Yesterday I uploaded a new GNOME 44 Liveslak (built with the new 1.7.0 release), but I’ve changed some things with the latest ISO. Namely, I’ve removed a lot of things from Slackware proper, that a GNOME desktop just don’t need. These things are listed below:
- d/ – a couple extra gcc packages have been removed
- e/ – removed emacs software
- f/ – removed Linux FAQs & Docs
- k/ – removed the kernel source package
- kde/ – This is a GNOME ISO, we don’t need KDE included!
- t/ – TexLive and friends are gone
- tcl/ – TCL related apps are also removed
- xap/ – here I’ve left some basics, removed most of it but I’ve kept FireFox and a few other essentials
- xfce/ – again, this is a GNOME ISO.
- … and ‘joe’, just because it installs 4 different menu items.
ANY of this software that you might need can be installed with’slackpkg’ as on any Slackware machine, I was just hoping to keep the ISO size a bit slimmer. Along with this change, I’ve split the extra ‘_software’ folder in the GFS repo into a add-on module. Once you’ve written your ISO and the disk is mounted, place the ‘gfs44_software.sxz’ file into add-ons and Liveslak will automatically add the software to the OS when it boots
If you choose not to get the extras, you won’t even know you’re missing anything when using the ISO. But the extra package includes much good GNOME software like fwupd, apostrophe, Deja-dup, and more. The ISO is shipped with the latest 6.1.35 kernel and -current as of yesterday. In the future, I’ll likely update the system when a new kernel is added which should equate to about weekly until 15.1 finally gets here. The add-on module may see more updates, (and software) dependent on how active the team is currently, I haven’t contributed much in months, I’ve been branching out but I’ll get back into the swing soon.
In other repo news, nwg-shell has added hyprland support with v0.5.0 (now at 0.5.6), and boy does that shine on Slackware now. Hyprland support is actively developing so expect more as time goes on, but the x86_64 repo has been updated to reflect that and add hyprland (and deps) to the install. You can still use sway, but now you can use sway or hyprland with the same great environment on -current. Expect the aarch64 repo to lag in this, as I haven’t the time to get that one up to par yet. I’m going to experiment with the ‘slackrepo’ app soon to hopefully manage a singular repo for all my packages on Slackware for all systems, we’ll see how that works out in the end.
For now, we must part… enjoy the goodies.