Installing Slackware on a Raspberry PI4

I believe ARM architecture to be the future; and while I wait for the Khadas VIM3 to arrive I thought it may be a good idea to see if the Raspberry Pi could replace my desktop (I hope to achieve that with the VIM3). My Linux distribution of choice is Slackware, one of the many reasons that I like it for, is that you get a sort of two distros in one: It can be a rolling distribution (just like Arch Linux) or a fixed one. This allows me to get the rolling one (which is called -current and gets updated almost daily) on my desktop to enjoy the latest version of everything, while having a more stable one (fixed version) like 14.4 on my NAS server.

Slackware has an official ARM port for 32bits and the work for a 64bits version (aarch64) has already started, so the timing is perfect. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4MB or RAM. The installation is possible thanks to the great work of the SARPi project, SARPi packs the binary files from the Raspberry foundation, the kernel and configurations files in a way that works with the official installation.

The installation was smooth following the excellent documentation of the SARPi project, the only issue for me was that I didn’t want to download an ISO or mirror the repository as a source for installation. Network installation is of course possible, but I was away from my router and the packages required for a WPA wireless connection are not available in the installer. However, it just a matter of pulling the missing packages over an usb drive from the repository.

The packages required are:

wpa_supplicant
wireless_tools
iw
libnl3

After that the wireless interface can be configured as usual.

It took me a while to install all the packages that I normally use and restore some of my configuration (dot files) but overall the process was quite pleasant, performance wise, it is ok, but struggles a bit playing YouTube videos, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a desktop replacement. Maybe their new version with 8GB of RAM is more suitable for that, but at this point I already have too many RPis and can’t justify buying another one. So my quest to replace my desktop with ARM continues…