well... i've mucked around with slack for a bit...
it was really nice playing around with it. learnt helluva lot in a short short time.

thing is, i can't get the blinking sound to work... and after a kernel recompile (which actually made the machine really really nice after that), i couldn't mount the cdrom nor the floppy... and no matter what i did to the fstab file and the /dev entries, well it didn't work. (i did ensure that the sound modules and the various file system support modules were also included during the recompile). also couldn't find the PAM stuff nor the usertty file... and i'm sure a host of things i left out...

thanks to trickykid, aussie, finegan and tazdevil for all the support and help... couldn't have gotten this far without all of your help...

well, it' back to rh7.2 for me (for now)... coz i only have 1 machine and i can't really afford to have it hanging around junked (need the machine for development). until i get another cheap 2nd hand machine, slack is gonna take a backseat for now... feeling wistful about it though...

cheers...

noooooooooo, !!!

what's wrong with install your Slackware in another disk/partition ???? there's no need to get another machine, don't
be lazy and install it on another disk or somethign.....

that will be more "cheap" than buying an 2 hand machine....

hoho... lazy? dude... over the past ten days, i have installed slack 10 times, freebsd 5 times, debian 2 times and redhat 2 times (this does not include all the other stuff i wanted eg. window managers, web browsers, office suites, programming APIs etc etc)... all on the one and only machine i have. i also have tried hard to learn something about security on linux.

in the same period of time, i have re-compiled the kernel for slack about 8 times altogether now... just to test it and to get it right.

i'm not boasting... just that u could hardly call that lazy... that's gotta be excessive! lol

but no worries dude... i forgot about / didn't like the redhat interactive startup. and missed all the control i had in slack... and couldn't resist going back to see where i went wrong with my kernel re-compile. so i re-installed slack again. realised i missed out quite a bit of stuff in my previous re-compiles... and did it again. now i've got the ipchains thing back, the floppy and the cdrom are back in shape now... and now all i need is to test if the sound is working and if i can download xcdroast and get that to work as well. (but i had to go off for a friend's anniversary dinner and am staying over for the night) so i'm using his windows box now... won't be able to touch it until the weekend is over... lol

well... there u go...

hey dude you sound like me, I install, reinstall, recompile, re install, re config, curse lots & at the end of the still dont know what I really wanted to actually do hehehehehe

I have not got to play with Slack yet, bout the only one I haven't played with, I tried to get a ZipSlack going agian to night on the other machine but the kernel keeps panicking halfway, bugger it.... but never mind, I've only installed Mandrake 7, (x2) SuSe 5.0, (x1) 5.2 (x3) & re compiles 2 or maybe 3 kernels in the last 2 evenings, just to get the dammed blasted Lucent winmodem recognised, Mandrake really does not want to talk to it, despite the software module compiling eventually, something to do with Drake being a rpm intall. the others might work but I am using realitvly archaic distros an dhave to keep switching back to MegaBuckSoft to search for any libs & patches on the net.
bummer

still, interesting learning curve on reasons why I should not rely on freebie from magazine software anyhow...

don't give it up, you can do it gui10 ! keep trying man...

I have an old compac 400 and I put slack 8 on it. Still have not got my new one yet.

It is really supported well.

After a few kernel compiles I have it up to the latest one with everything working smooth.

I am not using modules it is all built into the kernel.

what cpu/mem has your compaq ?

Go ahead and reinstall redhat, the idea is to have a working linux install and redhat will give you that. I used to dual boot between mandrake untill about three months ago when I finally felt confident enough about my slackness to remove mandrake completely. What I used to do was study what happened when I used the graphic config tools in mandrake and I even printed out a lot of the config files to reference when I started to play with slack.

The compaq is a DeskPro 400 MHz with 256MB RAM

and you call it "old" ??
I though you were talking about and 386.. 486..
my machine is mmx200/64ram
and linux run without problems, and is fast, at least for my

Ah yes I have a few of those around too.

Thinking about what to put on a DELL Optiplex 586 120 MHz


Right now it has RH 6.1

thanks for all the encouragement... if anything, that's probably what i need now... i appreciate it a lot...

i would still love to have a few more cheap machines around the house and set up a network... it's been a kind of dream for about a year now... perhaps i could try a few different distros on each machine... and i get the feeling if i run a few at a time, i could learn more by seeing how things worked on each one and copying from the ones that work out of the box to the more 'bare' distros...

well, this means i need a job... lol. at least i can and have started looking now...