Keyboard Problems With Slack Installer
 

Yesterday I bought a new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 with i5 processor. I immediately wiped Windows and attempted to install Slackware64 14.2 but after the installer image boots the keyboard isn't properly mapped and I can't get past the first prompt which ironically is just hitting enter to accept US keyboard. Enter key produces a letter a as I recall.

If I change the BIOS settings to allow for legacy boot and select to boot the image in legacy mode the keyboard works fine, so it has some keyboard mapping issue with UEFI. I prefer to stick with UEFI but am stumped as to how to get the keyboard properly mapped.

Any help would be appreciated.

I'm currently running Fedora on the machine as it installed with no issues at all, but would very much prefer to run Slack.

Nice laptop! As it is a new laptop I suggest that installing Slackware64-current will make it easier to identify and configure your hardware. Slackware 14.2 is almost 3 years old.

Download Slackware64-current

Thanks, I suspected that might be the issue. I prefer running stable vs current but that might be the only solution.

You'll likely find -current more stable than you expect. I've been running it for about three months now and it's been rock solid so far.

Just be sure to check the changelog before doing any updates. As an example, I waited a while before applying the BOOST package update since I read it would cause problems with Libre Office. After Eric updated Libre Office I applied the boost update. If I hadn't checked the changelog and just blindly installed it, there's a chance my Libre Office would have broken.

You can update -current once a day, week, month, whatever you want, depending on whether you want new packages and are bug-hunting or if you prefer stability.

Thanks, I've run current in the past. My issue is with some SBO packages that won't build properly in current. Is that still an issue these days? It's been several years since I tried current.

It will be on a case by case basis. I don't run that many sbo packages; they're all running fine on an up to date Slackware64-current.

Why? I'm just asking because my preference is to stay with "Legacy" (but really, that's just because I've been doing it that way since before there was UEFI).

Pretty much what I thought, hit and miss. Thanks.

Mostly because of the advantages of gpt vs mbr and I feel (perhaps wrongly) that gpt is better for SSD than mbr. I'm going to give -current a try, but may wind up just setting up legacy if it doesn't work out.

Ok, just finished installing -current without a hitch. I guess the 14.2 installer is just too old to deal with the new UEFI on this laptop.

Similar reason for me, the 14.2 installer can't see my NVMe drive. I had to install -current, but I'm glad I did.

Forum member (and one of the SBo administrators) ponce has tried to minimize the issues of SBo in -current by creating an unofficial fork of the main repo and maintaining it along side the main SBo repo and making adjustments to it as needed to keep things building and running on -current.

Have a look at his stickied thread where things are discussed and patches are proposed.

You can use the slackware-current installer to actually install Slackware 14.2. That's what I did on my new server. Here is the description of how I did that: https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/bui...all-slackware/

Another option is to modify the initrd file of the SLackware-14.2 installer slightly so that it will then recognize your NVMe drive. Such is described here on the forum: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post5538267

Thanks for that. So far the SBO packages I use have built no problem but I'll take a look at that.

I'll keep that in mind if I have issues with -current, but so far so good. The problem wasn't the drive, it was the keyboard mapping.