Flatpak for Slackware We’re watching containers make the transition from revolution to standard. In the app-container space, I’ve been happy with Flatpak. I know there were some eyebrows raised about security (I won’t link to the most inflammatory material here, but google away if you dare…), but overall these issues appear to be (1) solvable, (2) comparable to those one finds with other solutions, and (3) not as severe as leaving a stack of $100 bills in your bike basket with a note that says “Property of Bicycle Owner.
R Statistics with Slackware Perhaps motivated by another Slacker who used and cited Slackware in his recent publication, I decided to take on maintaining the R statistical package for Slackware. To be honest, I have yet to find the definitve Linux distro for data science, and I’d hazard a guess that Windows probably ranks in there too. I don’t expect the data science community to drop everything and flock to Slackware to dance in the jubilent celebration of a freshly updated R Slackbuild, but a few of you might and then I won’t have to do it alone.
GRUB2 with LUKS It’s a very common setup and poorly documented on the web.
I’ll be using Slackware in this example, but GRUB is used in many, many distros.
UEFI replaced BIOS years ago. People still call everything BIOS, but if it was made lately, your computer is probably UEFI. GPT replaced MBR years ago as the default partition scheme. MBR refuses to die, but again, most recent systems are GPT.
ELILO with LUKS LILO is the default bootloader, and it’s covered in slackdocs along with mkinitrd. The UEFI/GPT variant called ELILO is configured in an almost identical way, except that:
typing elilo does not configure it automatically - you must edit the elilo.conf file by hand. Make an initrd.gz file:
sh /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -l /boot/vmlinuz-generic this will produce a long, ugly output… you need to re-write verbatim everything inside the single quotes ' (e.
Dual Boot Windows / Linux + LVM + LUKS I’ll be using Slackware in this example, but this layout is common in Linux and I’ve used it for Arch, Alpine, Fedora, Centos, Void and others.
Preparation: It’s handy to have one USB stick for each OS or distro you want to install. They’re cheap as dirt and most ISOs will fit on 8GB, and many a great deal less.
you can make one by downloading a slackware iso (Current or 14.
Dual Boot Linux / Linux + LVM + LUKS I’ll be using Slackware in this example, but this layout is common in Linux and I’ve used it for Arch, Alpine, Fedora, Centos, Void and others.
Preparation: It’s handy to have one USB stick for each OS or distro you want to install. They’re cheap as dirt and most ISOs will fit on 8GB, and many a great deal less.
you can make one by downloading a slackware iso (Current or 14.
Slackware Multiboot: Tricking the installer The slackware installer setup is self-explanatory, except for multiple boot systems. It looks for an EFI boot partition, formatted FAT 32, and will use the first one it finds. This is a problem if you already have another Linux or Windows installed. I don’t like to share /boot partitions between distros and certainly not with Windows. But there’s a workaround:
boot your Slackware iso usb mount your / partition to /mnt mkdir /mnt/boot/efi mount your desired /boot partition to /mnt/boot/efi start the installer setup and go through the first steps including selecting the partitions
Slackware I’ve driven a lot of distros (my fellow distro hoppers will understand this) but my favorite remains Slackware. There is a mountain of opinion around the web for and against, so I’ll save you about a year of your life weighing the pros and cons and simply quote Dr. Zeuss: “You don’t like it, so you say? Try it! Try it, and you may!”
slackdocs is simply invaluable and and there’s no subtitute for reading it.