Mini Slint ISO and Qemu images

First, I wish a happy new year to all readers of this blog and those whom they care about.

One week ago a question was posted on the VINUX-SUPPORT forum, quoted below:

Hello all Slint users,
Happy new year 2020.
I want to try Slint and before going further I have few questions
which are follows:
1. Will Slint can be used as penetration distribution system like kali linux?
I used Vinux but its accessibility used to break when ever I run updates.
2. Can I install and run Enterprise data bases like DB2 comunity
edition or Oracle express?
3. is there any plan or proposal to make either a Oracle virtualbox or
vmware image?
if any one want to make a virtual image is it ok to Slint comunity?

Basically I answered to the last question: I could try to make a Qemu image of a Slint system instead.

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

But wait! A full Slint installation is around 16G and users will need more than that for their data. With a not so fast Internet connection, downloading a 20G file would take a very long time and that would be a waste of bandwidth.

I ended up building an image of a "minislint" system instead, that can be expanded once installed. Here, "mini" means both small in size (1.5 GB) and with just enough software to run Slint in Console mode.

All files mentioned in this post are in this directory

The image is slintmini64-14.2.1.3.raw and weighs 1.5G.

This mini Slint, as shipped, is accessible with Braille and speech from the inception, is connected to the network with dhcp, allows to surf with Lynx, email with mutt, play music with play. It includes many utilities, among which all needed for configuration and packages management.

How to use it is detailed in INSTRUCTIONS_FOR_USE

Here is the outline: 1. Download the image and check its integrity 2. Upsize the image to at least 20G, as a full Slackware installation weighs 16G at tile of writing. 3. Start Slint in Qemu for the first tile. This just needs to running a small shell script. 4. Resize the root (/) partition then the file system in it to use all the space (now way bigger) in the image. 5. Convert the mini Slint to a full-size Slint, installing in it all packages not installed in the image. This takes a lot of time, but still far less than downloading a 16G (at least) image if you have a slow network connection. 6. (re)Configure Slint to your liking. 7. Use it!

Last but not least, the image can examined mounting it on a directory, converted to a format suitable for VirtualBos or VMWare, and even transferred to a real device.

And indeed the mini ISO can also be used to install the mini Slint on a real device.

Have fun!

Didier

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