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188 lines
6.0 KiB
Plaintext
188 lines
6.0 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 55
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Title: HPR0055: Slax
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0055/hpr0055.mp3
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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
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sudo space dot slash boot slash lilo INST dot SH. And that's really important because
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it will not work if you do the wrong one. And they don't make, I didn't notice that
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it was a huge, I mean they don't have like a big warning sign in the installer files
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or anything. So you need to just kind of be on top of that, know what you're doing.
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Now another catch is that whilst installing, it's going to need to run a lilo binary file.
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And this lilo binary file will only run on the architecture, the CPU architecture, you
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know, that it is a binary four. So I know for sure that it will fail on for instance
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the PowerPC chip, it will work fine on an I 386 architecture or 686 architecture, you
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know, the typical Intel architecture. I don't have an AMD chip to try this on and I don't
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know enough about the differences between AMD and Intel except that typically if you're
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downloading an ISO, you have to make sure that you're getting that ISO for either AMD
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or Intel. So I'm assuming there could be a problem there. So if you're on an AMD system
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and you're trying to install this and it isn't working, if it hangs at lilo, it's because
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your chip architecture is wrong. So you'll need to find an Intel machine possibly to install
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this on. If you're installing from Windows, which I did not and I do not have access to
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a Windows machine to test it on, you can simply, you can be in Windows, there is an installer
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dot BAT file. So presumably you will know how to run that on Windows and you run that
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and I guess it'll work. Again, I do not have access to that so I haven't tried it but
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I have asked about two people on IRC how they installed it after they had done successful
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installs and what they had done was just do it via Windows and I guess that probably
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circumvents any kind of weird file system issue since I'm sure Windows probably doesn't
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recognize the X2 or XFS. So you're probably just dealing with a VFAT. So once you have
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it installed and it's ready to go, obviously you need to make sure that your BIOS settings
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are correct to be able to boot off of it. Getting into BIOS is usually as simple as hitting
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F2, Dring Boot or sometimes it's escape, Dring Boot or Delete Dring Boot and just set it
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so that the USB is a bootable, you know, the booting from USB is enabled and preferably
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higher in the sequence than your hard drive or else it will just boot off the hard drive
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because it won't ever get past the hard drive. But once you have it installed and you booted
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up off of it, you can easily make a persistent file, a persistent environment. And in
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all actuality, I have anyone have to do this. It's actually just being persistent for me.
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I don't know if this is an update that they've made for 6.0. Right now it's being persistent
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for me and the way to make it persistent if it is not persistent for you is simply make
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a directory on your flash drive. You can call it, for instance, Slack's RC. And then when
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you get to the boot up screen, you can use a boot parameter. Changes equals slash Slack's RC.
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And then Slack's knows where to put all of your changes and where to find them again
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later on. So I'm assuming there's probably a way to modify the LILO config file to make
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that boot parameter a constant thing. I haven't really played around with that lately.
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But if you go listen to Dan Washco's episode, HPR episode, about specifically obviously
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a LILO episode, you will find all the kind of information that you need to make that happen.
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The modules that Slack's has is a really cool feature. These are basically Slack packages.
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So they're basically just.tgz that you can actually, there's a utility on Slack's to convert
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a Slack package to a Slack's module. And there are sites with Slack's modules available.
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And you can add these modules to a folder in on your USB drive. You can identify that
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as your module folder. And then when you boot up, you will have those programs available
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to you. So you can keep adding two slacks and, you know, really easily with these little packages
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basically. In some events, you're not going to be able to get to a computer's BIOS in order
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to make it bootable from a USB drive. In that case, don't forget that you do have the live CD
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option. You could use that. That's what I ended up having to do at work since I worked around
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Macs and wanted to boot up off of the thumb drive. And the newest incarnation of Macs
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do not use open firmware so you can't access any kind of firmware setting for the boot sequence.
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And it simply will not boot off of the USB drive, tried everything. And just doesn't work.
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So you could probably hack the EFI firmware by downloading a developer kit from Intel.
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And installing it on the Mac. But you'd probably end up breaking the Mac. And I can't really
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afford to do that. I'm a job right now. So I haven't done it. But the live CD is an option.
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It works really well. I've been using that quite a bit at work. So either way, slacks is highly
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enjoyable. It's a great little system. Runs really, really fast probably because it's paired down,
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but also probably because it's on followed state. So you're not physically waiting for really
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anything. So it's a great little solution for for a quick Linux fix if you're on the go.
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And it's a really cool system. So give it a shot. If you've not tried Slackware,
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this could be a great introduction to it. It's pretty much, you know, you boot it up and it's
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kind of ready to go. It doesn't have any of the classic, you know, scary Slackware kind of things
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that you have to configure. So try it out and you might you might like it.
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Thank you for listening to Hack the Public Radio.
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HPR is sponsored by caro.net. So head on over to C-A-R-O.N-P for all of us here.
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