Linux Travails

Slax Linux has long been one of my favorite portable Linux distributions, and the latest version, 9.4.0 did not disappoint me in its power and grace. It is now based on Debian, so thousands of software packages are available with a simple “apt” command. I have the 64 bit version installed on a USB pen drive, and  decided to install Slax to a small partition on my hard drive, along with my existing system. The installation for the pen drive was as simple as mounting the Slax iso file and copying over the files to the pen drive, where I had previously created an ext4 partition. Then I opened a terminal, changed directories to the /slax/boot directory on the pen drive and ran $ ./bootinst.sh This sets up the ldlinux.sys bootloader. On booting from the pen drive, three options are presented: fresh boot, boot with persistent changes, or boot to RAM. Now, when installing Slax to the hard drive, I decided to forgo the installation step, and boot directly with G...

Tiny Core Linux is a wonderful tool to have as a backup system on a USB drive in case you ever need to do emergency repairs to your computer system.  It can also be a very lightweight and elegant  desktop system when installed to a hard drive.  My goal was to install to a small partition on my hard drive, and boot from the grub installation installed from my Debian Buster installation on another partition. I followed the excellent installation instructions on the Tiny Core website at: http://tinycorelinux.net/install.html I booted back into by Debian system and ran # update-grub , but the prober failed to find my Tiny Core installation. Fortunately, Grub2 provides a way to add custom menu items to the boot menu. First, I needed the UUID of the root partition of my Tiny Core installation, so I opened a root terminal and ran # blkid   The results included the partition I was interested in, which was: /dev/sda6: LABEL="tinycore" UUID="7a130a42-5c23-...

Slitaz Linux is a fast, tiny and fun Linux distro that I have been using on and off over the years.  I was a bit surprised when I downloaded and booted into a live session of Slitaz 5.0 (rolling) from a USB flash drive, to find myself looking at a command line login.  I had chosen the graphical desktop option, but X had failed to start. I logged in to the console that presented itself as root with the password root.  Fortunately, the networking was already enabled with DHCP, so I was able to do a little configuration to get to a graphical session. It seems the required drivers were not present for my GPU, which lspci lists as:   VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini [Radeon HD 8280 / R3 Series] So, I ran the command: # tazhw setup ati This pulled in the ATI Xorg driver,  xorg-xf86-video-ati  and all its dependencies, and I was able to get to a graphical desktop by issuing the command: #startx From here t...