I installed slackware 10.1 from CD's.
I played around with it for a few days.
It's amazing.
I have tried many distro's but I like this one the most and want to put in the effort and stick to this one.

Fresh from the install and reboot it only has a few minor issues.

I Have a DVDROM and a CDR/RW

1. My DVDROM is mounted as CDROM. I'm clueless how to fix it. Maybe I shouldn't. I can read from it, though I have problems with XINE freezing, but I had that problem with other distro's as well. I'm just ignorant but eager to learn.

2. My CDR/RW isn't mounted. I can open the tray by manually pushing the button but even if I put a CD in it and close the tray it still is not detected. I have hotplug activated in boot options but it still isn't detected.

Any ideas?

I want to updated everything including the new kernel but I will have to do that from cd's since I have the internet at work and not at home where I need it.

You think updating the kernel would work?

What do you mean?

What happens when you try mounting a disc in your CD-RW drive (you haven't said)?

nothing i don't see where i can mount it. I don't know how to mount it. I use kde and tried to create a link to it. It gives a scroll down menu to pick hardware to link to but my cdr/rw isn't listed. i tried in a terminl

mnt /dev/cdrom

&

mount /dev/cdrom

am I doing this right?

You're on the right track, but we need more info on your optical drives. Do

dmesg | grep "^hd"

and post the output here.

I will do that tonight when I get home. I'm at work right now.Is grep or dmesg a program to discover hardware or hardware settings? Would you advise me reading up on it? Thanks for replying so quickly. BTY I got my 3D acceleration working for my NVidia card. That was soooo easy with slack. Much easier than with SuSe. I really love slack

Again, Thanks for helping. I will let you know the results of

dmesg | grep "^hd"

tommorrow morning.

We just need to know which devices (/dev/hd*) your optical drives are attached to - which dmesg will tell us. It's possible that Slack has detected (and set up) your DVD-ROM drive, but not your CD-writer. To get your CD-writer working, we probably just need an appropriate line in your /etc/fstab. But before that, we need to know "where" the CD-writer is.

Last night I accidentaly rebooted with the SuSe installation DVD in my DVD drive and it screwed up Lilo. I will be formating my haddrive and doing a fresh install of slackware tonight.

Can I do anything during the instal to avoid having this problem with my drives?

Can I install the latest kernel during the install?

How could I install the latest kernel during install with out the internet and using a cd?

or should I just use the default kernal bare.i to install?

I have a Dell Dimension 8100
Pentium 4 @ 1.8 Ghz
DVDROM
CDR/RW
Nvidia GEForce MX2
TurtleBeach Santa Cruz (The Alsa driver installed during the install must be the wrong one beacause after the install I only got sound out of the right front speaker, I have a surround sound system 4.1)
USB Keyboard & Mouse (The wheel on the mouse doesn't work with slackware either, I need to configure that too)

Advice please

Doing a fresh install of slackware is a bit drastic and almost certainly unnecessary!

Can you still boot your PC into some version of Linux?

If not, do you have Slackware install CD handy?

If not, do you have some other kind of boot disk or Live CD handy?

At the Lilo screen it gives me the option to boot Linux. It only says Linux. When I prees [Enter] I get the erro "Kernel E!@# too big or something like that. I do have a slackware installation cd.

What you think?

I don't have anything to lose. I only configure the NVidia card and installed Doom3. I don't mind doing that again.

I think you should boot from the Slackware install CD. When the boot prompt appears, enter:

bare.i noinitrd ro root=/dev/hdXX

(replacing hdXX with whatever device your Slackware root filesystem is on, e.g. hda5). That will boot your Slackware system, whereupon you can reinstall lilo with

/sbin/lilo

Then remove the Slackware install CD, cross your fingers for luck, and reboot.

Thanks, in my case it would be

bare.i noinitrd ro root=/dev/hda1

I have only /hda1 Linux
/hda2 LinuxSwap

I will keep this lilo fix in my notes

Thanks

just suggestion about your cd issue-did you try mount data or audio cd?

audio cd-s do not need mounting. nor cant be mounted.

about slack lost just boot up with slacks installcd, start setup-choose reconfigure system and reinstall lilo with correct values.no need for slack reinstall

I have these problems with slack

1. DVDROM shown in kde as CDROM.
2. CDR/RW not listed in kde at all (with or without disc inserted)
3. Wheel on USB wheel mouse not working
4. Need to instal or configure the right ALSA driver for my "TurtleBeach" "SantCruz" sound card because I only get sound from my right-front channel in a 4.1 surround sound system.

I want to use the latest kernel 2.6.8.11

Which of the following is the smartest & fastest way to go about it?

1. Wait for a new realease of Slackware with this kernel as default. (Could be a while for the sake of stability)

2. Try a fresh install with the new kernel. (I wouldn't know where to start)

3. Work out the bugs first, then worry about upgrading to a new kernel. (I'm guessing this is the way to go, then again, I don't know enough to know I don't know)

What do you think? As for my experience level

Installing Slackware was the easist so far (Maybe cause I screwed up)
My biggest acomplishment was enabling 3-D acceleration for my NVidia card.

You're getting yourself in a muddle between "installing" and "configuring." Slackware has an excellent installation program - it gets Slackware onto your hard drive, and that's it. Configuring it is up to you.

1 & 2) Slackware does not create entries for your drives in /etc/fstab, nor does it create mount points in /mnt. If you want these, you must create the directories in /mnt and add the appropriate lines to /etc/fstab. (By default, it has an entry for /mnt/cdrom, and usually maps this to the first optical drive it finds.)

3) How to set up a wheel mouse

4) As root, try running alsaconf.

I recommend you figure out your problems first before you start mucking about with new kernels or new versions of Slack. Nothing you've specified in your problems will, or is ever likely to be, "cured" in the next Slackware.