Two days ago, alienbob (Eric Hameleers) announced the release of Slackware 15 Alpha after nearly 5 years since Slackware 14.2. It's a big big day. The most recent upgrade was to glibc-2.33 which then required a rebuild of all of the packages to be included. After reading this announcement, I had to go build an iso and proceed to do a fresh installation of Slackware.
So, how is this done?
The first step is going to be attaining all of the various packages:
lftp -c "open https://mirrors.kernel.org/slackware/ ; mirror -P 2 -c -e 'slackware64-current'"
This is going to download every package in the slackware release. Where I have 16 you would alter that to however many CPU threads you wish to use with FTP. Once the download is complete change to that directory, and then you will need to run a rather long command:
mkisofs -o $HOME/Slackware64-15-Alpha1.iso -R -J -v -d -N -x ./pasture -x ./testing -x ./source -x ./extra/source -hide-rr-moved -no-emul-boot -eltorito-platform efi -eltorito-boot isolinux/efiboot.img -A "Slackware64 15" .
You will then need to burn this to a disc or copy it to a USB drive, I chose to use USB:
dd if=Slackware64-15-Alpha1.iso of=/dev/sdf bs=1M
You then boot off of USB via whatever bootup keystroke that your computer requires.
Once booted, you will need to partition your computer's hard disk. I typically
prefer to use gdisk for this. You can invoke gdisk via the command
gdisk /dev/sdX and subsequently, you will be presented with a very fdisk
like interface but it supports GPT partitions which are required for UEFI boot.
If you currently have a problematic disk type, you can wipe that out with 'x'
and then 'z'. Make sure to an EFI partition with the type of ef00.
Following the partitioning of disks, you can then proceed to installation via
setup.
Once you're booted into your new installation of Slackware, you will want to go about adding a regular user and adjusting any settings that you wish. After that, you may wish to install sbopkg. You can grab sbo via:
wget https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.1/sbopkg-0.38.1-noarch-1_wsr.tgz
Then you will want to install that package via:
installpkg sbopkg-0.38.1-noarch-1_wsr.tgz
Once installed, you will need to make a few changes to the configs for sbopkg
the queue file generator. Within /etc/sbopkg/sbopkg.conf you need to change the
REPO_BRANCH and the REPO_NAME to match:
REPO_BRANCH=${REPO_BRANCH:-current}
REPO_NAME=${REPO_NAME:-SBo-git}
Then you need to do the same with /usr/sbin/sqg
Once that is complete, you can do:
sbopkg -r
You can then search for a package via:
sbopkg -g packagename
You can install a package via:
sbopkg -i packagename
If a package has many dependencies, you can install them via:
sqg -p packagename
sbopkg -i packagename
By building the ISO file yourself, you have the latest possible install media. If you want to keep your install updated, you will want to change /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. In my installation, the mirrors file still lists current and 14.2. I commented the 14.2 line that was default, and then uncommented https://mirror.slackbuilds.org/slackware/slackware64-current/. Once this is done, issue:
slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all
That's a decent brief. For those gamers out there, you should know that Slackware is perfectly capable of running Steam. To do so:
sqg -p flatpak
sbopkg -i flatpak
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam
You can then run steam via:
flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam
You should now be completely capable of running your Steam games. If, on the other hand, you want to use Lutris, you will want to follow alienbob's instructions on multilib installations.
Finally, if you find Slackware useful, please support it via Pat's Patreon.