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10.2

About Slackware

Slackware was one of the very first Linux distributions. It is ideally suited for use as a UML guest operating system.
It does not have all the bells and whistles of the newer distributions, but it has some very strong selling points:

How this image was built

The packages are installed using the installpkg tool, specifying the root path using the -r switch.
This tool requires a specific version of tar (version 1.13 which is no longer provided in the latest Slackware packages), so we obtain a copy from an old version and untar both the pkgtools and tar into a temporary directory (Slackware packages can be manipulated with tar -z)
For more details, see the full installation log.

The Disk Image

This 32-bit image is on a reiserfs filesystem (v3.6) and uses 1.5GB of disk space when uncompressed.
download-link root_fs (~70MB) MD5 SHA
Boot test log

This 64-bit image is on an ext3 and uses 2GB of disk space when uncompressed.
download-link root_fs (~70MB) MD5 SHA
Boot test log

(last updated on the 2009-01-24)

Keeping it up to date

We have installed the slapt-get package which allows you to keep the distribution up to date using a simple automated tool similar to Debian's apt-get:


slapt-get --update
slapt-get --upgrade

Should keep a system up to date. To find slapt-get and install new packages which are not part of the standard distribution, visit linuxpackages.net.
Note: the mirror specified in the image has been chosen because of its proximity to our servers, please ensure that you use an appropriate mirror (modify /etc/slapt-get/).