howdee,

i hadnt found this forum until just now, but i thought id
post a note about my experience installing slack9 using
the bpck6.o driver thru parport on an old laptop. since
the laptop did not have any cdrom, usb, or eth-ports;
i chose to do a parallel port cdrom install rather than try
to get a pcmcia-network card working.

in hindsight (and with another more powerful computer)
everything seems easy, but heres the main link:
http://www.angelfire.com/ca6/hfelton...75t/index.html

in particular, on page3 theres a quickie modules.zip-file
that i used on a fourth floppy to actually get it all working.
the instructions are kinda stream-o-consciousness...

basically, it took bare.i, install.1, install.2, and this modules.zip
to make a bootable parport cdrom drive so that i could do
the basic install for slack9. the reason parport.i couldnt be
used is that bpck.o was compiled into the kernel and i had
a newer backpack-cdrw that needed the bpck6.o drivers.

im not sure, but it seems like (since there are 2 root disks)
it should be easy to add most of the loadable modules that
anyone could reasonably want instead of the roundabout
way i had to use. is there some reason NOT to add the modules
into the install.1/.2 root disks?

otoh, i never was able to get modprobe to do anything while
booting from the floppies - so maybe i missed something obvious.

good luck, h.