Can someone explain to me how to setup a dual boot on my computer so that i can give slack a try. I currently only have win xp installed.

i have 2 harddisks : master =40 gb 5400 rpm
slave = 180 gb 7200 rpm

an the moment windows is using both of these but more than half of the space is free on both drives. they have both been formatted NTFS

i already have the cd one iso , so i can burn it and get to it. Do i need the second cd for slackware 9.1 setup aswell?

Slackware is not a newbie-friendly distro; you have to be committed to some trial-and-error. I suggest turning one of your hard disks completely over to linux. Linux will not write to NTFS partitions, so you will have reformat the disk or partition that you want for Slackware.

Heads up: Slackware's installer does not have a GUI partitioner. You're expected to run cfdisk from the command prompt before you run Slackware's setup. cfdisk will create and remove partitions, but it cannot resize them.

i have already tried mandrake for a while , but i found it a little simple.

well in that case, do you or anyone else know a virtual machine that supports slackware. i have already tried slackware 9.0 on vmware workstation 4 , but it does not support slackware.

this what i did in vmware workstation 4:

i made a new Linux vmachine,

-with an ide hard disk(in the advanced options of the harddisk)-

-I loaded the slackware 9.0 iso file into the virtual cd-rom drive

I powered on this vmachine

(this next section might not be in the exact same order but it should give you the info of what i did)

-I logged into the root by typing root.

-i chose US keyboard layout by hitting enter

-where it told me which kernel i wanted to load, i hit ENTER to load the bare.i kernel which it said is for ide harddisks (when i hit F2)

-i chose typed 'cfdisk' i typed 'yes' to set tables to zero and the i selected 'new' to partition the free space. I also selected the option 'write' to write a table which was needed for me to get into setup. then i 'quit' cfdisk'

-i now went back to 'setup' . and i got no warning of 'no partition' , so i set it all up. after it was finished installing the packages , 'setup' told me i had to reboot.

-So i rebooted...

{{now this is where i got that problem}}

just a black screen which doesn't respond with a white underbar in the top left , right after the bios info where i thought slackware was gonna load.



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should i have installed LILO? (cuz i didn't)

yes you shold have.. or AT LEAST have made a boot disk/LILO disk.. now can you get into windows at all?? what you can do is REINSTALL over slackware again.. i've installed 14 times in two days and now its runnning sweetly

Sorry, but I do not understand why you wanted to install Slackware that way. Yes, you need to install lilo or grub, otherwise nothing will boot without a floppy.

I don't know anything about vmware, so I don't know if cfdisk actually wrote a partition table. From your description, you seemed to have an empty partition ready for Slackware prior to your installation. If that's the case, why not boot with the Slackware CD rather than running it through vmware?

The simplest way for me in that case is to create a fat32 partition on either 1st or 2nd HD, than copy the downloaded from ur ntfs iso to e.g. D:\slackware-9.1-install-d1.iso. Extract the boot n root disks from that iso (bare.i, install1.dsk,install2.dsk, rawrite.exe, some related readmes), use ISO reader, if u don't have any try googling("ISO COMMANDER") ..

Write those boot- n root-disks to disketts
Boot with the diskett, login as root, do partitioning with
cfdisk /dev/hda or cfdisk /dev/hdb ..

Create a root partition for slackware either in hda or hdb as u like, as long as u have free capacity in ur HD u don't need repartition of ur ntfs, cfdisk is just fine enough for that.

The full slackware installation (install everything will take about 2 GB), but u have only 1st disk, so it ll be less than 2gb as Gnome n kde are on the 2nd ISO. They r the real HD/resource taker by linux ..

If ur memory is something 512 u maybe don't need swapspace, but u can create them also, if u want it fast then create swapspace on the other HD where ur root partition for slack/linux is or even create 2 swapspace (in both HDs).

Create 2 empty directories e.g.
mkdir /tmp/iso /tmp/src

mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /tmp/iso
mount -o loop -t iso9660 /tmp/iso/slackware-9.1-install-d1.iso /tmp/src

Then try some "ls -lA /tmp/src" to see if the iso is correctly mounted, if u can read the iso like u are reading it from a cdrom., then u r ready to run "setup"

Later select your source from "premounted directory" during the setup, pass to the given field "/tmp/src/slackwzare" without the " ".

That is wut I will do it in a few minutes, bcoz my downloading of 1st install CD is also finished ..

FYI, for newbie I'd suggest u to install also either KDE or GNOME, they are more confortabler to use, other WindowsSessionManager are more simpler, but may lack of many features, that one normally assumed their present on WM ..

thx for all the input people. I'll try it this way if i can't get it to work on vmware 4

So now my question is:


Did ANYONE get it to work on vmware workstation 4 . or ANY other virtual machine

Hi,
I have managed to install slackware 9.0 under vmware 4 ..so defintely slackware 9.1 would install

sorry that i dont remember the details since it was long time ago (but i can investigate it if you are really stuck)

one hint for you: USE SLACKWARE BOOT DISK USING RAWRITE

i hope this helps

it's nice to know that it works with people. And yes i really am very very stuck. I'll try and find boot disk and rawrite and give it a shot

ok this is probably a stupid question to you guys:

how do i login and get to the desktop?

i get a command line screen and i can only login as 'root' and i then still can't get to the desktop. i have tried 'adduser' but it says it can't lock the password file, and that the user was not created, after i setup a user account..

So basicly i can't get in

What do you mean by that you "still can't get to the desktop"? If you've completed the installation and Slack boots up and lets you log in...seems all well to me. What goes wrong when you startx? And what does adding additional users have to do with it?

you have to execute xconfigurator first then run startx if that's what you mean by "getting into the desktop"

it worked for me .. but everything is 10 times harder to do with it than redhat 9.0