Friday, December 19, 2008

Minimal slackware install

Of course it can be less than this, but it is pretty much enough to start to organize your Slackware installation exactly as you want it. You can even reuse some old memory stick. I prefer to have usb stick much more than running small cd distributions, such as "Damn Small Linux" because it is writable and you can update it easily. An interesting package is slapt-get that enables to load packages and all dependencies from the net.

but, here is what you have to install (for the minimal Slackware installation):

A packages:
sysvinit
sysvinit-scripts
sysklogd
etc
aaa_base
aaa_elflibs
aaa_terminfo
bash
glibc-solibs
coreutils
kbd
shadow
devs
udev
util-linux
grep
e2fsprogs
pkgtools
device-mapper
findutils
getty
module-init-tools
sed
shadow
sysklogd
utempter
tar
gawk
gzip
less
bzip2
cxxlibs
lilo
kernel-huge
kernel-modules

AP packages:
man
groff

N packages:
network-scripts
net-toolsdf
dhcpcd
iputils


You can install packages from a working Slackware installation with:
# installpkg -root /wherewewanttoinstall name(s)ofpackage(s).tgz

Or you can boot to Slackware DVD, mount the DVD, mount the partition, install packages from the DVD with the same command.

after that,
chroot to the partition with the installation,

edit /etc/fstab
edit /etc/lilo.conf
(find somewhere how to do it)

# mount -o bind /dev /wherewewanttoinstall/dev
# mount -t proc /proc /wherewewanttoinstall/proc

# lilo

Reboot and boot your new (light) Slackware installation and customize it as you wish. It is about 170M. I used it on old computers that cannot boot from usb, to boot from hard drive, then continue with usb stick. even 266Mhz PentiumII machine works very fine with it.

11 comments:

axjslack said...

Veri interesting work....

Would you like to transformate it in sort of minimal distro?

Doknos said...

maybe i will do something like that in the future, i really like the idea of using usb sticks like medium to boot from, not cd's or dvd's. they are good for doing installations, but not for having a working system. usb sticks are cheap and silent and you can easily carry them around.

axjslack said...

At the moment I'm working on a little project with slackware, and we need to modify the usb installer of slackware that is so useful.

We are working to a modified version of slackware for netbook (like Acer Aspire One or Asus Eeepc). Now we are in "projecting area", but we just begun...

If you are interested look here

http://www.fsugitalia.org/netslack/

May be that in the future will be good project... for the moment are only a lot of ideas

Doknos said...

hey, it's good thing you are doing - good luck with the project. i will try to put some new stuff on this site and maybe it can be useful for your project also. right at the moment i am very busy.

myname here said...

hmmm, this doesn't work with slack13 32 bits... or does it?

Anonymous said...

I will be changing this into a sort of distribution. A very very similar package listing will be series A in my Slackware based distro lovingly titled YALD.

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IT Books said...

I would include ncurses, dialog, which and openssh in that if it were me. But I network everything and I had some issues installing new apps without them.

Anonymous said...

I'm from Mexico and I want install Slackware on USB Stick (with save persistent data, of course), where can I start?

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Unknown said...

# Tiniest slackware installation able to boot properly.
-------------------------------
A series (25 p)
-1/ pkgtools
-2/ aaa_base
-3/ xz
-4/ tar
-5/ bin
-6/ coreutils
-7/ devs
-8/ etc
-9/ grep
-10/ sysklogd
-11/ sysvinit
-12/ sysvinit-scripts
-13/ sed
-14/ procps
-15/ shadow
-16/ aaa_terminfo
-17/ util-linux
-18/ bash
-19/ e2fsprogs
-20/ kmod
-21/ udev
-22/ glibc-solibs
-23/ kernel-huge-smp
-24/ kernel-modules-smp
-25/ aaa_elflibs