Hello,

I'm normally a Ubuntu user, but since I got a new laptop I've been unable to use it for some reason, and so have decided to move to Slackware after using Slax for a while. So anyway, rather then risk messing my new laptop up, I decided to use Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 instead to test. I downloaded the DVD version and burnt it to a DVD and kept the ISO as well instead. First I tried to install it from the DVD with Virtual PC, but it always crashed during boot, at a different part each time. I tried to use acpi=off and apci=off, but it still failed to boot. Instead I tried capturing the ISO. This did the same, except apci=off worked and it now boots up. I've set the partitions up and ready to install. However, a new problem has arisen.

Basically every time I try to install it, it crashes randomly around the area when it installs recommended components like "koffice".

Any ideas on why this happens?

Edit: NVM, it seems to be installed ok now, thanks anyway. For anyone with the same problem, to make it work I had to choose not to install dev tools. No idea why.

Sounds like your ISO image was corrupted during download.
Did you check the validity of it's MD5SUM and/or the gpg signature?

Eric

No actually I didn't, come to think of it :S Virtual PC has been messing with most distro's I've attempted to use so I have decided to simply go with VMware Player and download ready built virtual machines to use. This has worked fine for me so I'm going to stick with this.

Thanks for the help.

I had the same sort of problem installing gentoo, I did finally get it to work for slackware, I think (if I remember correctly) I had to use "huge.s" kernel to get things to boot correctly

hope this helps
Michael

I don't recommend using Microsoft Virtual PC with Slackware 12.0. I got it working, but VirtualBox works much better.

Here are the issues that I had with running Slackware 12.0 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.

• In order for the mouse to work I had to add the boot parameter "i8042.noloop"
• S3 driver for X-Windows won't load (requires 5 updated files to fix)
• Vesa X-Windows driver works, but no text in tty windows after running X
• Soundblaster audio device for Virtual PC doesn't work (hangs KDE).
• Microsoft virtual machine additions for Linux doesn't work with Slackware

I didn't have any of these problems with VirtualBox and was able to use Slackware 12.0 without any updates. The virtual machine additions work and the mouse integration, clipboard and sound all work fine.

If you want to know the files that I had to update to get X-Windows fully working with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, here they are. I downloded them from the Slackware site.

xf86-video-s3-0.5.0-i486-2.tgz
pixman-0.9.6-i486-1.tgz
xf86-input-keyboard-1.2.2-i486-1.tgz
xf86-input-mouse-1.2.3-i486-1.tgz
xorg-server-1.4.0.90-i486-1.tgz

I also found that using the Vesa Framebuffer driver in the kernel works the best to get framebuffer support. Use the S3 driver for X-Windows after updating X-Windows.

So, the only thing that I haven't found a solution for is the sound. I couldn't get sound to work with Slackware 12.0 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.

I just loaded Slackware 12.1 into a virtual PC 2007 virtual and had better results than Erik_FL.

Video works (KDE started first time at 1024x768)
Mouse works without issue

I have no sound, but haven't tried fixing that as yet.

I haven't tried Slackware 12.1 but I have switched to VirtualBox since Microsoft Virtual PC will not run on Vista Home nor Vista Home Premium operating systems.

It will be a while before I can try 12.1 because of the difficulty in upgrading my existing hacked up copy that supports Promise RAID.

Installing Slackware 12.1 in a Virtual PC 2007 is easy
but there are a trouble to solve.

After running X11, with "startx" or with "init 4", You
could discover that the "text mode" does not continue to
work when you stop X11 or when you use "CTRL F?" to
change display (The display become black).

I found it is because of the vga mode running the kernel :
"vga=773" in /etc/lilo.conf. If you change in "vga=0"
(do not forget to run "lilo" and reboot after change)
you have a display trouble when the slackware run at
start "/etc/rc.d/rc.udev start".
(REM: this choose could be done during the installation
when configuring lilo)

To solve this trouble, You could "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.udev"
But than the mouse do not work because the module is not
loaded and you must run "modprobe psmouse" before running
X11.

The trouble come from loading by udev of the module "s3fb".
A best way de solve the trouble is to avoid udev to load
this module. That can be done by adding in the file
"/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist" the line "blacklist s3fb".
Than X11 display and text display work !

I had the same problem and rebuilt the kernel without s3 framebuffer support.

I've never been able to get audio to work with Virtual PC 2007 and Slackware. Also, when I press keys they tend to repeat depending on how busy the rest of the computer is. That gets quite annoying. Virtual PC 2007 just doesn't work very well with Linux.

I switched to VirtualBox because it supports mouse integration and audio with no problems plus it allows USB devices to be accessed. The 1.5.6 version of VirtualBox is the best so far. The newest 1.6 version has more problems so if you want to try VirtualBox use version 1.5.6. I hope the problems in 1.6 are corrected because I like VirtualBox much better than Virtual PC. Also VirtualBox runs the guest OS much faster. Since VirtualBox also runs on Linux as the host OS it made more sense to stick with on VM package that I can use for everything.

Virtual PC 2007 is mostly useful for running older, non NT Windows operating systems like Windows 95, 98 and ME since VirtualBox doesn't support mouse integration and other guest OS extensions for those.

Veneur, thanks for the tip on the text mode change. I had noticed that today and was looking for a fix.

I still have no sound. Using the MS docs, I tried using modprobe to load snd_sb16. It loads, but it starts eating too much cpu and I still don't get sound. KDE reports cpu overload. I suspect a paramter mismatch, but don't know as yet.