Hello all

Here's an odd question for everyone. I've been looking for as small as possible linux (slackware) install, and after a lot of poking about I've come across the old version of slackware that could be run from DOS after extracting from a zipfile, zipslack. The last version was for Slackware 11.

However I've hit apon a problem. I find often there are *lots* of corruption with regards to filesystems, either from the dos partition I have zipslack on, or if I try to transfer it to an ext2 file partition.

The hard drive in my PC (which is a 700Mhz AMD Athon, 20 GB IDE HDD) has no errors; normal linux live CDs work fine with no problems.

What I am trying to do is to work out just which slackware packages were used to create zipslack in the first place. But short of going over *Every* file x.x I cannot work out just which packages were used.

I understand a normal slackware install can use tagfiles, but I cannot find very much about them, nor many people using them. In theroy I guess tagfiles could be created to represent the files used by zipslack, and those used to install slackware. However, I've found no such information online.

Can anyone help?

ljones

Pat Volkerding tailored every zipslack release. The build process is undocumented.

Eric

However, there should be the list of installed packages in /var/log/packages. The only thing that ever seemed to be different for zipslack was that all the header files (usr/include) were removed and all the static libs (*.a) in /usr/lib were removed.
I used to do all my installs by starting with a zipslack installation. Several packages needed to be reinstalled in order to have the development files(headers and static libs above) to be able to compile stuff.

If you are having corruption problems when unpacking, make sure you are using a FAT 32 partition and always unzip the files directly to the partition you want to use. If you want to then copy the files over to a regular linux filesystem like ext2/3, you need to be sure that you mount the FAT partition as type umsdos -not as FAT. Avoid mounting the partition as FAT as it may cause filenames to be changed.

You have to be running a 2.4 kernel in order to have support for umsdos filesystem -it is not available with 2.6 kernels. All of the older (<=11.0) Slackware install or rescue disks and kernel have umsods support hard-linked in the kernel, so it's best to boot with one of them.
If you are unzipping the zipslack zip under windows, not all zip tools will work correctly -using unrar/rar usually caused problems. Do not try to unzip using DOS as 16bit unzip tools cannot handle the large file size. If there is no windows installed, then boot with a linux CD and use unzip to unpack the archive.

If you want to migrate the install to an ext2/3 (or other linux fs), it is easiest to get it booting from the FAT first and then follow the 'migration' directions in the zipslack FAQ. You can then turn the FAT where the original install was into a swap partition for the migrated installation.

If you want to just use the list of installed packages as a base list for creating anew installation, there are some differences as compared to later slack versions, regarding udev, coreutils, util-linux and maybe others.
Have fun!