back into the slack
I’d been doing most of my work on my laptop. I wanted to play the most recent Half-Life episode on the desktop, which meant installing Windows. It was a huge hassle installing Windows XP, much worse than any Linux install this century, and part of it was to destroy everything on the 300 GiB hard drive. (The part of the Win XP installer that examines the hard drive would just get stuck, even though the first primary partition was NTFS, 100 GiB.) Since I wasn’t much using Slackware or any of the several other distros I had installed to play around with, I just cleaned it all off without backing up anything but a few documents.
Now, of course, I’m kicking myself. I’ve just installed Slackware 12.1 and am beginning to put back into place the stuff I want or need. And this time I’m going to try to document a lot of it here, if only so I can find it again if I need it. There are some things I do to any GNU/Linux install, and I forget the details of how to do them — I’m hoping if I put them here, I can save myself some re-re-re-googling down the line.
So far, I’ve just installed it and the grub bootloader. The Slackware way is to use lilo instead of grub, but I really prefer grub. Slackware does provide a build of grub, but that’s not much use before Slack is bootable. I use System Rescue CD to install grub; it’s a Gentoo livecd with some good tools, and I’m most comfortable with Gentoo. The stage files grub needs aren’t in the cd’s /usr/share/, but it’s easy enough to copy them from /boot/. Then the grub commands I needed were just root (hd0,4) and then setup (hd0,4).
I couldn’t recall what parameters need to be passed to a Slack kernel, but it turned out that just using kernel (hd0,0)/boot/[kernelfilename] root=/dev/sda7 ro works ok. Later (much later), I’ll at least get framebuffer goodness and maybe a grubsplash. And compile a slimmer kernel — for now, I’m using the huge-smp one.
The desktop only has dial-up, and once again Slackware’s pppsetup works fine to get a connection. I also set up kppp without problems.
I’d forgotten how annoying KDE’s sound scheme is. I turned it all off immediately.
Next up: nVidia drivers and xorg config, udev rules for USB drives.