linux swap question
 

mmmkay. i have been struggling all day with trying to install either slackware 8.1 or 9. for some reason, when i boot with a bare.i floppy, and it starts to load vmlinuz, it comes up with an 'in idle error'. that's bad, mmkay?!? the thought occurs to me that it may be as a result of the fact that i hadn't set up a linux swap partition. hopefully this is so. my question is: should this be a logical partition, and should i put it before the primary ext2 partition? i had previously been trying to set up a dual boot w/ win98. then i gave zipslack a try. now i am just taking the plunge. i will NOT be reduced to putting windows back on that machine!!!!!

I don't know about the specific error message. You do need a swap partition but Linux should try to run even without it - at least, my install created it but didn't mount it and it ran well enough for me to edit fstab myself. My partition is primary and you might as well do that unless you can't for whatever reason. And I don't believe it matters where it is. All that being said, it sounds like you've got some other sort of problem in addition to the swap partition. First thing is always to check is the floppy itself, of course - get a good download?, make the floppy right?, etc. Maybe somebody else knows about the error message, though.

I think the download was good. I made the floppies by first doing a full format on each, then using RAWrite. When bare.i boots the machine intially, and I get the 'DONT CHANGE DISKS YET...' message, and then the boot prompt, i have tried just hitting return, and also typing 'ramdisk', to mostly the same end: the in-idle error, and once, it started spewing a bunch of numbered nonsense which I assumed (heheh) was the kernel loading itself, then it rebooted, and came up with the same 'don't change dsks yet' and boot:. Is there some syntax I am missing??
Either way, thank you for taking the time to read and reply bro...very:cool:
the naughtster

Hm. Not a slack user myself - the swap issue was what caught my eye. I'm also out of my depth with the error and installing slack in general - maybe you could try the bareapm.i disk - depending on what the idle issue means. Or try one of the others, anyway.

Hey, no problem - giving and getting help is what we're here for. :)

Not necessarly, it depends on how much ram you've got. I'm running Mandrake 9.1 now without a swap. Granted I have 512 mb but still it is not always necessary though recommened it you don't have much memory.