Episode: 55
Title: HPR0055: Slax
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0055/hpr0055.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:50:13

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it without any catches. Now if you've done EXT2 or XFS, then you're going to want to do
sudo space dot slash boot slash lilo INST dot SH. And that's really important because
it will not work if you do the wrong one. And they don't make, I didn't notice that
it was a huge, I mean they don't have like a big warning sign in the installer files
or anything. So you need to just kind of be on top of that, know what you're doing.
Now another catch is that whilst installing, it's going to need to run a lilo binary file.
And this lilo binary file will only run on the architecture, the CPU architecture, you
know, that it is a binary four. So I know for sure that it will fail on for instance
the PowerPC chip, it will work fine on an I 386 architecture or 686 architecture, you
know, the typical Intel architecture. I don't have an AMD chip to try this on and I don't
know enough about the differences between AMD and Intel except that typically if you're
downloading an ISO, you have to make sure that you're getting that ISO for either AMD
or Intel. So I'm assuming there could be a problem there. So if you're on an AMD system
and you're trying to install this and it isn't working, if it hangs at lilo, it's because
your chip architecture is wrong. So you'll need to find an Intel machine possibly to install
this on. If you're installing from Windows, which I did not and I do not have access to
a Windows machine to test it on, you can simply, you can be in Windows, there is an installer
dot BAT file. So presumably you will know how to run that on Windows and you run that
and I guess it'll work. Again, I do not have access to that so I haven't tried it but
I have asked about two people on IRC how they installed it after they had done successful
installs and what they had done was just do it via Windows and I guess that probably
circumvents any kind of weird file system issue since I'm sure Windows probably doesn't
recognize the X2 or XFS. So you're probably just dealing with a VFAT. So once you have
it installed and it's ready to go, obviously you need to make sure that your BIOS settings
are correct to be able to boot off of it. Getting into BIOS is usually as simple as hitting
F2, Dring Boot or sometimes it's escape, Dring Boot or Delete Dring Boot and just set it
so that the USB is a bootable, you know, the booting from USB is enabled and preferably
higher in the sequence than your hard drive or else it will just boot off the hard drive
because it won't ever get past the hard drive. But once you have it installed and you booted
up off of it, you can easily make a persistent file, a persistent environment. And in
all actuality, I have anyone have to do this. It's actually just being persistent for me.
I don't know if this is an update that they've made for 6.0. Right now it's being persistent
for me and the way to make it persistent if it is not persistent for you is simply make
a directory on your flash drive. You can call it, for instance, Slack's RC. And then when
you get to the boot up screen, you can use a boot parameter. Changes equals slash Slack's RC.
And then Slack's knows where to put all of your changes and where to find them again
later on. So I'm assuming there's probably a way to modify the LILO config file to make
that boot parameter a constant thing. I haven't really played around with that lately.
But if you go listen to Dan Washco's episode, HPR episode, about specifically obviously
a LILO episode, you will find all the kind of information that you need to make that happen.
The modules that Slack's has is a really cool feature. These are basically Slack packages.
So they're basically just.tgz that you can actually, there's a utility on Slack's to convert
a Slack package to a Slack's module. And there are sites with Slack's modules available.
And you can add these modules to a folder in on your USB drive. You can identify that
as your module folder. And then when you boot up, you will have those programs available
to you. So you can keep adding two slacks and, you know, really easily with these little packages
basically. In some events, you're not going to be able to get to a computer's BIOS in order
to make it bootable from a USB drive. In that case, don't forget that you do have the live CD
option. You could use that. That's what I ended up having to do at work since I worked around
Macs and wanted to boot up off of the thumb drive. And the newest incarnation of Macs
do not use open firmware so you can't access any kind of firmware setting for the boot sequence.
And it simply will not boot off of the USB drive, tried everything. And just doesn't work.
So you could probably hack the EFI firmware by downloading a developer kit from Intel.
And installing it on the Mac. But you'd probably end up breaking the Mac. And I can't really
afford to do that. I'm a job right now. So I haven't done it. But the live CD is an option.
It works really well. I've been using that quite a bit at work. So either way, slacks is highly
enjoyable. It's a great little system. Runs really, really fast probably because it's paired down,
but also probably because it's on followed state. So you're not physically waiting for really
anything. So it's a great little solution for for a quick Linux fix if you're on the go.
And it's a really cool system. So give it a shot. If you've not tried Slackware,
this could be a great introduction to it. It's pretty much, you know, you boot it up and it's
kind of ready to go. It doesn't have any of the classic, you know, scary Slackware kind of things
that you have to configure. So try it out and you might you might like it.
Thank you for listening to Hack the Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by caro.net. So head on over to C-A-R-O.N-P for all of us here.