Well I did the installation of Slackware more or less. Have to finish it off but every thing is going well.

The thing is I'm someone who doesn't really like things installed which I won't use so I chose the menu install. Now I have one or two questions:

1. If I install Slackware "bare and clean" with no other pakkages (then your network) is it really hard to install the things you want after? I know some apps will need other pakkages which will also need to be installed. This because I'm going to run fluxbox but will use KDE apps and GNOME apps.

2. Is a "bare and clean" installation which is then finished of with the things you want faster, slower, or the same as when you install everything?

3. In which option can you define during installation what goes on what partion for I would like /root, /home, and /usr on different partions.

Well okay it were three questions, sorry about that.

FLUXBOX RULES!!! (sorry)

as far as installing other packages its not that difficult...
if installing packages from cd you can...

as root run:

pkgtool (i believe (still a newbie))

or

installpkg /cdrom/slackware/path/to/package.tgz

pkgtool will give you the menu like interface that you saw during the install, you'll want to have the cdrom mounted before hand with either of these options...with pkgtool select source and put in
/cdrom/slackware/<category>

where category = a | ap | d | e ....so on

i prefer just the 'installpkg' way myself...if you install an app and it doesnt seem to work you can check :

ldd /path/to/app/executable

to check its dependancies assuming its dynamically linked

if installing from source code usually its as simple as :

./configure <any options here> && make && make install

you usually need to run that from the top level directory (wherever the configure script is)
check any readme's or the INSTALL file if there are any (should be)


as far as speed goes...i believe it all depends on what processes are active...(slackware is pretty good at not running any access crap that doesnt necassarily need to be running)

as installing on partitions...im not sure what you mean....selecting which partition to install packages on during the initial install or after system is up and running....the latter of the two should be simple and have no extra work ( assuming you /etc/fstab is setup correctly) but if you mean during initial install....i'm not sure i usually only use /boot /root and /swap partitions

enjoy your new system

Don't install only packages you need, bad idea, slack doesn't like it. Instead do a full install, then remove all the packages you don't need using pkgtool. This way it might save some trouble later, with dependencies.
/home will be empty on a fresh install, as well as /root
/usr will contain all the programs installed and all files that go with the programs. Don't put /etc on a partition! It contains scripts that are run before the partitions are mounted, so if you put it on a partition, linux will not boot.
HTH
-NSKL

In the very beginning of installation, if you partition your harrdisk into several partition, you will be asked if u want to assign any directory to any partition

So you can assign /dev/hda1 as /boot , /dev/hda2 as /home , /dev/hda3 as /usr
etc

In the SETUP menu i think


Andy

Okay, thanks everyone. Tried installing yesterday which went well. But knowing me te be alert for anything that may "mess-up" M$ (which is easily done) I chose to skip LILO to do it later. So I'm going to put that right first, maybe a new install to with the net.i bootdisk for I do have a network card and you get the option to use that kernel in the setup.

Now I can't boot into Linux but that's not such a big problem, and I thought of a way to remove M$ sothat it can't be "messed-up" due to my mistakademaka's. Just ghost it to a new IDE disk on the Master IDE controler for I normally boot from a RAID controller, not using the raid options though but there the fast controllers.

SO tonight is reinstall night.

thanks for the tips

AND SLACKWARE IS UP AGAIN!


i discoverd my mistake right after the click. I didn't know if I would get the choice where the boot record would be writen, how dumb of me, but later I read at slackware that I would have had it. Oh well. Beter luck tonight.

Because Slacks package installer is primitive, it doesn't track dependancies. This means that if you do a bare install, then try to install something like fluxbox, you'll have to track down all the dependancies yourself. On a bare install, the list will be quite long!

If you really want to do this, I would recommend NOT using Slackware. I think Debian is a lot better at this. Debian has a much steeper learning curve, but I think "apt-get" rules! It will build a very stable system from a bare install. The "bare" install on Debian is about 100 megs.

I haven't used RPM based distributions to do this in awhile. Years ago, I experienced "RPM Hell" where RPM would get all confused about what I had and what it needed to get things to run. I would expect things have gotten better now.

My best recommendation on dual boot setups with M$ is NOT to install lilo on the MBR. Keep the original M$ MBR and put lilo on the front of your linux partition instead. Then set the bootable flag on the M$ MBR to boot to your linux partition. Then configure lilo to optionally boot back into your M$ partition when you want.

This way if anything goes wrong, you can simply "fdisk" the bootable flag back to your M$ partition and get your system booting your M$ OS again.

Another reason for doing it this way is that anytime you encourage your M$ to do any kind of disk repairs, or OS re-installs (common occurrence), the M$ OS won't wipe out your lilo boot loader. After your M$ OS is through doing it's damage, simply fdisk the bootable flag back to your linux partition and lilo will come back!

Unless you know that you actually wiped out your linux partition, just boot on either your install CD or a linux boot floppy and do something like:

"linux root=/dev/hda2"

at the lilo prompt to boot into a linux file system on IDE hard drive "a" partition "2"

Slackware gives you the option to directly inspect and edit the lilo configuration file before committing the lilo bootstrap to your hard drive. I Linux distributions that don't give you this option, then proceed to do something that leaves you with a computer that won't boot.

You should really the lilo documentation. It can be kind of hard, but you'll learn a lot about the booting process of a PC as well as the awesome power and configurability of lilo. It is well worth the time!