Hi all,

I'm new to Linux, but an old hand with computers. I'd been playing with Ubuntu 6.06 for the past five months or so, but decided to wipe it off my machine and start over.

(I had some disk errors that I think were caused by the graphical installer. I couldn't seem to fix them. Other people reported the same errors in the Ubuntu forums, and a real solution never seemed to emerge from the discussions. Fsck didn't fix the problem. :-( Bummer.)

Otherwise, my Ubuntu experience was pretty good, but I didn't feel like I was learning a lot about Linux. So I started looking around at other distributions. I've downloaded, printed out, and read the Slackbook, and Slackware looks pretty good.

My question: the Slackbook is about a year or so old and predates Slackware 11. If I follow the directions in the book, will they still be valid for the newer version?

Thanks in advance.

-Drew

in most of the cases, they're still valid, because Slackware's changes aren't that radical

I think the biggest changes is some package inclusion and udev (because of the kernel development also). The rest is about the same with the previos version

Thanks!

I downloaded the first ISO last night. Only 4 more to go. :-)

Regards,

-Drew

I agree with willysr and as you can see here, they are still selling the same slackbook edition with the 11.0 release

Hi,

The slackbook should be a helpful guide. Sure, something like udev and some other 2.6 kernel specific conditions won't be included. The basics will be valid and helpful.

I'm curious about the disk errors that you say occurred. Can you be more specific? You say fsck could not repair. By chance could you move the data and reformat? The sectors or blocks marked bad? What about ranish tools?

Off to google! Curiosity didn't really kill the cat!

Note that the last few CD's contain the source code which usually isn't necessary.

Maybe I should start a new thread on this, if so, let me know.

Here's the story in brief:

Computer:
HP Pavillion, Pentium III 800, 328 MB RAM, I bought it in August of 2000.

It came with a 30 GB hard drive that is still working perfectly. I ran Windows ME on it for five years without trouble (I know that's odd, but it's true), and then upgraded to XP Home Edition this time last year. Still no problems.

A few months ago I bought a second 120 GB, made it the slave, and partitioned it into three 40 GB partitions.

Then I installed Ubuntu 5.04. I reformatted and repartitioned the last 40 GB of the new drive into three Ext3 partitons: one for root (/), one for Home, and one for Tmp (which is what I thought was a swap partition).

Ubuntu installed easily and worked well...until I tried to upgrade.

To make a long story short, I decided to download the Ubuntu 6.06 disk and install from scratch. I used the graphical installer to reformat the three Linux partitions without changing their sizes. This time, the installer wouldn't let me specify the swap partition be formatted as ext3 because I wanted it to be a swap partition -- having learned that /tmp was not the same as swap.

Every time I booted after that, I got two error messages. One stated that there was a difference between the boot sector and its backup. The second stated that the disk had a number of sectors, but only space for a slightly lower number of sectors.

Ubuntu 6.06 ran just fine, but the errors bothered me.

I ran fsck, and got the same errors, but my attempts to make the backup boot sector match the original did not stay permanent. As for the clusters not matching, fsch gave me an error that it couldn't fix that problem.

At this point, after a lot of research I can see how I probably botched the partitioning while installing Ubuntu 6.06. So I completely reformatted and repartitioned the second hard drive, and used the Windows XP install disk to get GRUB out of my MBR on the first disk. My computer is Linuxless once again. And I have three 40 GB FAT32 partitions on the 2nd hard drive.

I thought I would reinstall Ubuntu 6.06, but I noticed during that process that I couldn't reformat and partition the final 40 GB of the disk. There may be a way to do it, but I couldn't find it. I did find out about an alternate install disk for older hardware that uses the text-based installer from previous versions. I thought I could give that a try, but then decided to take this opportunity to try Slackware.

My plan this time is to use GParted to make the Linux partitions first. Then I'll install Slackware.

One issue that I'm wondering about is my video. I have an on-board Intel 82810 graphics chip. I found Intel's support page with a Linux "driver," but it's an RMP package, so I'm not sure I'll be able to use it. I'm also not sure I'll need it. Ubuntu ran pretty well without.

Regards,

-Drew

Thanks for the tip. That should cut down on my download time. At least I've got DSL and not dial-up.

Regards,

-Drew