Install Slackware Using A USB Flash Drive

Installing Slackware using a USB flash drive is very easy.

Slackware includes a usbboot.img in the usb-and-pxe-installers directory of the official installation media, along with AlienBOB's usbimg2disk.sh in case the above image doesnt work for you out of the box.

Additionally AlienBOB has written two articles in his blog on how to install Slackware using a USB flash drive from either Microsoft Windows or Linux.

This document will demonstrate yet another way of doing this, which from my experience is easier and often more convenient than all of the above. This document will describe how to create a Hybrid Slackware ISO with Isohybrid.

Prerequisites

Syslinux >=3.72 is required

Additionally you should either have:

a) official Slackware installation media, preferably the DVD ISO one, available on any Slackware mirror.

or b) a local copy of the Slackware tree. That may be the tree of a stable release, or even one the tree of the -current Slackware development cycle.

If you choose to go with b) you should be able to create your own ISO images using a script such as:

Pat's DVD script

Pat's split to 3 CDs script

AlienBOB's mirror-slackware-current script

or even a custom one of your own.

Using isohybrid

At this point you should have a Slackware ISO lying on your hard disk.

Make it hybrid:

isohybrid slackware-13.1-install-dvd.iso

Copy the ISO to the USB flash drive

Now all that is left to do is copy the ISO to the USB flash drive.

That can be done using the dd command as the root user, that will overwrite all the files currently present on the USB drive:

dd if=slackware-13.1-install-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdX

PS. dd expects the name of the device, not the partition, so you should use eg. /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1.

Epilogue

Boot the computer using the USB drive. Experience should be no different than using the official installation media.