This is going to be my first installation of Slackware. I have had success with installing Ubuntu (several flavors), Suse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS. But they all hold your hand and are pretty straight forward.

I am not afraid of partitioning my hard disk myself. The problem is that I cannot even get that far. I have 3 hard disks. The first has Ubuntu Hardy Heron installed with several desktop environments. I don't want to touch that installation. My third Hard drive is an external 750 Gig USB My Book that no longer has the My Book software or label anymore. I am using that for storage so I don't want to touch that either. My second drive which I want to install is a Sata 200 Gig that is currently formatted NTFS. I tried to partition that drive by:

Slackware said it could not find this drive. Needless to say I didn't get very far.

As far as packages:
I need something for a digital photo album
Something to play tunes.
Something to rip tunes to my hard drive, which is formatted NTFS.
Something to play DVD's with.
An Office application

and not much else beyond that.


I just tried to install again only this time I typed 'sdb' and I got a fatal error: cannot open disk drive.

My sound card is on board sound. But I also have a Creative Soundblaster Xfi Extreme gamer card installed but have had virtually no luck getting it to work in any Linux distro. I believe my onboard is AC 97.

My video card is an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe.

My internet is through Comcast. My modem is a Touchtone Telephony cable with a Linksys WRT wireless router attached.

I don't know what else to tell you about my system that any of you could lend a hand with. Obviously first I have to overcome the partitioning hurdle, and then providing I get a successful install having GRUB see this installation. I have heard a lot of good things about Slackware and all of those things are the very reason, I want to obtain a successful installation of Slackware.

I think that you should use the command:

cfdisk /dev/sdb

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Steve Stites

I did. It got me
I have Acronis Disk Director, I could repartition that drive before Slackware even gets a look at it, but I would rather learn to do it from the Slackware distro DVD that I downloaded and burned yesterday.

I managed to get Slackware installed, but I have a problem still. I did not set up Lilo because I have GRUB installed with my Ubuntu installation. I need to know how to edit GRUB so that it will boot Slackware.

I dunno if this command is available during the install process but try 'blkid' as root. That may give you some info. Or you can try 'lsscsi' if they are SATA drives they should show up.

Try this as root. That may show you some of your disks, partitions. H_TeXMeX_H's command will yield good information as well.

# fdisk -l

I took that distro quiz you have linked. Here are my results:

I am quite surprised. I would have thought Debian and Slackware would have made that list as well. I think that the only problem I have with Debian is that I haven't been able to get KDE installed and my video card installed. All of the other distros hold your hand unlike Slackware and Debian. The learning curve isn't quite as high and I most of the time enjoy a high learning curve so long as the frustration level isn't just as high. Slackware is beginning to frustrate me, but along with that comes the desire to conquer it.

I managed to get Slackware installed but will need to do another install. I also have Ubuntu installed and I want to have Slackware show up in GRUB or else have Ubuntu show up in Lilo. I have not had any success with either and I have tried I think most of the options that I can think of.
I was able to partition prior to installation, but perhaps choosing whether logical, primary, etc. partitions may have had a factor on the install and the booting. Just a guess, because I still call myself a newbie.

Use at least two primary partitions (swap, root).
Did you remember to set your root partition as bootable when using cfdisk? Set your swap partition to type 82 (linux swap).

Set the sata up an ide. use slackware to partition.

Head to slackbuild.org. Download the build script for digikam or gwenview.

Amarok and audacious are part of the stock Slackware.

Head to slackbuild.org for many packages to help with ripping.

Xine is part of the stock Slackware.

KOffice is the only office suite in the stock Slackware. OpenOffice and other packages are available at slackbuild.org.

All you need do is edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add a new entry. Important to remember with GRUB is that disks and partitions start numbering with zero and not one. Perhaps the following might help:

Installing GRUB

I've done just about everything that you all have listed, including partitioning my disk before installing and still cannot boot into Slackware. I tried installing Lilo on both the MBR and the Root partition. Neither worked. Even tried installing Slackware by itself with no other OS. The only thing that I can think of trying is installing a copy of Windows XP first, but I really don't want to do that.

Finally ended up installing Kubuntu, just so that I could have a system to work with tonight when I got off work.

I am not giving up with Slackware, but I don't really know what to do now. One thing that might help would be to know whether I should make the partitions logical, primary, active? What I did was make the Swap partition logical, and the Root partition primary. Or does this matter?

How long should it take Lilo to finish? It seems that it hung up forever on my machine.

Tried that. It didn't work, that is why I tried to install Slackware on a completely blank system except for data on my 3rd Hard drive.

When you partition your drive make two primary and then change one to swap.