Monday, January 16, 2012

Minor Update to My Live USB

I have been using a live USB based system, off and on, for the last few months. I am impressed with how well it actually works! There have been a few glitches on my hardware, and have switched to the bleeding edge linux kernel, v3.2.1. I've also upgraded to Firefox 9. It moves a few toolbars around by default, but they can be swapped back to look more like v.3.6.x. The root filesystem is prepopulated with an almost full base install of Slackware 13.37, with a few updates beyond, including the kernel. A few useful packages are also installed including the evince document viewer, and some browser plugins. The space used from the outset is about 3.9G.

Here is a screenshot of the live USB running, with the firefox about box appended:
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The system is running in true live mode- all changes to the system are stored in RAM only. A persistent mode is also available. The system's root filesystem is using the same layout as discussed previously on an 8G flash drive.

edit: Here are the steps I use to finalize the boot of a pristine Slackware install in live mode.


  • login as root

  • run pkgtool, select the slackware scripts to run again. Select the relevant choices.

  • add a non-root user using adduser

  • add the above non-root user to the sudoers list, using visudo

  • setup wifi connection parameters, if applicable, using wicd-curses, or similar

  • login as non-root user and begin customizing user environment as desired


    • set screensaver; I dislike the default selection, random screensaver

    • customize xfce's main toolbar

    • start firefox to initialize user directory, .mozilla

    • install adobe flash

    • install other plugins: greasemonkey, reddit enhancement suite




Update 2012-02-02: There were a lot of slackware patches in the recent official slackware changelog. Here is a screenshot showing Firefox 10.

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1 comment:

  1. Good night Douglas Mayne, My name is Martin, from Mexico.

    I am looking for a tutorial about Slackware Linux on usb drive.

    Can you give me a few tricks about it?.

    Firstly, I installed in a reiserfs file system, but it became very slow.
    secondly I tried with a ext2 file system with a minimall install, just with fluxbox and some basic packages, the problem now was when i tried install more packages, all fine but never was going to power down with shutdown -h now.

    Could you post a brief tutorial about your install, please?

    ReplyDelete