First off, I am a linux noob, and know only the bare essentials. I have been trying to install Slackware 11 on my Toshiba Satellite M55. Actually, the installation goes fine, but when I try to boot normally using the default, or any kernel, the system hangs up when the hotplug script is started. This makes little sense to me, beacuse I previously installed Slackware 11 on this laptop, initially just to play around with it, and hotplug took a while to find things, but it did work. There have been no hardware changes made. Anyway, now I want to actually start using linux. For starters, I want to get my Intel/Pro wireless adapter working. I have read that for this driver, you need to run a 2.6 kernel, and of course the default for Slack is a 2.4. When I tried to use the huge26.s kernel that comes with slack, I got some error message during boot something like "kernel panic: could not mount root fs". At one point, I also downloaded the latest stable 2.6, and managed to get it onto my laptop, only to get an error message while it was compiling: something like "such and such directory does not exist". I have tried installing several times now and I just can't figure this out.

So I have a couple of questions:

What is the deal with hotlplug?
How do I get my wireless internet to work? and
should i just try a different distro....?


I know Slackware is a difficult distro to deal with, but I really feel like I was learning a lot when I had it running; I don't want to give up on this distro just yet. Please help, I really want to get this working!

I wrote this a little rushed, please ask for additional information if you need it. Thanks in advance.

If you get a kernel panic from huge26.s when trying to mount your root filesystem then you need to create an initrd and add the path to it in your bootloader. huge26.s isn't.

All the instructions are in /usr/doc/mkinitrd-1.0.1/README.initrd (which you can also find symlinked from /boot/README.initrd) This is a 5 minute deal.

Hotplug was replaced by udev (and more) in 2.6 kernels. So I would say first try configuring your system to use the 2.6.17.13 (huge26.s) kernel and then see what happens.

BTW this thread should be moved to the Slackware forum. You will surely receive all the help you need there.