I have a older PC that I am going to install slackware 11.0 once it comes out. I was looking over the HCL....if some of the hardware on my PC is not on the HCL am I in trouble?

Just trying to figure out how much wiggle room I have to deviate from that HCL.

Thanks!

No problem, go ahead and install it. Perhaps you will return here and add your hardware to the HCL

Hi,

And welcome to LQ!

The HCL isn't comprehensive, it's just an accumulation of hardware
that our members know to work (and only the hardware where the
members actually took the time to write an HCL entry, too ;}) which
makes the list drop to maybe 1% of hardware actually in use by our
members. I didn't submit too many items, but then I only have very few
machines, too :}


You could always look for your machine on
http://www.google.com/linux
or post details here and ask :}


Cheers,
Tink

People are installing Linux on all manner of strange boxes much faster than anyone can update lists....

I just set up my system with a Promise tx4302 SATA controller and two SATA drives. Somewhere I got the idea that it might be hard to boot from an add-on card like this. Even after searching, I found nothing conclusive.

As it turns out, it all works perfectly.......sometimes it's easier to try something than to do the research.

As Tinkster said ...

The kernel is where support for hardware comes.

Slackware-11.0 will load with a 2.4.33 kernel by default,
and you can choose from one 2.6.16.x kernel in /extra, or
perhaps the latest stable kernel in /testing.

Therefore, your hardware has as good a chance of it being
recognized in Slackware as any other Linux distribution.

What hardware are you concerned about?

Whilst you wait on Slackware-11.0, you can download a Knoppix
iso image and burn a LiveCD/DVD. Then you can boot your computer
with it and see what hardware you have, and how well it's setup
by Knoppix.

This isn't the same as Slackware, but you can at least get a list
of what's on your motherboard by issuing "/sbin/lspci" from a
terminal in Knoppix.

in linux, it doesn't matter if hardware support is documented, there is almost always a way to get any piece of hardware to work

i've run linux on some relatively obscure hardware in the past, and i've never had hardware that wouldn't work. The only thing that is sometimes problematic is wireless network cards, but in my experience, they can be used with just a little tweaking.

What is it that is not listed that you have? It may be that someone here as the same thing and can point you to some config files or something to get you started. Most stuff just works. Even a winmodem can work, although not very well from what I have read.