How to fix your Operating System using netboot.xyz PXE LiveCD (2024-01-13)

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I’ve been a huge Slackware fan since I first saw it on an amber monochrome CRT back in 1995 at the offices of Internet Group in my home town of Stara Zagora.

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But there is one thing that really trips me every time – after a Kernel upgrade I never remember to run

1. geninitrd

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2. eliloconfig

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Then I also need to make sure that /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf

chooser=simple
delay=1
timeout=1

image=vmlinuz
        label=vmlinuz
        initrd=initrd.gz
        read-only
        append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p3 vga=normal ro i915.force_probe=4680"

actually has the i915.force_probe=4680 [1] kernel parameter (after the ro).

So needless to say - last week I slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade-all and it went well. But when PG&E turned off the power and machine rebooted - Slackware could no longer start.

And then I found NetBoot.xyz!!! I made a bootable USB with this tool and had a selection of many operating systems (LiveCD) to boot. Sadly Slackware was not one of them. Debian worked really well in this case. (I won’t bore you with how I fixed my issue - ended up wget http://mirrors.fcix.net/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware-15.0-iso/slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso && dd if=slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=1 status=progress && sync but that’s another story.)

netboot.xyz menu

Grab a copy, make a bootable USB, keep it in your pocket! You won’t regret it!

Here is mine (I think this H8ACUOEGOBBA-36M HYNIX stick that came with my car looks better without the casing)

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  1. The parameter i915.force_probe=4680 in the elilo.conf file enables support for my specific Intel graphics hardware, which turns out is not yet officially supported or recognized by default in the Linux kernel. The i915 module is the driver for Intel GPU devices, and the force_probe option is a way to manually specify device IDs that the driver should attempt to manage. The value 4680 corresponds to a specific Intel graphics device ID. The point is - without this I cannot launch startx - no graphics! ↩︎