I have another problem, now. The installer prompted me to skip the LILO installation and proceed to ELILO configuration, but when I selected the option, it went directly to mouse configuration. What am I supposed to do now? Configure ELILO manually? Please advise.

EDIT: I went ahead and installed LILO, seeing as I have UEFI booting in legacy boot mode, and LILO worked just fine. However, I cannot get Linux to recognize /dev/mmcblk0p3 (my Linux root partition) as a valid root filesystem; I get a kernel panic, complaining that it cannot mount a root-fs. Is there a module I need to have the kernel load before booting?

After fiddling around with the laptop a bit, I've come to the conclusion that the kernel is not loading the MMC modules, and therefore does not load the drivers for the eMMC drive, and that's when the kernel panics, because it can't find /dev/mmcblk0, and can't mount the root partition. Is there a solution to this problem? I am stumped; I've tried everything I could think of, and no joy.

Regards,

Matt

If you're using the generic kernel, there is probably a module you need to load. You could look at lsmod when you boot off the install media to see what modules are listed so you can add them to an initrd. If you're running the huge kernel, then I am at a loss.

It's always been traditional to build into the huge kernel any modules for storage controllers that might be found in common computer systems, especially laptops. What modules do you find loaded from the installer? Unless doing so creates conflicts elsewhere, these could be candidates for changing from =m to =y on the huge kernel.

Here is the lsmod output from the installer:

When the installation routine was over, but before rebooting, did you chroot into /mnt and switch to the generic kernel? If so, did you generate an initrd for it, with your root filesystem included?

I didn't know I could do that. That sounds like a workable solution. I'll try it and post here what happens. Thanks!

I'd try to create an initrd and add these modules to it (possibly overkill on the modules, but better safe than sorry).

mmc_core,mmc_block,sdhci,sdhci_acpi,usb_storage,uas,xhci_hcd,xhci_pci

(My guess is you'll definitely need the mmc_* and sdhci* modules, as those are used for "mmc" memory, possibly usb storage and uas (USB attached scsi) depending on how your memory is attached to the system, and xhci* if it is using a USB3 interface.)

If it works after that, you could keep that initrd as a fallback and then create additional initrd with modules selectively removed to ultimately see which modules are required to boot your system.

You could then either keep the initrd or recompile your kernel to include those (and, obviously, post your findings here so Pat can decide if he wants to make adjustments to the kernel config).

EDIT: You could also, after doing a chroot, run /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and it'll hopefully tell you what modules are being used in the installer and the exact modules your initrd would need to contain.

That'd probably be much easier than my previously suggested method.

Well it might be a solution if indeed you did chroot into /mnt and replace the huge with the generic kernel. Did you?

Another question you might answer is this: did you format your root filesystem as xfs and try to install elilo there? I'm not sure about elilo but I do know you can't install lilo to a root filesystem formatted as xfs.

Well, I did as gezley suggested with the -generic kernel, and the initrd.gz file. Unfortunately, I now have another issue: When I hit <Enter> at the LILO prompt after rebooting, it gets stuck at "Loading Slacker.." (Slacker being the name of my boot image). It, for all intents and purposes, has hung. Any ideas?

NOTE: I should add that the BIOS is set up for UEFI with Legacy Boot, if that makes a difference.

Post your /etc/lilo.conf and your output of ls -la /boot

I have the same issue, my thread here:
LILO + initrd leads to kernel freeze immediately after the LILO menu

I switched to UEFI mode with elilo. I will follow your thread to see if the problem could be found.

Did you run lilo after making the initrd .. (Something I forget to do every now and then)

I truly appreciate the input of everyone here (especially Pat!). However, the installation of Slackware was just enough of a trial, and I am suffering from just enough of the flu, for my patience to come to an end, and for me to explore using other distros for installation. I picked Mint 17.3 Xfce. Installation went painlessly, and no problems rebooting, either. I did have to run a script I found online that compiles and inserts a kernel module for the Broadcom 43142 wifi/bluetooth hybrid chipset, but once that was done, everything was running top-notch. I think I'll stick with this setup for now: Slackware for the desktop, and Mint for the notebook.

Thanks again, everyone!

Regards,

Matt

First of all thanks to everyone who sent in feedback and hints and tipps... i will mark this thread as "SOLVED" because i have decided not to go for the HP Spectre but for the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga12. Finally the non-glare Display, the extra Pen and the Lenove-design did make the decision. Slackware is running fine on it (after disable the SecureBoot/UEFI-stuff... i prefer pure MBR ). After upgrading to Plasma5.6 the Yoga12 runs fine (Note: Original 14.2rc/KDE4.14 does work also but i prefer the look of Plasma5). I have added OpenCL for the Intel HD5500 for darktable. With OpenCL the Pen works very well, easy to draw masks when edit RAW photos That's more then i had expected Could be faster but when traveling the performance is OK.

Thanks again for all the feedback

P.S. For automatic screen rotation i am using the rotate.py script suggested by ArchLinux, works well but screen redraw is a bit slow. Anyway... TabletMode with Pen works for me.