Azman @UniMAP

The official way to do this is, of course, to get it from slackware.com.

Personally, I have getslack, a bash script based on (more accurately, a trimmed-down version of) the excellent (he termed it infamous) mirror-slackware-current.sh by Alien Bob. When going down this path, the next step would be to prepare the installation media.

I no longer need an ISO image (refer to USB installer below). But, I have my slack2iso script (also based on Alien Bob's script) that can help in creating one using the tree downloaded by getslack.

Alien Bob has provided a script to make/setup/configure a USB-based Slackware installation media. I wanted to do something simpler using the existing files in the Slackware tree that I mirrored using getslack (mentioned above). So, here is how I got that working.

1. Create a FAT32 partition
   • use fdisk and make sure it is bootable (bootable flag enabled)
   • use mkdosfs (e.g. mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdb1)
2. Use syslinux to provide bootloader
   • create a /linux/boot/syslinux folder on the USB
   • type

     syslinux -d /linux/boot/syslinux /dev/sdb1

     Note: On newer syslinux, use -i to indicate new installation

   • a file ldlinux.sys should appear in /linux/boot/syslinux
3. Copy boot facilities from Slackware tree to the media
   • copy a kernel from slackware tree to /linux/boot (I used huge.s)
   • copy initrd.img and message.txt to /linux/boot
   • copy isolinux.cfg to /linux/boot/syslinux as syslinux.cfg
   • edit syslinux.cfg accordingly (initrd, kernel params, etc.)
4. Copy slackware<64> in the Slackware tree (I used a shorter folder name like slack on the USB)

And… we're done! Now we have a simple Slackware USB Installer and install it on every computer we can get our hands on!

Note: GPT Disks and EFI