Hi guys,
I have a question for you.

I have been using slackware for the past 4-5 years. I have recently bought a dell vostro 1000 laptop, and I want to install Slackware on it.

The problem is that Slackware 12 doesn't recognize the dual core AMD Turion processor the laptop includes, and when I try the SMP kernel (generic or hugesmp) it just crashed at boot time.

Then I tried the non-smp kernel and got Slackware working, except for one detail: instead of having a dual-core processor, Slackware was recognizing a single-core, 2GHz "athlon64" processor.

So I installed OpenSuSE 10.3, but I really don't like it... I have a feeling of "don't mess with the system" I never had with Slackware, and I hate the need of installing like 10 packages whenever I want to install just one, or all the time YaST spends updating repositories.

So, to the point: I want to know if any of you has any experience with this laptop and the newly released Slack 12.1
I'm downloading the DVD and I want to try it. I know certain stuff will not work (like, I won't be having a graphic tool to manage the wireless connections out-of-the-box) but at least I'll have (again) a rock-solid system :-)

AMD processors will almost definitely work just fine with Slackware 12.1 (AND 12.0). It is likely that there was another problem with your setup or possibly user error. If you try 12.1, you should run the installer with the huge-smp kernel (the default) and then switch to the generic-smp kernel afterward. It should be noted that the generic-smp kernel requires an initrd (initial ramdisk) -- instructions for creating one are located in /boot/README.initrd after installation. If you have any problems with 12.1, post everything (ie any errors, what you did, what is happening, etc.). Your laptop *should* work with Slackware 12.1 (though I'm not speaking from experience).

Hello, I don't have that laptop, but I do have a Toshiba with a AMD64 Dual Core T57, 1900GHz, and I installed Slack with the 2.6.24.5 huge-smp kernel, and installation went flawlessly. I read in the Slack Docs that dual core processors need the smp kernel in order to recognize the two processors, and I found that to be true (tried the non-smp kernel first.) It may be some other part of your hardware system crashing the boot process with the smp kernel.

I know there are many experts here who will help.

Bob

Thank you guys for your comments,
I finished downloading Slack 12.1 and it seems to be working just fine with my machine.

As soon as I finish the download of GNOMESlackBuild (just to have networkmanager and the wireless network working as soon as the system is installed) I will install Slack 12.1 in this system.

Luckily I'll have it running and completely set up in 3-4 hours :-)


Regards.