The LiveSlak Project: Running Slackware-Current Live Images With or Without Persistence and Installing Them

Eric Hameleers has unofficially contributed to Slackware for what feels like forever. He not only runs his blog Alien Pastures dedicated to Slackware and offers a huge selection of packages pre-compiled on his vanilla systems, readily available for our perusal. He also offers the Ktown repository with updated packages of KDE4 and the next generation Plasma desktop for both the stable and testing branches of Slackware. He also started the Slackware Live project based on his own LiveSlak scripts to give people an opportunity to run Slackware current without committing to an install and to get an idea what the next version will be like.

On 25th June the latest line of images was released, one for each desktop. Live ISOs are offered in 32 and 64bit, although only the Xfce and KDE4 images are available for both architectures. The other two images with MATE or a Plasma 5 preview substituted for KDE4 are 64bit only. This 1.2.0 release mirrors Slackware current as of 23/06/2018. Initially there was also a version with the Cinnamon desktop but this seems to have fallen behind.

Apart from the desktop chosen there are some differences in the size of the images. The Xfce spin is just under 700MB, the standard desktop version with KDE which is just named slackware-live-current is 3.1/3.0 GB respectively, the MATE version 2.1GB and the Plasma 5 edition a hefty 4.3GB, also due to extra software onboard. Read more about how the project came about and an overview with tips on Eric's blog.

It gets more interesting though when taking into account that these live distributions can be installed to hard drive to provide you with a full install of Slackware testing which can be updated from here with the usual package tools. Use the “iso2usb.sh” script for this. If you already have an older instance of the image running there's no need to reinstall just to update programs or kernel, you can refresh your USB stick with the "-r" switch instead of re-formatting. This will not touch any customizations we have made since the install. To update only the kernel use the “upslak.sh“ script. The images can also be run as a PXE server. There's a whole lot more information and guidance in the Readme.

Extra multilib packages, Skype, Wine and the Broadcom-sta driver are available in the bonus directory.
On boot we are presented with a nice Slackware-themed boot menu and login screen. You can either log in as root or use the live user account with password=live and then use su or sudo for admin tasks.

The Xfce edition came in at 693MB on the disk. It is pretty sparse in terms of programs but one thing I like about Slackware is that it always includes a copy of the GIMP so you can edit those screenshots, pictures and icon logos for your posts for example. You basically get the tools of the Xfce environment incl. a terminal called Terminal and the Thunar file manager, two chat programs, Audacious and MPlayer, the Geeqie image viewer, the GIMP, the HP printer utility, Xsane to handle scanners and two chess games. Lftp as a command line ftp client and TigerVNC are also on board but personally I find them useless as there are better clients out there, in particular as TigerVNC needs an ssh connection to be run over as it does not natively support creating an encrypted tunnel. Firefox 60.0.2 is the browser. It may be slightly out of date but remember, this is a snapshot of what was in current tree at the time. Not too bad for the size and should enable most people to get something done. There is no email client and no word processor or calculator but gVIM, Vim and nano are present for text editing.

As slackpkg is included you will be able to update all packages in your installation to the latest and run upgrades either from memory or make them persistent. At the time of writing there were 41 updates available for the Xfce version, one of them the latest Firefox 60.1.0-ESR.

By default Xfce is set to show all removable drives.

As always in Slackware, the environment is pretty vanilla and has not been tampered with, which means it's for the user to set it up to his liking. Nothing to write home about.

The MATE edition is of course a full 2.2 GB and that shows in terms of software included. There's still no LibreOffice here but you get the full MATE desktop with additional tools like the Pluma graphical text editor and teh Atrium PDF reader and a lot of other programs on top of what was in the Xfce edition like a Dropbox plugin for the file manager, the Pan news reader and a graphical FTP client, Thunderbird for email and the SeaMonkey suite as well as Zenmap to monitor network activities. Also CMake and Emacs and several others in the programming section to help us compile.

The desktop environment has been updated to 1.20.3. In true Slackware tradition the default MATE look is very unspectacular as well but it only took me about 20 seconds to change that. MATE is more complete than Xfce and offers a lot of choice in themes and backgrounds from the start, you get the whole set of backgrounds of a default MATE install. It only needed switching to another of the backgrounds included, a change to the Blue-Submarine theme and one of the MATE-Faenza icon sets and it looked a lot better. MATE is so easy to theme right from the right-click shell menu. This is my preferred edition as it is really useful, full-featured thanks to the MATE desktop and still smaller than the two editions to follow, the KDE4 and Plasma spins. After all, download time is time spent waiting. 

The MATE spin looks clean and sharp and can easily rival the Linux Mint or Ubuntu MATE editions in this department. What's more, like the other Slackware Live editions it just works rock solid and stable and comes with plenty of software so what could you want more? And once installed or made to run with live persistence it can be expanded on with the usual Slackbuilds and other packages.

The standard Slackware Live edition made from the testing branch ISO is using KDE4 as that is still the default desktop in Slackware. As expected the KDE4 spin was slower in booting and also slower from login to the desktop with quite a noticeably drawn out loading process compared to the previous ones. Running the desktop from USB key was also slow at times but may be better once put on the hard drive or with a USB 3 port.

The K desktop is now at incremental update 4.14.38. Another constant in Slackware is the package BSD games and fortunes which always comes up with a wise-cracking line. Note the one in terminal in the upper left. The desktop was presented nice and clean with no icons or widgets present. Minimizing and translucency desktop effects were on.
The collection of software was pretty much the same as in the MATE edition, only that you get the full education suite of the KDE Software Collection, the entire Calligra Office (which comes with some nice templates) and the KDE personal information manager and email clients. So quite a bit actually. Mozilla Firefox is still the browser but Konqueror is still included as well. Due to the lag I didn't spend too much time in here. It's not my favorite desktop anyway.

The Plasma desktop edition is experimental. Eric has provided a testing ground here with his packages for the stable and current branches of Slackware before eventual inclusion in the official distribution and is also providing a live image with these packages for testing. This image with Plasma 5 is only available in 64bit to showcase the Plasma 5.13.1 release and also contains LibreOffice 6.0.4 and VLC 3.0.3 among many others, so may be viewed as the most complete but is a hefty 4.3GB download. Check out the gallery for images of Slackware live with Plasma5.

[Edit 02/09/2018: Interestingly, this was much more responsive and worked better for me than the KDE4 edition although desktop effects are enabled here as well, both in terms of loading times and on the desktop. As advised in the comments below, there's also a choice of desktops with LXQT, Lumina and Xfce in this spin. They all work great and this turns out to be a really good show case for those desktops as well as for Plasma in Slackware. I may actually prefer this now to the MATE edition.]

MP3 playback and embedded online videos worked fine for me in all editions. It was trivial to mount hard drive partitions once becoming root, in case you did not log in with the administrative account a dialog box pops up asking for the root password and you're off working on your partitions. Suspend and Hibernate worked reliably and suspended and woke up without delay.

For my part, I think I'll keep a thumb drive with Slackware MATE edition handy, especially since Slax is now based on Debian and good Slackware-based live distributions are hard to come by. And in any case, nothing is as good as the original for demonstration and testing purposes, or as complete.