Adding programs

Pre-made packages:
Parted Magic is not Slackware based, but the main tool chain was compiled on Slackware. If you would like to add programs your best bet is to use TXZ packages from Slackware 14.x. You can also use DEB files, but Parted Magic will not make any attempt to resolve dependencies.
Note that there is no guarantee that these “foreign” packages will install or run correctly.

Make your own package:
Parted Magic is a Linux OS so you can't use Windows programs. A TXZ package as mentioned above in a sense just decompresses into the ”/” directory, so it's really easy to create a package that will work for Parted Magic. For this example we will make a TXZ package for the foobar program:

mkdir foobar
cd foobar
mkdir etc
cp /etc/foobar.conf etc
mkdir -p usr/bin
cp /usr/bin/foobar usr/bin
tar cvJf ../foobar.txz *

The above CLI commands create a directory structure that resembles the “real” one, copy the “real” /etc/foobar.conf and /usr/bin/foobar files into that structure and create the txz package. Of course you can also use GUI tools to create the directory structure, to copy the files and to create the package.
Note: The package must be created from within the root of the directory structure.

Installing your packages:
Parted Magic will install any packages it finds in the /pmagic/pmodules directory. If you want to run scripts at boot put them in /pmagic/pmodules/scripts.

If you run Parted Magic from a USB stick just copy the package(s) to that directory.
If you run Parted Magic from a CD the ISO must be remastered and reburnt - see our How to remaster the iso file page for details.
If you run Parted Magic via PXE refer to our PXE page.

Note: Use the ldd command while running Parted Magic to verify whether or not Parted Magic has the required shared libraries. If one or more are missing then add a /lib directory to your package and copy those missing libraries to that directory.