First of all...Greetings! I've taken the plunge to ease out of the dreaded Microsoft Empire. Okay, I'm a serious newbie here and would appreciate any input. I set up my partitions and installed the first 2 disks of Slack 9.1.
It boots fine to root and I can cruise around, but when I try to edit my /etc inittab and change it from 3 to 4 (so I can boot to gnome or kde) the changes don't take when I reboot. Further more, when I take out disk 2 and reboot, it gives me a black screen with a white cursor in the upper left hand corner. When I put disk 2 back in and reboot, it seems to boot off the disk; although I can get back to root. The questions I have are:
1. Do I need to keep a cd in to run slack, and if not, what do I need to do?
2. How do I get the inittab changes to keep and is that all I need to get gnome to boot? (I edited inittab in vi and did a :wq)

Thanks in Advance
~thirsty_guy

Sounds odd. No, Slack does not need the CD in to boot - and that's also probably why you can't change the inittab settings. Have you installed either LILO or Grub as your boot loader on your Master Boot Record of your hard disk? It sounds to me like you haven't.

CD #2 in the Slack 9.1 distribution is a so called "Live CD" - a bootable Linux system on CD-ROM. Don't leave it in your drive. Remove it and then reboot.

Good luck!

Actually, I skipped the lilo install and don't recall anything on grub so I guess that must be the problem. Do you recommend lilo or grub? Once I install one of them, does that mean I can edit the inittab file and it will boot to gnome or is there more involved? Seriously, thanks for taking the time with a newb, I appreciate it.

~thirsty_guy

Ah, I see.
Well I'm using Lilo but Grub seems to be good too, especially if you have the need to boot between more than 2 different Operating systems.
Other than that I can't say that I recommend one more than the other.

There's probably a lot of people here with much better knowledge than me when it comes to this though. =)

I think what you were editing was the Live-cd's inittab, which disaapears as soon as you reboot. You will need to install a bootloader (GRUB or LILO) to boot the Slackware you installed on your hard drive, or you can use the first cd to boot it by entering certain options, which are shown when it boots. I don't think Slack comes with Grub, you will may have to use LILO. You can install LILO by booting with cd 1, entering appropriate boot options so it boots from your hard drive, then when you boot the hd Slack, run 'liloconfig'.

Stick CD 1 in the drive, if it gives you any time to type in commands before booting enter:The option to boot linux may start with an upper case L or may be called something different entirely (use whatever option it suggests). Substitute /dev/hda1 for whichever partition you had as your boot partition or root partition if you didn't create a dedicated boot partition.
That should get you in...once in try liloconfig or if that does nothing /sbin/lilo

I guess I skipped installing lilo because I was under the assumption that it was only needed if I had 2 operating systems on one hard drive. I've only got slack 9.1 on the box and I guess the next step is to install lilo. I appreciate all the help and I'll let ya know if it worked out.
Thanks
~thirsty_guy

Hot Damn. I got everything going smooth. Couldn't run liloconfig from anywhere and did a quick reinstall with lilo going to my mbr. I've been playing with the various GUI's. Bye Bye Billy Gates.
Thanks again for all the help
~thirsty_guy

Welcome to the world