Mess Up On Installation. What Can I Do Right Now?
 

I have gotten quite a lot of help to get my hand on Slackware from this community. I get it installed this afternoon/evening. It took four hours or so. The result, however, isn't what I want. There are two problems. First, only Slackware shows up on the boot screen (see the attached screenshot) for an intended dual boot installation. Second, all I have is a terminal for Slackware, where I can sign into a root account I created during the installation and sign out, but nothing else.

Prior to the installation, I made a partition type to Linux (option 83 from the list. Someone mentions "Linux filesystem" on option 20, but I don't see it.) and leave another partition with HPFS/NTFS/exFAT unchanged. Slackware is installed to the partition. Can those two problem be fixed? If yes, how to fix them?

It seems that your Slackware installation is ok. Console login is default.
Login as root and run 'adduser' to add more users.

Take a look at the documentation https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:beginners_guide

To add Windows XP at lilo boot screen edit the file '/etc/lilo.conf' and
add a section for it at the end.
this is taken from '/etc/lilo.conf_example

Slackware defaults to a terminal (text screen), not a GUI. You have to sign in as root and then add yourself as a user, with the adduser command. Once you do that, you can log in as yourself and start whichever GUI you selected at installation with the startx command. Yes, this is similar to how Windows was started back in the DOS days. This can be changed by modifying inittab and changing the runlevel from 3 to 4, but since you seem to be new at this, stick with the terminal and startx for now. One step at a time. :)

You should have set up two partitions at minimum: One for Slackware (I prefer two -- one for the root directory and one for /home, but that's up to you) using ext4, and one for swap, equal in size to your RAM (Yes, I still believe that's necessary!). If you want to keep Windows, it should have been defragged and shrunk (if necessary) using the Windows disk tools.

A UEFI partition will also be necessary on newer machines. If Windows already set it up, leave it alone other than to reduce its partition size. Don't install Slackware in an NTFS partition. That's for Windows and USB drives.

Yes do the adduser thing and log with your user. If you want to check your partitions from command-line (aka cli) you can type
When you want to fire only one command as root you can do

@Tonus this gives quite a good output :

# lsblk -o name,label,size,fstype,model

A swap space is useful but it can be a swap file, no need for a dedicated swap partition. There are plenty of tutorials on the web for "set up a swap file". And as partition for /home is not really necessary, no need for the OP to reinstall, hopefully.

It looks like the OP already did that, albeit with another tool

This doen't seem to be a new machine, and with Windows XP installed UEFI is unlikely.

vw98008 It is my opinion even after 20+ years running Slackware that defaulting to Runlevel 3, the Multi User Command Line, is actually, though daunting to those new to Slackware these days, is an important benefit. Immediately it makes Users aware that CLI command knowledge is important. It is also useful for those unsure of how to setup Xorg, especially for Graphics. For example, nVidia cards and AMD cards for users who prefer the Catalyst drivers, are best handled by installing those drivers outside of X. That way if for any reason your setup fails, it's far easier to fix from outside of the problem. For that you will commonly need some CLI text editor, like vim, emacs, nano, whatever you prefer. If you don't already have a preference now is a good time to learn.

BTW if you have an nVidia card and install via the NVIDIA-foo.run proprietary driver, it offers to add appropriate basic lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf so the chosen driver is used. The nVidia docs will make you aware of any tweaks you might enjoy for top performance. One easy way to view those docs is to run the installer like this, "NVIDIA-foo.run --extract", which will create a tree with a Docs folder and files. There is also /var/log/nvidia-installer.log for information if you run into any trouble. That and "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" are very valuable tools for troubleshooting or tweaking proper setup of Xorg.

You certainly can login as root, use "adduser (name)" to create your main account and just hit Alt-F2 to get another login prompt to login as that User and just "startx". I prefer launching a Display Manger/Graphic Login/Chooser from the first root login. If you are on KDE v4 you could just run "kdm", "gdm" or "xdm" to get a graphic login where you can choose and try several WM/DEs. Both Xfce and KDE will have a layout fairly intuitive and friendly for an XP user.

Hope this helps you along. Good Fortune.

As you are seeing an NTFS partition, then your Windows XP is safe.

I would dearly like to see the output from 'fdisk -l', to see the partitioning in place on your disk.

It appears you have a legacy Windows XP install, using the old DOS partitioning system that only allowed for 4 primary partitions. Depending on your setup, your existing Windows install may be using a number of the primary partitions, at least one for the Windows XP install and perhaps other primary partitions holding a recovery image and a second primary drive. This can be overcome by making an extended partition on the last primary partition. This can be done using Windows tools or the 'fdisk' or 'cfdisk' tools on the Slackware installer. I think 'cfdisk' is easier for this.

For your Slackware install, I would suggest having a partition for the operating system (Linux type 83) and a swap partition (Linux type 82, sized at 2x available RAM). I disagree with @Didier Spaier, I think this is necessary for your setup, which likely has limited RAM. You can also consider another partition (Linux type 83) for /home (not required, but can be convenience).

My suggestion for what to do right now is to do a reinstall after addressing the disk partitioning, but taking more notice of the prompts that show. You are prompted to add users, but you skipped this. You are prompted for auto configuration of the lilo boot loader, accept this.

Do not feel bad. It took three attempts for me to satisfactorily achieve my initial Slackware install.

Setting up a swap file provides a swap space that can be used exactly the same way as a swap partition, with the added benefit that it can be expanded or shrinked at any time without re-partitioning. I didn't advise to not set up a swap space.

I've been partitioning my drives that way (swap, /, /home in that order) ever since I started using Linux back in '98. That was what was recommended to me when I first installed Red Hat 5.2 (and I forget now who recommended it), and I've kept doing it that way ever since.

Hard drives are large enough so that the space used for a swap partition isn't really missed, although I only allocate enough space to equal my RAM, not twice the size.

Depends. It's a lot easier to change distros (which I do on occasion) if I don't lose my /home directory when reformatting the / partition. When I worked in Windows, I created a D: drive and put the My Documents directory there. Saved me from losing a lot of work when Windows crashed. ;)

A lot of it is personal preference, but that's how I've been doing it for years and have had no problems.

When I did partition last night, one partition with HPFS/NTFS/exFAT type has a large portion of the HD. To my understanding, I shouldn't touch the partition (actually, I likely am not allowed to mess with the partition.) I only could change the partition type to Linux on a far smaller partition. If that is true, the partitioning practice is different from a dual boot Windows partition in which partition occurs in Windows and I can change the partition size.

And how you made room for Linux in this particular hard disk?

Did you had from start some free space, or you used a Windows or live system method like GParted to resize it?

If you just used just the cfdisk (from the Slackware installer shell) to "resize" the Windows partition, I am very sorry to tell you, but you damaged (probably almost) irremediably the data from your Windows partition.

Because the chances that your data (of the programs and other things) to be written exactly in the new size of your Windows partition, are likely the ones to win 1 billion dollars at lottery. Sometimes this happens, but it is really a very slim chance to happen.

I will try to reinstall it, possibly with the latest rolling release. But the new ISO size is much larger if I don't mistake it. I get its current live version and it is about twice larger than the 14.2 install DVD.

I haven't changed the sizes of those partitions. I don't know how to do so with Slackware.

There is no such thing like the "latest rolling release" because the Slackware has no rolling release.

The slackware-current is the development tree of Slackware, and while being generally stable, at particular time it may or may not work, being addressed to the experienced beta-testers.