Slackware for the minimal WM/CLI warrior
 

Something I will experimenting with soon will be a custom Slackware installation for desktop usage, for minimal WMs, or framebuffer/CLI-only usage. My plan is to omit all GTK and QT dependencies from the installation, but keep Xorg, the minimal WMs included with Slackware (twm, fvwm, blackbox, fluxbox), all the X apps that don't require GTK or QT, and of course all the wonderful CLI apps.

This thread will be a placeholder for this experiment, and I also encourage and welcome any input/advise/comments other Slackers might have as to this experiment.

As for inspiration, I look to the fine work done at LinuxBBQ with Debian sid (mostly). They have many fine releases with no GTK/QT dependencies, using a variety of lesser-known WMs, and framebuffer/CLI offerings.

I shall be following this thread closely :)

You don't technically have to remove anything from Slackware. Just use OpenBox WM and xterm. A lot of problems can come up from removing packages from Slackware, which is why a full installation is always recommended, and you don't have to use anything you don't need right off hand.

Certainly, but then this wouldn't be the fun experiment that it's intended to be. Sure, I may totally bork it by not installing all the libs and such, but I will be taking a look at all the packages and carefully considering each one, based on my stated goal. For the record, I NEVER do a full installation, I always omit all KDE, and several other packages, and haven't had a broken system yet.

There was a thread a little while ago:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ou-use-872378/

that may interest you. A lot of it relevant to what you're after I think.

Excellent, thanks for this!

I was reminded that the package sets are a good place to start pruning an installation:

http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php

And this looks like a good thing:

http://pbraun.nethence.com/unix/sysu...slackinst.html

For a basic installation that has the base tools (including networking tools) you can see which packages are included in the mini root file systems for the ARM port:
http://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwa..._minirootfs.sh

You'd need to add many more libraries and bits of X to get a working window manager, but it'd be a reasonable base from which to start.

A very fine idea! Did you already come up with a solution for

- setting up network for road warriors (I was surprised that there is nm-applet in slackware, but you need additional software (trayers) for it to work with other window managers and I am still struggling with nmcli)

- power management (don't know about a CLI version or a light X version, so for latter I tried xfce4-power-manager, but its pop-up windows don't work well with windowmaker (pop-ups create new program icons on desktop), and if I already have to use that component from xfce, then I don't see a reason against using the rest of xfce4 either)

- suspend from CLI (well, I came up with my own script using dbus-send)

Here is a very old "Slackware 12.2" minimal system that you could look at to get some ideas. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ckware-704866/

samac

I did a minimal install back in the 12 days and it went fine. just tried with 14.1 and found that there are libraries that PHP needs in the X set and even though I installed those I still had issues. Seems things are more interrelated now.

I know wifi and power management are both doable from cli, but I'm doing this on a desktop machine, so I'm not worrying about those. Using anything from Xfce, including xfce4-power-manager, would require GTK and its libs, which I am avoiding.

Aside from links and lynx browsers, I am using Dillo, which works nicely. Tried netsurf, but it needed gtk stuff.

Here's what I came up with so far:

Hmm, this may be helpful...

I've read this a while back... Specifically:

Now, I've never tried it, but maybe you could check it out, remove Salix packages and start building up from there?

I run dropbox in stalonetray on twm:

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14...ch=stalonetray

Continuing to work with fluxbox and pimp it out some. I added xfe for a GUI file manager, as it does not require gtk or qt: