Freeslack (a little off topic)
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For anyone interested, I found instructions for "sanitising" a Slackware install.
Thanks, pretty cool. That's like the first step towards a new fully free distro.
Is it really any better than Dragora? I know that both Slackware and Dragora follow the KISS principle. I've never tried them, though, because KISS seems to be a bad choice for me.
Dragora is brutal. Even more so than Slackware. I got as far as getting everything working on Dragora, except my printer - couldn't find half of what I needed to compile drivers.
But the above instructions are for taking a vanilla Slackware install and then cleaning it up. So you get pretty much what you'd get with Slackware, including a sane desktop on first graphical boot. With Dragora I get a 1024x768 blurred mess that requires a manually created and edited xorg.conf.
I've always had a thing for Slackware. Back when I first discovered Linux the name Slackware seemed to call to me - sounds silly I know, but there it is. Once I finally discovered libre-software Slackware seemed to be out of bounds, so this discovery is pretty awesome.
It still looks like the fonts have been scratched into the screen with a rusty needle though.
I am a member!
I suppose this is so people can run a free version based on Slackware without the far more difficult route of a proper fork. As Rubén can attest, there is a lot of work completely freeing a distro. For example, I doubt all references to non-free software are removed from the packages of "FreeSlack".
Still, I'll give it a try this weekend. ;-)
Agreed.
It is essentially a project to document all the instances of non-libre software present in Slackware so that anyone can make a libre version thereof.
A list of all the packages is offered so people can check the licences in order to create a totally free version. I suppose that a side by side comparison of packages with something like Triskel or Debian without the non-free repo enabled, might offer a short cut to examining each and every package. That's based on the presumption that if package.x is libre on Triskel it's probably libre on slackware too. No doubt someone will post a list of packages for which this is not true - packaging and licence checks are totally new to me, so I'm guessing.
Ubnfortunately I'm going to be the lazy one here waiting for someone to come up with a resulting distro.....which is a very exciting prospect!
I suspect you'll be in for a long wait.
Though it would be great to see it become a stand alone distro.
I'd do it myself but I wouldn't know where to start and would almost certainly quickly come up against things that were orders of magnitude above my current knowledge level.
Time was that I used Grub1 without a config file - I just typed the necessary strings into the grub console to boot (awesome level of local security). But then Grub2 came out and they had complicated the process by changing to great long alpha-numeric strings to indicate drives and there was no way I could memorise such strings so I stopped using that method and the knowledge, no longer in use, fell into the blackhole of memory. There's a world of difference between "we improved the process but it requires more complexity" on the one hand and "we changed the process and unnecessarily complicated it" on the other. Splitting a config file into several smaller versions and scattering them about doesn't seem to be anything other than plain stupid to me. But then, it's arguably dangerous to criticise technical decisions when you don't fully understand the thinking behind them. Let's just say, to this day I've yet to hear an explanation for the changes to grub that make me think "oh, that's OK then", the ones I've heard so far are like the ones surrounding systemd "it's good and if you don't know why you're a fool and should shut up".
In GNU GRUB 2, disks do not have to be identified with UUIDs: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Device-syntax
It is the most reliable way though (device names can be unstable). It is easy not to use UUIDs:
$ echo "GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true" | sudo tee -a /etc/default/grub
$ sudo update-grub
Anyway, if you really want local security, encrypt your disk (or at least your /home) with a good password. Nothing you can do at GRUB's level would prevent someone with a Live USB from booting it and reading/modifying your files.
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