Introducing Mini Slint

EDIT 22 January 2020: A new version supersedes the previous one and this post has been edited accordingly

Happy new year to all readers of this blog and those whom they care about.

One week ago I answered a question on the VINUX-SUPPORT forum:

Q. Is there any plan or proposal to make either a Oracle virtualbox or vmware Slint image? if any one want to make a virtual image is it ok to Slint comunity?
A. I could try to make a Qemu image of a Slint system instead.

That is, a file that could be used as a virtual hard disk by a Qemu emulator, with Slint already installed in it.

As a full Slint installation is around 16G I ended up building instead an image of a "minislint" system. "mini" means small in size (2 GB) but big enough to run Slint in console mode with limited features, but that can be easily expanded to convert it to a full size Slint just running a few commands, listed in the README

All you need to get and run minislint lies in https://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-14.2.1/minislint/.

Albeit small, minislint as shipped is internationalized, accessible with Braille and speech as soon as started, connected to the web, allows to surf with lynx, email with mutt, play music with play. It includes all utilities needed for configuration and packages management with its 197 packages listed in packages_list

minislint allows you to run Slint without installing it, in a virtual machine as well as on a real drive, for instance a (possibly external) hard disk or SSD or an USB stick.

If copied to an USB stick in converts it in a rescue media, as the boot menu includes an entry to detect and boot most installed operating system. It works with a machine set to boot in EFI and Legacy modes.

The README tells you how to use it and its features. Outline :

  • Get it.
  • Transfer it to a device.
  • Run it in a device.
  • Run it in a Qemu virtual machine.
  • Install it yourself.
  • Look into minislint in the image.
  • Use it in VirtualBox or VMWare.

Have fun!

Didier

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