I love everything about slackware, but it won't install on my laptop. I can start the installer, but my keyboard won't work. It's not the first distro I've had do this, debian and redhat also don't work. However, I've used debian-based live cd's that do (overclockix and Mepis [i think deb based]). Suse and arch have installed with little problem. I like the nature of slackware, there are no kernel hacks, no fancy upgrade programs that will crash if you've installed other software outside of recomended repositories. It's totally your system. Arch is pretty cool, but it's a little too deep for me. Although if I can't find anything else, I'm going to dive in with pacman and get things working a little at a time.

Info if you need it
Medion , I think 2900
p42.4mobile
512 ram
dvd-r/cdrw
creatix wireless-b

ps, i think that the asus/medion extras in the kernel would apply to my laptop. can anyone confirm?

Stick with Arch - everything you like about Slackware goes true for Arch as well, plus it has decent package manager! It's a top distro.

have you tried vector linux??? Its based off slack

Actually, it was a newbie mistake. I was booting bare.i off of the cd. It seemed reasonable enough to me, because you're not installing the bare kernel, just using it to install everything.

So, a new question... Why do you need the acpi enabled kernel to see the keyboard?