Slack installation
 

OK...I rawrote bare.i, install.1, and install.2 to floppies. I burned the slackware 9.0 iso to a CD (as an image, not as a plain ol' data CD).

Now, do I have to burn the packages to CDs as they are, with each package in a separate folder, or should I just burn the contents of all of them willy nilly?

after running the 3 floppies you must insert you slack iso and intallation will begin as if it booted from the cd ( i asume your board can't boot from cdrom)

Uh...I believe I can, but I made the floppies before I knew how to burn an iso to a disk. My question was actually about how to burn the packages, tho.

(edit): or are the packages included in the iso?

you don't burn the pkg, you burn the iso wich contains the pkg, boot the cd and during installation pkgs will be installed

Ah, just the information I was looking for. Thank you.

Use your floppies if you end up not being able to boot from your CD though... I couldn't boot from CD, so those floppies came in *very* handy.

Good luck... and welcome to Slackland!

:)

-zsejk

Once you go Slack, you never go back:p

LOL

So many nastily funny implications in that, so little space to put them.

:D

-zsejk

Yeah...I couldn't boot from the CD, so I used the floppies and I had the following problem: It recognized that I had the pkges on CD, but during the install of the pkges, it said "Input/Output error" or something like that. It was like Cat: Error: Input/Output or something. I'm pretty sure I did the burning of the CD right. When I run e: (my CD-RW drive) it gives me a bunch of files and dirs, instead of slackware-9-install.iso or whatever. Suggestions?

No, it *should* have files and directories. Mine has like a bunch of files, then a isolinux directory, a kernels directory, and a slackware directory. The latter then has a bunch of directories in it: a, ap, d, e, f, etc. If you have that too, there's no reason for it not to work. Did you download it from one of the mirrors mentioned on the Slackware site? Maybe you have a corrupt ISO image, I don't know.

:(

I know the following .iso image is a good one (it's the one I used), so if you *are* thinking of downloading a new ISO image (might not be necessary, but in case you are going to anyway), try the following link:

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.sla....0-install.iso

Something that is definitely worth reading (in case you haven't already) is the Slackware Essentials book (which is online at http://www.slackware.com/book/).

-zsejk

An ISO file is what we'd might commonly call an image file. It's not an image in the picture sense, but it's more like a "snapshot" of everything on a given CD, thrown into one file. It's roughly analogous to a ZIP file where you threw everything together, and then extracted it onto a CD when you burn it. So, you should be seeing files and directories on your Slackware CD - not one big ISO file. ^_^

One thing you might want to look into, well, two things...

- Is the ISO image you downloaded good? This is why Slackware comes with a file for an MD5 checksum. An MD5 checksum is a big alphanumeric string that is like a fingerprint for a file. If you search on Google, you'll find an MD5 checksum program for Windows or whatever your current OS is rather easily. Have it inspect the ISO you downloaded and make sure the MD5 signatures match. Stranger things have happened and downloads can get corrupted. Once, when I had some Mandrake CDs, the installation would halt midway through do to a similar error. The file sizes were exactly the same as the ones on the FTP site - but when I did MD5 checksums on them, they were very different files. And note that the Mandrake ISO burned properly and that the installation program actually did install a few programs before dying. Hence, you should always do an MD5 checksum on your downloaded Linux ISO files.

- Most modern computers have a way of booting from the CD, but it's not always enabled by default. When you turn your computer on, do you see anything about system configuration or BIOS? Usually it's mapped to a function key like F2. If you go into there, see if you can find anything about booting from CD - maybe under "boot sequence" or "boot order" - some words to that effect. I don't guarantee you'll find one, but it doesn't hurt to look. ^_^

Could you be a little more specific about the "cat" error you're seeing? Is there anything more than "Input/Output error"? What kind of Slack installation are you trying to do (full, newbie, etc?) and precisely how far is Slack getting before it starts giving you this error? Does it crash or just it keep jamming its head against the cat wall?

I would agree with zsejk and Kyouryuu, you should definitely check the md5sum of your iso. Though I would recommend using Tom's root/boot rather than a windows-based md5 program (if you don't already have some linux distro). It's a great little rescue disk, which is always a good thing to have anyway. Google for it.

If your iso image is good, then you might try copying the slackware directory from the cd to your hard drive before starting setup; then during setup, set that directory as the source. I've had problems in the past when installing directly from the cd and this usually helps.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

I realize that it's supposed to have the files and dirs. That's how I know that I burned it correctly. what's an md5 program? I downloaded one from like ftp.slackware.com once and it was just text.

My computer is able to boot from a CD. I know this because I have already installed CollegeLinux and Redhat from a CD previously, so that's not it. My only guess is that the iso was messed up somehow.

About the error I received...I really don't remember what it said exactly, but I know I was doing a full install. I'll check if the iso that zsejk gave me doesn't work.

Ah, I read about the md5 thing, and I think I understand it. I'll give that a try as well.

Short story: It worked.

Long story: I tried installing several times before getting x and lilo to work. At first I'd just written off LILO as not gonna work, but it turned out that when I'd been rebooting I had the CD in, and it was mysteriously suddenly able to boot from the CD. LILO worked completely after removing the CD, and I've only experienced two problems so far:

A: The modem doesn't work. (I'm writing this on XP)
B: The wheel on my mouse doesn't work.

Any help with either problem would be very nice.
Thank you all very much for being patient with me and for your help.