[SOLVED] Is it possible to install Slackware64 by using the first installation CD?

Is it possible to boot the Slackware install CD no.1 (32 bit), but use the 64 bit packages via FTP and obtain a proper Slackware64 installation?

I need to do this with version 14.0 on an older system that does not have DVD drive, but a CD one. PXE boot doesn't work (although the network card is functional), and neither does booting from a USB stick written with the provided usbboot.img

You can't use a 32 bit installer on a CD to install a 64 bit Slackware, whatever be your packages source, because it will search packages series in slackware/, not slackware64/, thus won't find them.

If you can afford to burn one CD on your other box you could use the CD/USB ISO image for Slackware64-14.0 that you'll find here:
http://slint.fr/installers/
Instructions to burn the CD are there:
http://slint.fr/installer.html

PS it's a polyglot installer but don't worry, it speaks English

Originally Posted by Didier Spaier You can't use a 32 bit installer on a CD to install a 64 bit Slackware, whatever be your packages source, because it will search packages series in slackware/, not slackware64/, thus won't find them.

IIRC, if you do a network based install the installer asks specifically for the directory with the packages, so you will be able to install the 64 bit packages. The real problem is that you won't be able to install a bootloader, since this involves chrooting into the installed system. You can't chroot into a 64 bit system from a 32 bit system.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD IIRC, if you do a network based install the installer asks specifically for the directory with the packages

Yes.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD ,so you will be able to install the 64 bit packages.

No. The installer sets REMOTE_URL as the URL of the FTP/HTTP server and sets REMOTE_ROOT as the parent directory of the directory with the packages, then looks for the tagfile information this way:

# Make sure we can select stuff from the package series (in case of installer for 32 bits):
 dialog --title "INITIALIZING PACKAGE TREE" --infobox \
  "\nRetrieving tagfile information for the package tree ..." 5 65

 for series in $(ls -1 slackware) ; do
  wget -q -P ./slackware/$series $REMOTE_URL$REMOTE_ROOT/slackware/$series/tagfile
  wget -q -P ./slackware/$series $REMOTE_URL$REMOTE_ROOT/slackware/$series/maketag.ez
  wget -q -P ./slackware/$series $REMOTE_URL$REMOTE_ROOT/slackware/$series/maketag
 done

So as in case of a 64 bit source these files are in $REMOTE_URL$REMOTE_ROOT/slackware64/$series, wget will fail.

PS in 64 bit installer instead s/slackware/slackware64/, of course

Thanks for the clarification.

Thanks guys, I managed to install it in the end with Didier's slint.

Didn't even use a CD, but a USB stick. So I guess I was wrong and booting from USB works on this old machine after all.
Could there be a fault in the usbboot.img? I used the same stick and worked with slint flawlessly.
With Slackware's usbboot.img I was getting the following errors (attached image). I thought the stick was damaged, but it worked well with slint's iso. I also thought writing usbboot.img to the stick was somehow botched, so I did it twice on different machines. Any ideas?

Originally Posted by chicken76 Could there be a fault in the usbboot.img?

I used the usbboot.img from 14.1 yesterday to install one of my machines from scratch, for me it worked without any problems.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD I used the usbboot.img from 14.1 yesterday to install one of my machines from scratch, for me it worked without any problems.

Have you tried the one from 14.0 (64-bit) to see if it boots?

Will try that and report back soon.

EDIT: Works fine, too.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD Will try that and report back soon. EDIT: Works fine, too.

Darn it, what could I have done wrong?!

Thank you for your feedback.

I'm happy Slint hybrid installer worked. Looking at attachment to post #6, maybe despite EDD errors eventually USB stick was usable as what I see at the end is the greeting screen of the installer.

I don't think you did anything wrong and am not very surprised that ISOLINUX works flawlessly on some machine but not on others, this is pretty common as there are big differences between hardware and firmware (EFI or BIOS) from machine to machine as I can see following syslinux mailing list.

For the records USB boot images as usbboot.img are not that much necessary nowadays as an ISO image can easily be put on an USB key to make a bootable USB stick as well, just post-processing the image to make it hybrid using isohybrid. That's what we do with Slint installers. To be honest I got the idea reading Pat's README.TXT in isolinux/