Going to give Slackware a try, hopefully it all works out the way I want.
 

I am using Fedora right now. I have no complaints at all. But for awhile now I have been wanting to give Slackware a try. The only thing that held me back was no easy way to set up luks and lvm on install, yeah I get lazy now and then. So today I decided why not give it a try. I have Fedora and Windows installed already, if it doesn't work I still have them. I had to write these instructions by hand, no working printer at the moment, from this http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/slackw...ADME_CRYPT.TXT From the luks and lvm down to the end of the chroot and lilo configuration. I wanted to make sure I had it all infront of me just incase. I have been using computers for awhile now and more times than not something always pops up that wasn't expected or I forget a simple small thing and poof, have to start over.

I decided to unhook all my hard drives except the one I am using for Slackware. Less headaches and potential for me to make a mistake and erase something that would just annoy me.

If all goes well I will be back here. It might take a little while. I am currently downloading the dvd iso with Ktorrent. Looked like the mirros are over worked and slow and I didn't really want to add to the stress they are under.

I usually install Slackware like this:

1. Click enter to boot with default options
2. Login as root w/o password.
3. Run cfdisk (MBR) or cgdisk (GPT) to create partitions and assign swap it's space.
4. Run pcmcia to bring up any hardware that might need detecting.
5. Run network to make sure my network device has a driver loaded.
6. Run setup and start from Add Swap step and perform a full install with a single /(root) EXT4 partitioned file system.
7. Restart and use the disk to rescue boot.
8. Configure grub2 and install it to my hard disk MBR.

Well everything went fast and easy. Very easy. The only problem I had was after I rebooted and it got me to the passphrase stage it would not recognize any usb keyboards. So I hooked up ps/2 keyboard and entered the passphrase. After everything loaded my USB Keyboards work. Hopefully they will work when I reboot. If not I will research it and figure out why.

All I did so far was create a user account, hoping I remembered all the correct groups since it has been awhile, and came here to make this post. I am very happy that all went so well. And KDE seems to work faster with Slackware than with other distro's I have used. Not sure why but I am liking that.

I installed Slackware 14.1 x86_64 and the full DvD.

FYI, to select the correct groups for desktop use just push the UP arrow when asked by adduser (like below)
if I want to add myself to them later (because, for example, I forgot to do the above), I just use gpasswd here

Thanks for the tips. I had used Kuser to create the new user. All went well except... I changed the run level to 4. That way kdm would just start and I wouldn't need to take the few extra seconds to log in with startx, like I said I can be lazy. Anyways I tried to log in with the new user and I kept getting an error. Well I had forgotten to choose my default shell. So I kept getting the error that my login shell was not listed in /etc/shells. Took me a few minutes to figure that out. All works well now.

Other than that I am going to take my time and check out Slackware. It is more involved and a lot more at the command line. That is fine. I always updated Fedora or Debian from the command line anyways. I just hope I don't forget NOT to type in yum or aptitude instead of slackpkg. I know I will more than once, lol.

Hi

I assume you created an initrd for the LUKS support. That initrd must have the USB support modules included or else a USB keyboard will not be functional when you have to type in your passphrase.
Do you remember the exact mkinitrd command you used to create the initrd.gz?

Check out this topic, too: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-a-4175484332/

Cheers, Eric

Next time, use virtual terminals and 'less' to open any documents you need to read along the way.

Thanks for the link.

Yes. I had it all written down. At least I think this is what your talking about.

I am also having issuses with slackpkg. I have one mirror, under the current 64, checked. I installed slackpkg+ with ease. However the only one that gives any results in searches is slackpkg+. I have vlc installed but if I search for example dolphin, nothing comes up. It will show me what is installed though. I am very new to Slackware so I probably forgot something or overlooked something. I will search soon to see what I can find.

Ok. I have to reinstall Slackware. Don't ask. Live and learn.

Ok. I installed it again. Same as before. It went smoothly and works fine except for the usb keyboard. I thought I corrected that with this install, but I didn't. With the link above I know where to start now. This install I kept all the hard drives plugged in. So lilo added Windows and I am curious to see if it boots. I am not worried if it doesn't. I have lilo installed to the mbr on sdb while Windows is installed on sda and Fedora's grub on the sdc mbr. I am going to have to take my time with all of it. I am new to Slackware and I have a lot to get use to and learn.


Edit: slackpkg. I understand it now. After I add some more repos I am going to focus on the usb keyboard issue.

dont uncomment more than one mirror for slackpkg. :)

There is absolutely no reason to reinstall whole system to fix it.
If you use LUKS and have USB keyboard, you must provide keyboard drivers available during password prompt. If you use huge kernel it may be not issues(because huge kernel have build-in USB drivers), but if generic one - you definitely MUST load additional kernel modules-drivers, main USB stack. So modify your mkinitrd parameter -m to somethink like -m ext4:usbhid:uhci-hcd . That why Eric asked you "exact mkinitrd command".
See README_CRYPT.TXT paragraph "USB keyboards and LUKS"

PS: If you use /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh command, you probably could avoid this issue, since recent version of(included in 14.1) now detects if USB keyboard attached, and generates proper -m parameter value. (But you still can and must analyse it and fix if needed).

You don't know what I did that made me decided to reinstall, do you ;-) I will say that it had nothing to do with the usb keyboard or slackpkg. Enough said on that.

Ok. Got it now. I need to add this to my notebook (the paper kind) so if I ever have to reinstall I will know what is what this time. As far as slackpkg went. I just didn't understand how that worked until I was able to find information about it through a search. Now I get that the Slackware repos are very small and I need something like sbopkg or getting packages from slackbuilds.org. Now that I know that it is not an issue.

Thank you for the information on the usb keyboard.

That is a good idea but I wanted to have a physical copy on hand. Plus writing it down helped me learn all of this better.

Edit: Just ran /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and rebooted. USB Keyboard works perfectly.

you have to wait a little until the SBo repository will be ready for 14.1: work is in progress and happens on the git master branch.
if you want to help testing or use what's ready, you can set that with sbopkg: consider that ATM more than half of the repository has been checked and stuff still needs to be done.

Oh. I didn't even look when I downloaded it. I have dual monitors and had a few things open. That explains why somethings where not installing correctly. I am in Fedora right now but when I boot back into Slackware I will do that and help with the testing. I think it is safe to say if anything goes bad I will just reinstall, that really should be my new signature ;-) lol. Thanks for the heads up.