Episode: 3303
Title: HPR3303: Slackware on RaspberryPi
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3303/hpr3303.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:28:38

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This is hacker public radio episode 3,303 for Wednesday,
the 31st of March 2021.
Today's show is entitled Slackwear on Raspberry P.
It is hosted by Brian in Ohio and is about 20 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is an alternative to Raspberry P.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
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Hello, hacker public radio, Brian in Ohio here.
I'm out from under my rock and I thought I would throw in a show.
I guess there's a call for shows so I'm doing one and what I want to talk about today was
how to put another a different kind of operating system on your Raspberry P.
Specifically putting Slackwear on Raspberry P.
And the reason I'm doing the show is I think there was an email exchange back and forth about
something about repos and Debian and Raspbian or something.
And I mentioned just put Slackwear on your pie and don't worry about it.
And I can file in Raspberry P.
How about doing a show on it?
So here I am.
So Slackwear is, I believe, the oldest actively maintain distribution for Linux.
One of the oldest, probably the oldest, definitely I think the best.
But that's a matter of preference.
And Slackwear on ARM, which is what the project is called, started back in 2002.
This is drawing from the arm.slackwear.com.
There's links in the show notes for all these sites I'm going to mention,
which is the official port of Slackwear to the ARM architecture.
And it started in 2002 by Stuart Winter, aka Moses.
And it became an official port of Slackwear in 2009.
And I'm not going to delve any more into the history because if you want to know more about it,
you can go to the Slackwear YouTube, it used to be a podcast for a season,
but now it's a video cast, video podcast, whatever you call it.
But YouTube channel that Stuart Winter hosts along with another key person,
the maintainer of the Slackwear on the Raspberry Pi, the Sarpy Project specifically.
They do a podcast together.
And actually the second season, the first season on video,
I think it was the first episode, really gives a good history of Slackwear in general and
Slackwear on ARM. So I'm not going to try to recreate that if you're interested, go over there.
So why do I put Slackwear on my Raspberry Pi's?
And it's, well, I'll tell you, the first Raspberry Pi ever got was the Raspberry Pi Zero.
I think I bought it at a micro-center, which is a big box, realtor, realtor, no, retailer,
realtor. You're a retailer here in the United States of America, and they were selling them
for cheap less than $5, I think. And so I picked up one and did what everybody does through
a Razbian, or was it Razbian then? Yeah, Razbian on it and proceeded to look at the tremendous
thing known as Debian. Debian to me, and I'm not against Debian actually, but I don't use it
myself. I used it when I was an Ubuntu user, which is where I got into Linux was of course using
Ubuntu until they switched to the Unity desktop, but that's another story. So then there's just certain
things and some of them are completely, like I said, I'll give an example. When you go do an LS
en route in Slackwear, all you see is directories to a file system. So there's other, and of course,
there's things inside that. When you go to Debian or Razbian and you do an LS en route, there's like
files scattered through there. It's not pleasing to look at. Then of course there's the old system
D thing. I think system D has its uses, but not on a single device. As in in its system, it's great
if you're having to spool up thousands of servers because of this perceived ability to run
things in parallel. But if you have your own machine, I think system D is not only
unnecessary, but just gets in the way. So anyway, I had been a Slackwear user for years prior to
owning that first Raspberry Pi. So I didn't really use it because I didn't really like Debian,
and I didn't really have any projects for it. But then when I heard about the Serfee project,
that's when I realized, oh my goodness, I can put my favorite OS on to this new single board
computer, and that would be great. So that's what I did. So I'll give you a couple that's
they've got some notes here. One good reason to choose Slackwear over some of the others is you
can do very, you can do minimal installs very easily. If you've never done a Slackwear install
on anything, you ought to because you might learn something. And two, in the process of installing it,
there's a section where you can go through basically every package. And if you've listened
to a new world order for the last three years, I think, Cloud2 is slowly going through all those
packages. But there's thousands of them. And if you can choose what you want to do now,
caveat is that Slackwear is designed to be completely and fully installed. So if you put
something in there, or if you take something out and then you try to install something else,
and it doesn't work because it's missing a dependency, that's on you. Don't expect anybody to
to help you out necessarily. But there are certain broad categories of packages that you can easily
not install and not worry about a desktop environment. You can just, there's two main desktop
environments, KDE and XFCE. You can just choose not to have any of those packages installed.
X, if you're not going to run a, a graphical environment at all, you're going to be headless,
then why you don't need X or any of the X applications. You can just not install any of those. And
it's very easy to customize and do minimum install that way. Now, I know you can do adjust,
but I guess those names changed out there. You can do a light install of Raspbian or whatever,
a Raspberry Pi OS, but you really don't know what you're getting. On Slackwear, you know exactly what
you are getting or leaving out. So that's one good reason to do a Slackwear install. Second reason
is education. Slackwear, although I think is very easy to install, it does require using your head
there is no, it's really not so much a click one or two buttons and everything magically is done
for you. It is, it's a hands-on process, takes some reading, some patience, and you'll learn
something, I guarantee it. There's also just a wealth of information on the Slackwear,
the doc.slackwear.com, the Slackwear.document.project, wealth of information about all kinds of different
things, just like it's not as detailed or as extensive as the Archwicky, but pretty darn good.
And the other reason is stable and secure. Slackwear 142 has been around for five years now,
it's great OS, never had any problems with it, it's going to get security. I think they do
security updates to like, Slackwear 9 or 10 or maybe 8. So you're going to get years of security
updates and for a single board computer that you set up to run a bash script and bang on some
of the GPIO pins, that's probably good enough. You don't need the latest and greatest as long as
it works and it's secure. Okay, that being said, who should avoid Slackwear? If you're unwilling
or unable to read and follow directions, don't use Slackwear because there is everything spelled
out for you and more. There's an unbelievable amount of information in text form in a Slackwear
install. And I'm not just talking about man pages, there's just all kinds of hints, tips,
tricks inside the OS that install that's just amazing. But if you're unwilling or unable to read
and follow directions, don't try Slackwear. If you think you're late, when you use apt instead of
apt-get, forget it, don't use Slackwear. And if you think commands like DD are scary, you probably
should avoid Slackwear. But if you're not one of those people, the question becomes, how do you install
Slackwear on a Raspberry Pi? Well, first and foremost, there is no official port of Slackwear
arm to the Raspberry Pi, but there is community-supported projects. And I'm not sure of this,
don't quote me on this, but just listening to the podcast and listening to the video cast,
it sounds like Stuart Winner doesn't particularly like the Raspberry Pi because some of the things
that the foundation decided to do, well, a big thing I think is it has a very non-standard way
of booting compared to most armed vices. It doesn't use a U-boot, it uses a GPU, some binary
blobs and stuff, so he's not into it. He'd rather use something like a banana pie or an orange pie,
which some of those are officially supported. That's just a guess. I'm not exactly sure. He basically
says, don't ever give him a Raspberry Pi, he'll never use it or even desires to use it. And that's fine.
But there are ways to get, there are ways, of course, to get Slackwear onto a Raspberry Pi and that's
due the community. And there are essentially two ways that I've seen how to do it. And one is on
the Slackwear Documentation Project site, link in the show notes, there is, if you scroll through
and you see communities supported, I have it here, let me click on it, you go to the main site,
Slackwear Documentation.com, in the how-to section, just search for the arm,
how to get started. And there's actually a link from the Slackwear.com arm port against
link there to get here. But there's two install guides. And if you scroll down, there's first off,
there's a huge section on all kinds of stuff about arm and linux on arm and getting things up and
running, like engine action, using the I-squared C and wireless access points and all kinds of good
stuff there in the middle. And then in that group is a Slackwear arm on Raspberry Pi 2. And there's
a thing or on 3, 2, but Raspberry Pi 3. But in that is a link and it talks about the manual install
method on how to get a Raspberry Pi installed, what they call manually. And I would say describe it as,
you know, you're taking an SD card on your PC, you're setting up some partitions, you're downloading
some firmware from the Raspberry Pi foundation, that's basically your boot partition, you get the
permissions correct, you set up a second partition. And in that second partition, you install the
mini root file system. And with those things, with linux kernel and firmware for system on chip
and a root partition, you can get Slackwear running on any arm device. You put that into the
Raspberry Pi, you do some WGET magic and you download all of the current Slackwear arm, or
I shouldn't say current, the Slackwear arm, whatever version you use 14, 2, or current. And then you
do basically a, you use Slack package, which is the Slackwear package manager. Yes, there is
one for Slackwear. And you use that to install the new software, the rest of it and upgrade it. And
what you end up with at the end of that process is a Raspberry Pi that boots into Slackwear,
but it still needs some tweaking. It's going to need some kernel help, it's going to need some
stuff to get some of the accessories functioning and all those hints and tips are in that how to
document. So it's a process, it's a very manual process, it's not a very standard Slackwear process.
And that, because of that, that's where the next way to put Slackwear on a Raspberry Pi comes in
and that's the Sarpy project. Sarpy project was started by Phil, I don't know his last name,
he's on the podcast, video cast, whatever you call it, started in 2012 when he,
him and another guy heard about this thing called Raspberry Pi coming out. And although
the Sarpy project isn't considered, they don't call it a manual project, there's still some
setup requirements, there's things to download, there's things to set up for your SD cards.
But I will say this, even if you never, ever, ever do put Slackwear on a Raspberry Pi,
everybody should go look at the Sarpy project's website, which is sarpy.fatdog.eu.
And that is how you do a video, a tutorial on something as complex as setting up an OS.
He has written a guide that's just tremendous and it's useful in a lot of different ways for
a lot of different things, even if you've never put Slackwear on a, on a Raspberry Pi or other
ARM device, it just for regular Slackwear installs, there's a lot of good stuff in there.
I just think that if you're gonna, that should be the gold standard of guides on the internet,
it's a great, great project, can't say enough about it. Once you, there's a point there where you've
downloaded all the stuff in the Sarpy project guide and you end up with a, basically, a standard
Slackwear install. You boot into a minimal system, you just hit the setup, you're, you're
faced with some end curses menus that help you get through partitioning, setting up, I'm sorry,
setting up your partitions, picking out what packages to install, setting up some of your,
doing some of the initial configuration stuff, and then you end up finishing, it adds all the
packages, takes, takes about an hour to do a full install, and then you're done, you have a
Slackwear on your Pi. After your install, so if you decide to do this after you get done with an
install, you have a complete development environment on that Pi. There's no need ever to, a lot of
tutorials, anything you do on, on Raspberry Pi, they all start out the same way. First thing you do
is, apt upgrade, then apt, apt, dist upgrade, or whatever, and then you, and then you have to install
10,000 packages to be able to compile something or to do something in Python. It's all the same.
On Raspberry Pi, all that stuff is pretty much all included. If not, you can actually go to slackbuilds.org
where the unofficial, official package packages for Slackwear are stored, and those are all just
bascripts, mostly bascripts, to compile software on your device to be able to install it.
So you just grab Slackbills and you try building stuff. Some of it's going to work, some of it's
not going to work. I'm at pretty good luck, though. Be prepared after you do any kind of install
to get your search flew up, because I tell you, some of the help, and I use air quotes there, help
about doing stuff on the Raspberry Pi is terrible. And a lot of the stuff is not really going to
apply to a Slackwear system, because you're not going to do system CTL service restart for
any of this stuff. You're going to do other things, and that's just the way life is, but you will
learn stuff, and you'll be more confident and more sure yourself around any Linux system,
and you'll be able to discern what a good OS is, and what a bad OS is.
So that is how you get Slackwear on to a Raspberry Pi. Two systems, both well documented,
one one awesomely documented, and one pretty good at documentation, and expect to learn something,
and just have fun. Try it out one time. If you've never done Linux from scratch,
try just do a Slackwear. That's another metal you can get on your Linux armor. No, shield, whatever.
So anyway, if you have any questions or questions, you can email me if you comments, go ahead and
leave a comment or make a show. Tell us about some alternative operating system you've put on
your Raspberry Pi, because there are better things than Raspbian or Raspberry Pi OS out there there
are definitely are. So this is Brian in Ohio signing off. Thanks for listening, and I just want to
remind everybody that the only mistakes you can't learn from are your own fatal mistakes. Goodbye.
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