SlackwareLive USB Persistant on a Chromebook
 

I installed SlackwareLive on a 1.5TB USB drive and made it persistent to boot my work laptop into Slackware. I decided to try plugging it into my Chromebook and boot from the USB drive and see if it would boot and be useful.

Yep...touch screen works, Bluetooth works, wi-fi works...I haven't found much that doesn't work yet. The keyboard still works in tablet mode, and there is no onscreen keyboard, but I don't see that as an issue. I don't use it in tablet mode often. I usually have it on my desk connected to a keyboard and trackball. It's too bulky for a tablet and I usually just flip it around to type, then go back to tablet mode.

This is pretty amazing, it just works. It's a little slow here and there, but it's not bad actually. I will see how long the battery lasts, but so far, this is pretty amazing.

This is a Lenovo Chromebook 11e Yoga, one of the first ones. I want to try this because it is now EOL from Google, so there are no more updates for ChromeOS. There are some other options out there for an internal OS like NeverWare CloudReady or FydeOS. We'll see how well this works for the time being.

Amazeballs. Slackware never disappoints.

James

Hooah!

You do not need to use a slackware-live with persistence or not, to install Slackware in an external USB hard drive. Specially when it have 1.5TB. That's just complicating your life.

Instead, you can just do a standard installation of standard Slackware, in a standard EXT4FS partition from that USB hard drive.

Eventually using UUIDs on /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf if you want your Linux system to be truly portable and to boot in whatever computer. A subject well debated already in this forum.

Yeah! I recently installed slackware-current from a liveslak disk, and a few weird situations aside, it was pretty smooth.

I was under the impression you could not install standard Slackware from an ISO to a USB drive and just boot any PC it's plugged into it, which is why I didn't do it. There was something about unetbootin and all kinds of other hacks to make it work off a USB drive. What's the point of SlackwareLive then?

What makes it complicated?

James

I am under the impression that slackware-live, like any Linux live system, is for using it from a CD or DVD, or from an USB flash drive (also known as USB stick)

Those USB flash drives are very slow (around 5-15MB/s on read, 1-5MB/s on write) and they wears very quickly, compared with a real hard drive, mounted in an external USB case or not. That's why they need a special designed operating system, to minimize the drive access.

However, an USB hard drive permits you to install on it a standard Linux operating system, which I think is definitively preferable, because it can be modified later at will. I.e. to install or upgrade packages on it.

Doing that on a live with persistence is a bit tricky.

Still, a live system, specially when you do not abuse the persistence, it tends to behaves faster on slow drives.

For example, you can get a virtual throughput of around 60MB for an USB2 hard drive which is limited at 30MB/s

Personally, I use a standard Slackware installation with only the /usr put in a compressed read-only squashfs, similar with a live system, in an (E)IDE drive which permits an throughput of around 70MB to offer a virtual one of 140MB, which feels well on system responsiveness.

Slackware on Chromebook
 

Hi James

Very interesting experiment !

Does Google Chrome work correctly on your ChromeBook running Slackware ?

It does :) It also runs Vivaldi.

This is now my Volkerding SlackBook.

James