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Installed Slackware Aarch64 on Raspberry Pi3b (Report)

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I realized last week that I could re-purpose my Raspberry Pi3b 1G that
was doing nothing, into an always on Slackware computer at home. 

That's the first Pi I ever bought in Dec 2017. 

It works. It's running Slackware-current aarch64 on the inboard SD card.
Graphics works (startx). 

(Installed from hdmi monitor and usb keyboard+mouse. Ran it like that
for a while. Now it's running headless.)


Here are my notes and comments about the whole process:

1. Slackware ARM is a port. It has it's own peoples, website and mirrors.

2. There has been no ARM 64bits release ever. You have to follow
-current. (There has been ARM 32bits release.)

3. I used the instructions at:
https://docs.slackware.com/slackwarearm:inst_sa64_rpi_generic

4. I didn't have a spare USB-SSD drive and I didn't want to spent money
for one so I did a SD card install. The install script did not gave me
any issue when I selected to install on mmcblk0p3.

(Using a SSD is the prefered method because of the low life expectency
of SD cards under heavy write.)

5. It did means that I used for installation SD media
"rpi_generic-sdimg.img.xz" and not "rpi_generic.img.xz".

They are both MBR disks with a 2GB VFAT partition for the Raspberry
startup files and the slackware kernel + install initrd.

The large install image also has a 8GB ext4 partition holding the
"/slackware/slackwareaarch64-current" installation hierarchy.

If you are installing on a large SD card (>128GB). That 8GB is probably not
meaningfull and the advantage of installing from local files will outweight
the lost space and the added complexity of a networked install. And you
can always re-purpose that 8GB after the install.

6. I had no issue booting from the installation SD card. Paritioning with
fdisk and running the first steps of setup. Then I tried to get the
packages directly from "ftp.arm.slackware.com".

THEN ALL BROKE LOOSE.

7. "ftp.arm.slackware.com" CNAME cascade to "ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de"
where I live.

That host SUCKS. It can be unavailable for hours. It has anti-abuse
limitations that made it block all my download requests when I reached
the "n" set.

I was getting errors for each package at this point. I stopped everything
and had to restart from a clean installation SD card. (Because I could not
reboot from the current SD card anymore. (setup has changed things in the
VFAT partition?))

8. I hosted the Slackware installation files from a local HTTP server
and restarted the setup from new and downloaded the packages from there.

That worked. I had a fully running Slackware-aarch64 machine after the
normal setup and download phases. SUCCES!



Other notes:

i) It's better to use a HTTP server, not HTTPS. Because the "wget" binary
on the install-initrd complains twice for each downloads if you do HTTPS:

"wget: note: TLScertification validation not implemented"

ii) I didn't want to re-download everything for my local http mirror. So I
used the files directly off the "rpi_generic.img.xz" install SD card.

xz -d rpi_generic.img.xz
losetup -f
  (returns the first free loop device: /dev/loopX after this point)
losetup -P /dev/loopX rpi_generic.img
  (-P tell to go through MBR/EFI parititions detection)
mount /dev/loopXp2 /mount/point/in/my/http/server/hierarchy
  (2nd MBR partition on rpi_generic.img)
  (test how you get the files of your webserver because you'll need
  to enter that path manually in setup (all the way to the folder
  holding the a,n,xap,etc sets))

once done:
umount /dev/loopXp2
losetup -d /dev/loopX

iii) There might better behaving slackwarearm mirrors than
ftp.arm.slackware.com. But I didn't want to personally test them after
my failure. (Not sure there's even an offical list of mirrors.)

iv) It's nice that it automatically setup a ZRAM swap area. I don't know
it's a -current thing or ARM RPI touch. But it will save my SD card a
little. (There's no miracle with only 1GB of RAM though.)


Anyway, I had fun and now I'm running Slackware-current for the first time
ever.

Lot's of rambling on my part here.

dmesg:
https://eintr.net/temporaire/slackwareaarch64-current.dmesg-pi3b.txt


-- 
Hugo Villeneuve-Lapointe

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Installed Slackware Aarch64 on Raspberry Pi3b (Report) hugo_villap@email.invalid (Hugo Villeneuve-Lapointe) - 2026-08-16 01:31 -0400

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