liveslak 1.6.0 feature release, plus a new set of ISOs for Slackware Live Edition
Liveslak is my favorite project, it’s fully under my control, I built it from scratch, I get good improvement ideas from its users and Patrick helps when liveslak needs something new from Slackware. There are times that it gets less attention though, and in the first half of 2022 there was not much activity – some minor updates whenever I needed to release a fresh batch of Live ISO images. Most of that inactivity was caused by burnout.
But then someone mentioned Ventoy to me, because liveslak ISOs would not boot from a Ventoy disk and they hoped I would be able to fix that. At first I was like “I don’t care for it, why should I put effort in supporting it” but on second thought and reading through its web pages, my opinion changed in favor of Ventoy. In fact, it is a quite the unique piece of software and I am using it myself now.
So what does it do? Ventoy takes a USB stick, formats it and puts a Linux kernel, a Grub bootloader and some smart tools on it. Then you can put as many bootable images (ISOs, IMGs and so on) on its first exfat-formatted partition as there is room. Ventoy will automatically populate the Grub boot selection screen with all bootable images it could find on that partition. You can then boot any ISO straight from that menu.
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Ventoy is now fully supported. Liveslak 1.6.0 implements the “Ventoy-compatible” guideline. This means, Ventoy won’t apply any “hooks” to liveslak when it boots its ISO image, and liveslak figures out for itself how to boot. You’ll see the message “SLACKWARELIVE: (UEFI) Ventoy ISO boot detected…” (or ‘BIOS’ instead of ‘UEFI’ if you have an older computer).