more of a promotional gimmick.

I don't really see the purpose of that actually. I can see carrying around a CD of packages for convenience, or whatever reason to have them handy, but all you would need to do is install/mount the CD and then

I'm missing your reasoning behind why you would want the CD to be bootable, so you could install a package into a partition that already has an operational Linux system accessing it as part of it's file system, instead of just installing the package(s) from the CD using the running OS.

like I said, Odd Pondering. Perhaps not bootable, but provide a menu interface to selecting packages off the CD. It would be targeted at mainstream GNU/Linux users to add third party packages from a semi trusted source. Only slackware power users would really be using the "installpkg" command

Hi,

LQ has 'Cooking Up Some Slack. (CUSS)'.


The above link and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

Ah! oic!

I saw that link here at LQ but just figured it would be a 404 pointing to the old site (The link I provided points to its archive at the wayback machine).

The link here on LQ is "Much improved", actually somewhat complete from the looks of it

Thanks onebuck!

Oh Okay. That solution is present already Yeah, I guess for me I like the ***pkg suite of tools... And when I used to think Redhat was kewl I used rpm -ivh (which you can actually do in Slack if you force and nodep), but I left the Redhat camp completely back with 5.2 - the stuff after that was just junk (IMSNHO). I remember they were including 6.0 with every Proliant, and didn't work the bugs out of it until 6.2 - and the same with the 7.x series of Redhat.

But I digress However, ....

The solution you're looking for already exists in the form of pkgtool - its the gui version, if you will (ncurses) of Slackware's package management system. You can navigate along kinda like you would in the old Norton (or midnight) Commander, pick out your packages, and manage them.

For your particular application, the assumption is that you're interested in carrying around a CD of packages that aren't already in the std Slack distro, so just head on over to http://LinuxPackages.net, pick and choose the packages to d/l (I think the best OpenOffice package is still only available over at rworkman's own site though), burn 'em to your CD and then you're all set!

Pop in your Cd w/all of your packages, run 'pkgtool', navigate, select the packages and then vroom! done

Here's some screen shots: http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php


Hope that helps

Doh! forgot pkgtool uses a gui... but either way... you don't have a nice menu grouping the packages and you cant select them from a list to install all at once. At least not from what I could see by glancing at it.

In the end. For that 'promotional gimmick' type of thing, you could probably simplify it all with a custom ncurses gui.