Full-Blown Installation on DVD

Your new Slackware 12.2 Linux Demo LiveDVD is a full-blown installation of Slackware Linux 12.2.

If you downloaded a full installation DVD of Slackware 12.2 Linux and installed everything on that DVD, the first time you booted your new Linux system, you would have almost exactly what is on our DVD.

Perhaps you want to see our instructions on booting the Demo DVD?

No Root Password

There is no password required for superuser/administrator access for this DVD. That's okay, because only the local user can "get root".

Please read the instructions, below, first. Then you might want to come back and see our page on turning on services such as the web server.

You may also want to read about configuring internet settings.

Adding A User

You should create a user account for normal operations.

Log in as "root".

Open a terminal (XTERM) window by clicking the icon on the "dock" at the bottom of the screen.

Type adduser and then press the "Enter" key. Follow the prompts, most of the defaults are good.

You have just added a user. Click the "K" menu on the bottom left of the screen, and log out, and just "end session". Soon you will see a new login screen. Log in as the user you have just created.

Just remember that if you restart the computer, nothing you have done will persist past the restart.

Saving Things

Make a non-volatile storage volume

[As of September 17, 2009, this now reflects procedure for Version 1.3]

Log in as "root". Make a new user, if you haven't yet done this. See right above for how to do that.

Insert a 2GB (or larger) flash drive (key drive) into your USB port once you have booted into the Linux LiveDVD.

Open a terminal (XTERM) window by clicking the icon on the "dock" at the bottom of the screen.

Type into the terminal:

dmesg

and you will see a lot of text. At the end of it you should see something like "sda1" or "sdb1" or maybe even "sdc1".

As an example, if you see "sda", you would now type:

fdisk /dev/sda

Play with this for a while, typing "m" will give you some idea of options.

You will want to delete the MSDOS (FAT16) partition, and then "n" will start to add a new partition. Select "p" for a primary partition, and "1" for the first partition.

Accept the default for "start cylinder" and follow instructions to create a partition of 256M in size.

Then type "t" to change the partition type, and then "l" to list the choices. You should choose "83" as the type. That's a basic Linux partition.

Now add a second Linux partition. Type "n" to add a new partition, "p" for a primary partition, and "2" for the second partition.

Now just hit "enter" a few times to accept the defaults and fill up the rest of the drive with that partition.

Then once this is done, type "w" to write the changes to the flash drive.

Now make a file-system.

For example, if the flash drive is /dev/sda you will want to type:

mke2fs /dev/sda1

("make extended version-2 file-system")

and now you have a formatted flash (key) drive suitable for a Linux system.

You should do this only when you first create this non-volatile storage.

Now you should also format the second partition:

mke2fs /dev/sda2

You're done with this part.

Make this volume your user directory

[As of September 17, 2009, this now reflects procedure for Version 1.3]

You just made a user, right? Now make this their home directory the newly-formatted flash (key) drive. The name of the user we will now call <username> for this example.

Version 1.3

    Make the User Drive

If you have the Demo DVD version 1.3, you can make a version 1.3 flash (key) drive -- as instructed above -- and after that, most of this will be automated.

First, make the version 1.3 flash (key) drive, as instructed above.

Follow the instructions seen under "Version 1.2", below.

You must connect to the InterNet (or copy the previously-downloaded appropriate files to the drive from another Linux machine).

Log in as the user you have created. You will be in that user's Home Directory.

Click on the icon for "Xterm". An "xterm" window will appear.

Point at it with the mouse.

Now, type in the following, and then press "Enter":

wget http://www.thomashardman.com/tech/unix/files/userstuff-1.3.tar.gz

If you successfully connected and downloaded, or already have the file on the first partition of the flash (key) drive now mounted as the user Home Directory, now type and Enter:

tar -zvxf userstuff-1.3.tar.gz

The "tarball" (Tape ARchive compressed file) will decompress and write files to the drive.

Edit the files USER and PASSWORD and insert appropriate values:

joe USERNAME

(enter the user name you wish, up to 8 characters, and then hold down the <ctrl> key and press "k" and then "x" to save and exit the editor.)

joe PASSWORD

(enter the password you wish, up to 8 characters, and then hold down the <ctrl> key and press "k" and then "x" to save and exit the editor.)

This part, initialization, is done. Now reboot.

    Normal Use

After rebooting, log in as user "root".

Click the "Xterm" icon. An "xterm" window will appear.

Point at it with your mouse.

Type in the following, and then press "Enter":

sh /etc/rc.d/rc.thumbdrive

Your user account will be re-created, and the drive partitions will automatically be mounted in the proper place.

Log out of the "root" account and log in as the user, with the proper login and password you created in the Initialization section.

Please be advised that under this version, the user name and password are stored as plain text. Security is only as good as you can make it by physically securing that flash (key) drive.

Version 1.2

Assuming that the flash (key) drive is revealed by "dmesg" to be /dev/sda1,

fsck /dev/sda1 ; mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /home/<username> ; chown -R <username>:users /home/<username>

To repeat the example, if your username is "cooluser" you'd type

fsck /dev/sda1 ; mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /home/cooluser ; chown -R cooluser:users /home/cooluser

Now log out from the 'root' account, and log in again as "cooluser" to use the example.

Everything you save to your new "home directory" can be read again after reboot, or transferred to any other Linux machine.

Now Go Play

Now that you are logged in, and have your own directory, go play! Try everything on the menu, remember that if it wants a password for some function that requires superuser authority, there is no password, just press "Enter". But remember that everytime you reboot, you will have to re-create the new user, and mount the flash (key) drive to the user's home directory. The user's home directory is created by the "adduser" script.

Play with the menus, try everything, all that will happen is that you learn while you do things. If you do something wrong, or a lot of things wrong, you can just reboot the system, because it is read-only, nothing you do can affect anything other than the flash (key) drive contents.

Surfing the Web

Click the "K menu" at the bottom left corner. When the menu appears, scroll up to "Internet", and when the second menu appears, select "SeaMonkey". That's just about exactly the same as Mozilla "Firefox". It should be very familiar to any experienced websurfer.


Additional Features Available from TJH Internet SP

We can and will, for a fee, write a permanent user directory and user account to a LiveDVD for you. However, you will still need a flash (key) drive to store data that will persist beyond reboot. We also offer consulting on servers to retain your user information and data through multiple reboots, and to protect your data with encryption and authentication, and we prefer to do this for enterprises as our best solution is the "secure mobile office fleet-in-a-box" We have not yet set a price for that, but for a custom DVD burn to preserve user and login information across reboots, we charge $20. That's a lot less than a new copy of MicroSoft(tm) Vista(tm).