Slax author's Blog (RSS)

Absolutely perfect, great job! I love this :)

By the way xterm has wrong font color (black font on black screen) and bash could have set some PS1.

Thanks so much for keeping slax going. Please, please, please make an XFCE based version like the venerable Slax popcorn.

Hi, Tomas,

Trying for the first time Slax7 177Mb,
amid overall delight of and thankfulness to you for the new product,I would like to propose changes in
boot options selection:
1) Unflag Persistant changes
2) To increase timeout to at least to 5 sec.
The reason - I had to unzip unchanged version twice after missing to unflag default persistent changes in alloted 3 sec.

Thanks
Sala

hey Tomas, your work is getting even better! KDE looks good and is working fine.

xterm is really using the wrong font color but Konsole is ok!

The problem with xterm is that KDE tries to make it use KDE colors, while xterm somehow doesn't understand it :) I guess I'll have to make a workaround for that somehow, since I wish other non-KDE applications to use KDE color scheme.

@Tomas tks for the reply. I know that you compiled a new kernel ... is there any change that you could create the packages kernel-modules and kernel-firmware just like the original Slackware? ... it would fix the wifi problems that some of us are facing.

I mean .. is there any chance that you could create the packages kernel-modules and kernel-firmware?

@tdmsilvino:
Kernel modules and kernel firmware is already included in Slax. There are modules and firmware from Linus's kernel tree. Are you suggesting to replace the vanila firmware drivers by drivers from Slackware? I don't understand your request, I am sorry. How do you expect that splitting the files into separate packages would help you fix wifi problems?

Tomas, don't unflag persistent changes, is more comfortable.
wifi don't work, i use a usb card with arheros ar9271 chipset (ath9k_htc module)

@Tomas I had checked the /var/log/packages and I couldn't find the modules and firmware packages, that's why I was requesting to include them. Now I understand that when you compiled the kernel those modules and firmware were already included in the distribution.

I performed some tests and I can see that the iwlwifi driver is included in Slax, it loads fine but no wlan0 interface is created. Maybe there is some problem with udev that I didn't figured out yet. I will look for information to troubleshoot that.

@tdmsilvino:
Thank you very much. I have no wifi device here for testing so will really appreciate if you find out what's missing there.

@Tomas
i'm giving up with posting direct link (got rejected twice) on this blog.

please go to packages.slackware.com and search for "kernel-firmware" as this is what you are missing.

regards

There is kernel firmware installed in Slax. You just can't see it in the list of packages, since it gets instealled together with the prebuilt kernel. So you say that the package "kernel-firmware" from Slackware makes your device work, while it doesn't work in Slax natively? If this is the case, then I'll have to examine it, since it uses the firmware from git-tree, which should be (IMHO) the same like the firmware used in Slax already. In all cases, thank you for your suggestion.

Ah, I found a ML message from David Woodhouse announcing to create the git tree for linux-firmware (which is actually used in Slackware), which provides more fw drivers than the kernel itself. That will be probably the reason it was needed instead of just the fw files from vanila kernel.

Thank you all for heads up, I will include the firmware from the mentioned git tree in Slax! :)

fanthom, thank you very much! I downloaded kernel-firmware, converted the folder to sfs -with .sb extension- & putted to slax tree. now wifi works, but I cannot connect. sorry for my english!

"So you say that the package "kernel-firmware" from Slackware makes your device work, while it doesn't work in Slax natively?"
i'm not a slax user anymore so can't say if it works in slax or not (i didn't try new slax on my hardware)
anyway - after reading the comments it was pretty obvious for me what was missing.

Diky, slax je vybornej projekt, pokud by byl potreba mirror dejte vedet. faha.faha(zavinac)gmail.com.

Hello, Tomas. I was trying your new SLAX, but graphic environment won't work. Show only static white "_" on black screen. Console mode working. Tested on Intel miniITX mainboard with Atom and i945 chipset (Little Valley 2?). Any suggestions? Thanks.

Thanks for installing extlinux. Usb install works fine. Waiting for wifi and graphic card drivers to do further testing. ;)

Again thanks a lot for keeping slax alive. Sleek looking KDE. And a new up-to-date Kernel :-)

Hello Tomas, just wondering... . What space does the present KDE4 on iso occupies? I am in favour of LXDE for simplicity reason and I'm curious, if there is a way to "somehow" make it run (instead of KDE4). ...But for my personal use only, stick with the KDE4!

PS: 148MB ... hustodemonskykrutoprisny, ThumbUP
I was able to strip down desktop image only down to 350MB, keeping the KDE look www.pclinuxos.cz/?page_id=1949 ... therefore I'm excited about "new Slax", GOOD JOB!

Hello Tomas,
can you integrate easy text editor in your build? :)
Today I try to repair my GRUB with this edition of Slax, but there is no text editor. But mc in terminal works great :) Slax help me again!! Thank you! :)

there is no graphic display when tested with AMD fusion c-60 integrated radeon 6250, just white screen, any sugestion?

Hi Tomas,

great that Slax is back :)

Are you aware that any downloaded binaries e.g. firefox will not run zet for some reason? The files can not be found or executed although the executable flags are set?

Cheers,
Syntax

Don't get it, downloaded binaries will work without any problem ... You just have to download binaries for the same architecture like Slax is.

Hi Tomas,

If I start blackbox from the terminal, (Graphical Desktop was unchecked in boot prompt. Then I changed symlink xinitrc from xinitrc.kde to xinitrc.blackbox then startx), I cannot come back to the terminal by exiting blackbox. The only option then is to shutdown or reboot.
I guess the reason being you call blackbox repeatedly in a loop. Is it possible to implement an exit to prompt in the blackbox menu? Maybe the infinite loop can check for existence of a file or something which the exit to prompt command can touch or delete?

BTW, KDE looks awesome! Keep up the good work!

Thanks,
Jason

@Jason:
Actually you can exit blackbox by Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

Hi Tomas,

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately I run slax from a virtualbox and hitting ctrl-art-backspace restarted my host system's X session!

I will see if I can do some change in virtualbox's settings.

about to boot the new slax... wiiiiiiiiii

Hi Tomas,

Was experimenting a little with the iso. I recreated the iso such that only core modules is loaded. Then once the system is up, I manually loaded the other 3 modules, xorg, kdeps and kde in that order. But then when I run startx, KDE gives 3 errors while starting up. The KDE desktop itself is loaded but these errors come:
1. "KDE Power Management System Could not be initialized"
2. "No mime types installed
Check that shared-mime-info is installed and XDG_DATA_DIRS is not set, or includes /usr/share"
3. "Could not find mime type "application/octet-stream"

Is it mandatory to load all 4 bundles before the rootfs is loaded? Since I was thinking, I can start only the core (and devel once you created it) and then load xorg and other GUI modules, if and when needed, hence this experiment.

If all 4 modules are started during bootup itself, KDE loads fine.

Most likely the problem is that kde requires some services to be running (dbus and such), which are not autostarted yet if you activate the kdeps module. So you basically need to telinit 1 and then telinit 4.

I'll fix that after I release the 'activate' script. How do you activate the modules now by the way? there is no activate script yet.

You are right, telinit 1 and then back to multi-user worked.

There was the "updating MIME data bases" when init was changing back to multi-user which I guess did the trick.
Thanks!

I activated them by manually mounting the squashes and adding them to aufs:

mkdir -p /mnt/{xorg,kdeps,kde}

mount /mnt/live/memory/data/squashes/02-xorg.sb \
/mnt/xorg/ -t squashfs -o loop
mount /mnt/live/memory/data/squashes/03-kdeps.sb \
/mnt/kde -t squashfs -o loop
mount /mnt/live/memory/data/squashes/04-kde.sb \
/mnt/kde/ -t squashfs -o loop

mount -o remount,add:1:/mnt/xorg/ none /
mount -o remount,add:1:/mnt/kdeps/ none /
mount -o remount,add:1:/mnt/kde none /