Hi

I need a bit of help. I have made progress over the week, but my Macbook Slackware install is still not 100% Since my 13.37 install was so solid it has been a very long time since I had to fiddle around with things like this and it is causing me brain ache.

After I battled with the GPT and disk partitions and rEFIt I now have a Slackware install that boots. However, during install liloconfig throws up an error about not being able to detrermine the video from the bios. This didn't happen with my Slackware 13.37 install on the same machine.

It is a single install, no OSX...

To get lilo installed correctly without errors I mounted to HDD partition I had the install on and edited /etc/lilo.conf to reflect that I only have Linux available. I also checked to make sure /etc/inittab booted me to run level 3. But even after these checks the following happens:

Machine boots, runs through and gets to lilo. Goes to Linux install and runs through the standard boot procedure. There comes a point (this happened on my 13.37 install too) where the screen resolution bumps up just before running xorg. However, on my new install the screen just goes black. The backlight is on and I am unable to move between terminals with ctrl+alt+F[number].

Bit of a conundrum.

To get this far I wiped the drive and set up GPT partitions with gdisk (EFI, HFS+, MSDOS, Linux Swap). rEFIt was happy with this and installed okay. I then boot the Slackware DVD and go through the motions of installing the system.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3 prior to setup. Setup, then config.

One more point, I get double entries for /dev/sda1-3 and /dev/sdb1-2 when fstab wants to configure mount points. THIS is weird. Could that be the fact that there "could" be a protected MBR on my internal drive which is causing all the troubles?

I have been at this for over a week and it all started because I never worked out 3d accelerataion 13.37. Well, I did but I was getting rubbish results and what I could determine it was down to the intel drivers! Thoughts?

sounds like you are having an issue with KMS. I would suggest disabling KMS during boot.

What type of MacBook is it?

Generally you need the EFI (100MB) partition formated Fat32.
I'm not sure why you have an HFS+ partition when you were saying there was no OSX installed.
I generally go with:
1. EFI fat32
2. / root ext4 65536M
3. swap (System ram size) ie. 8192M
4. /home ext4 Everything else

I guess slackware handles the EFI part now after Slackware 14.0.

Choose "standard" for the boot video. You can just set that in lilo.cfg
1. Boot from the DVD install disc.
2. mount /dev/sda2 /mnt ; "whatever your root partition is"
3. chroot /mnt
4. lilo

Wasn't there a new Lilo in 14.0?

You may have to blacklist the intel console KMS driver.
ie. add the driver to: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

3D acceleration is easy in Slackware if you have Intel hardware.
Just type "xorgsetup" as root.

SPOT ON!

It was likely the KMS. I #d out the vga line in the lilo.conf and ran it again. Rebooted perfectly!

It`s an old 2,1 white 13 inch Macbook. I wiped everything off it and used the slackware install disk to reset the GPT tables and partition the disk up. I then installed rEFIt and went into a Slackware 14 install. Now, after knocking out the vga setting all is well!