GNOME 43 – LIVESLAK

Latest ISO is always available here:

https://slackware.lngn.net/pub/liveslak/

The LIVESLAK contains slackware64-current as of the last revision [see date above on filename]. Featuring the core GNOME modules, except gnome-boxes and gnome-builder. I’ve excluded them because of the large amount of extra dependencies, but I’ve included built-in system-wide flatpak installations for flathub and gnome-nightly repos. You are recommended to install them through gnome-software if you require them.

Outside of the needed libraries not included in Slackware-proper, this Live ISO contains the core GNOME modules, including the gnome-console, gnome-maps, gnome-control-center, gnome-music, gnome-photos, gnome-software, gnome-disk-utility, and much more.

As of this revision the system is shipping the core components of the GNOME 43 Desktop and these extra applications:

• Authenticator
• Endeavour
• Gradience
• Apostrophe
• Brasero
• D-Spy
• Evolution
• Extension Manager
• File-Roller
• Fragments
• GNote
• Gui-ufw
• LibreOffice
• Pika-Backup
• Rhythmbox
• Seahorse
• Secrets

Slackware is shipping with the latest 6.1.12 kernel and Firefox 110.0, and GNOME includes their browser Epiphany (43.1), including the webkit2gtk, 4.1 and 6.0 (this is the development version) rendering engines, which boasts amazing speed in my testing use so far! I’ve also included the GNOME Extension originally from Ubuntu, AppIndicator, which you must enable within the Extensions application upon first boot for the missing tray support within GNOME.

By default at boot GDM loads up a Wayland session for your Live User (password also “live”) and sudo is configured for root access (the root password is “root”). The ISO contains a slightly-shrunk Slackware installation minus the KDE and XFCE desktop environments. The ISO weighs in at ~3.2GiB. In order to use a usbstick with persistent storage, one must run the iso2usb.sh script as root during the writing process (or use ventoy). The system ships with pipewire enabled, to disable/re-enable one can use “pipewire-disable.sh” or “pipewire-enable.sh” as root. The GNOME-Flashback session will not work with pipewire enabled, you must disable it in order for Metacity to run.

If there’s anything you’d like to see added, that you feel would be useful on this live system, leave a comment, and I’ll consider it. I’ve also added a couple add-ons which you can add to your usb stick for btop, broadcom-wl, mbpfan, sbopkg… any other suggestions?

If you’d like to install the ISO, first you must boot it and then install the entire system on a freshly formatted drive using the included installer script @ “/usr/local/sbin/setup2hd”. You will then have a machine running Slackware with GNOME 43.4 (latest release). Installing on an existing system is not supported nor recommended, as there could be too many software conflicts out of the box and I have no idea what you have on your systems. If you’re still interested, use the package repo (link on the right of the page) with slackpkg+ and read through the guidelines page for the repos.

Many thanks to AlienBOB (for liveslak) and my fellow GNOME loving teammates – 0xBOBF, Frank (snuk) and Nathaniel (N4t3R). Rizitis was the OG with the GNOME liveslak, I am but a vessel for his inspiration and efforts.