Booting Slax 9.4.0 From an Existing Debian Installation

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 Grub2 from my Debian system.

First, I needed the UUID of the root partition of my Slax installation, so I opened a root terminal and ran # blkid  The results included the partition I was interested in, which was: /dev/sda6: LABEL="slax" UUID="7a130a42-5c23-4148-80c9-c9a8e78f311c" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="c04ff9fd-76a7-4e19-be5f-588f230dd9f3"

I am running Debian Buster on my desktop, which uses the Grub2 boatloader. In order to get Grub2 set up to boot Slax, I edited the custom boot entry file.  To do this, I opened a terminal and ran the following (as root): # nano /etc/grub.d/40_custom

The file, 40_custom, looks like this before editing:

#!/bin/sh

exec tail -n +3 $0

# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the

# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change

# the 'exec tail' line above.

Without removing any text in the file, I added my entry at the bottom, adding the UUID for /dev/sda6 where appropriate.  I am using "vmlinuz" for the linux line and "initrfs.img" for the init root directory line.  I want to always boot with persistance, so I added the “perch” bootcode to the end of the line that starts with "linux":

menuentry "Slax with persistence on sda6"  {

insmod part_gpt

insmod ext2

set root='hd0,gpt6'

search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 7a130a42-5c23-4148-80c9-c9a8e78f311c

linux /slax/boot/vmlinuz root=7a130a42-5c23-4148-80c9-c9a8e78f311c perch

initrd /slax/boot/initrfs.img

}

I hit ctrl+x to save the file, then ran # update-grub.  I rebooted and the custom Slax entry was at the bottom of my Grub2 menu list.

I started up Slax, opened a terminal, and ran # dpkg-reconfigure tzdata , changed the time zone then did a shutdown. I restarted to test persistence, and the time zone changes were indeed retained.

A few final thoughts. Slax is a real joy to run, and its creator, Tomas Matejicek, is something of a Linux alchemist.  Slax is powered his very innovative Linux Live Kit project.

I probably won’t keep Slax installed to my hard drive, though, unless I can prevent it from automatically logging in to the root account. When I look at the file tree, there appears to be a guest account, but I can’t figure out a way to log in to the system manually. I don’t see any options in the published bootcodes that would allow logging into a user account prior to starting X.

What I tried doing with mixed success was to set a password for the root account, then delete the "guest" user and add a new user.  Then I installed the SDDM display manager, and rebooted.  This appeared to work, in that I was presented with a login screen with SDDM, and I was able to login with my new user account to either blackbox or fluxbox.  I lost all of the Slax graphical embellishments, though, and just had a "normal" looking Debian Stretch desktop.

Anyone who has found a better solution to logging in to a user account on Slax 9.4.0, please leave a note in the comments.