Thoughts on liveslack and fedora-silverblue: an immutable Slackware?
by giomat from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5J8JR)
I was reading a bit about the technology that drives fedora-silverblue and the concept of "immutable base system", and I thought that a similar thing is accomplished by the liveslack iso, using squashfs overlays.
If I understood the logic correctly, the way one adds packages to liveslack is in form of squashfs modules that are layered on boot and are read-only, much like it's done on fedora-silverblue with a thing called "rmp-ostree layers" (which also needs to reboot the system on new additions).
If one wants to install liveslack on a physical pc drive, rather than a usb drive, keeping the base immutable, would it be possible to just write the iso on one of the drive's partitions together with a persistenced home for the user to add its own stuff (thinking about flatpaks and containers), and configure grub/lilo/something else to assemble the layers on boot? Then you would get an immutable slackware.
So while I keep diving into the documentations, I want to ask the wiser users what do you think is missing to liveslack to provide an alternative to fedora-silverblue as an immutable os?
And would you see practical benefits of such a system over a standard setup?
It would certainly need a way of updating the base "in place" without burning the whole thing on disk again. I don't know much yet about how fedora does it, but I remember hearing that it's something similar to Android, where a partition is reserved for a complete updated base and the system swaps the old with the new on reboot.
If I understood the logic correctly, the way one adds packages to liveslack is in form of squashfs modules that are layered on boot and are read-only, much like it's done on fedora-silverblue with a thing called "rmp-ostree layers" (which also needs to reboot the system on new additions).
If one wants to install liveslack on a physical pc drive, rather than a usb drive, keeping the base immutable, would it be possible to just write the iso on one of the drive's partitions together with a persistenced home for the user to add its own stuff (thinking about flatpaks and containers), and configure grub/lilo/something else to assemble the layers on boot? Then you would get an immutable slackware.
So while I keep diving into the documentations, I want to ask the wiser users what do you think is missing to liveslack to provide an alternative to fedora-silverblue as an immutable os?
And would you see practical benefits of such a system over a standard setup?
It would certainly need a way of updating the base "in place" without burning the whole thing on disk again. I don't know much yet about how fedora does it, but I remember hearing that it's something similar to Android, where a partition is reserved for a complete updated base and the system swaps the old with the new on reboot.