Slack on a Laptop
 

I am looking to use slackware on a laptop (an HP Compaq nc6000) and I was wondering if there was anything I need to take into consideration for this procedure. And which kernel selection should be made for optimum use on a laptop. More specifically if compiling the 2.6 kernel on a laptop will be difficult.

if you are curious it has:
Intel Pentium-M 1600 MHz
512 MB RAM
ATI Radeon Mobility 9600
and a 802.11a/b/g wireless adapter

any assistance would be appreciated

1 More thing
 

Is it possible to use GRUB as poopsed to LILO?

Slack is great on laptops.
My only concern about your hardware would be the a/b/g combo card. Is that an integrated centrino deal?
You'll want to find out what wireless chispet(s) it uses, and whether there are native linux drivers written for it.
If not, head over to ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net to see if it's on their list of supported cards/chipsets. If not, head over to linuxant.com and you'll have to buy the drivers to use.

Other than that, your hardware should work great.
The proprietary ATI drivers now play nicely with 2.6 kernels, and work fine with Xorg instead of XFree 4.3. Just make sure when you configure your kernel to leave DRI as a module, if you want to generic radeon module to play with as well. Your agpgart can be either module or built in... I normally do it as a module.

When you create your xorg.conf file (or use fglrxconfig), make sure to specify the option to use the kernel's agpgart rather than fglrx's built in.
The line is:
--Shade

PS- In response to your last question, of course it's possible -- but it's not included with Slack. Download grub and install it, if you want it. On a single boot machine, it doesn't make much difference which boot loader you use, though.

it's a laptop that I have to have for school. UW-Stout gives all undergrads a laptop, so it has Win XP home on it, which I want to keep because they gave me all kinds of free awesome productivity software (Adobe Creative Suite, Macromedia Dreamweaver, MS Office 2003 Pro, and crap like that, I will be using a small (maybe 10 gigs or so) partition for windblows.... so it will be a dual-booting machine... and I've been using GRUB since Red Hat 7.3.... plus it's prettier. I want to use my laptop as a display model, if you will, for fellow telecom students that might want to make the switch. :p

I installed slack onto my HP ze4600. The install went great. But the only thing I had to change was choosing the bare.i kernel with "nousb" as an option; without that option, the laptop's keyboard would not respond when it came time for root's initial login.

If you have to use this option, don't worry because usb devices still work =)

If you want to keep all ur fancy software then u will need to resize the ntfs partition. You can use partition magic or (a cheaper option) try to get your hands on a recent copy of Mandrake installation cds. The Mandrake installation can resize ntfs partitions. Just stop the install once you get to this point. Also, don't forget to defragment the hard drive beforehand.

mandrake cd's : www.linuxiso.org ( check on this page also, they have some iso's )

if u would rather use partition magic e-mail me, unless you already have it.

leaderdil@yahoo.com

resizes the windows partition nicely...then u can use cfdisk during the install to make your /swap and /

the slack install is very easy, i just did it on my hp laptop and my dell laptop...dell is a dual boot, hp is just slack for now.

Just make sure with installing Linux that it has to be within the first 1024 cylinders.
If you add Linux to the end of the partition, it won't work.

Slack will be awesome on that laptop, I've got it running without problems on my Toshiba PII 366mhz with 128megs ram.

If you need to use the other apps, have another computer (if you already own one) host the programs and you can then accessing them via RDP or VNC. (krdc is the command in Linux) and you can run things remotely. It would also be a good idea to setup a share on that computer so you can smb into it to get what files you need, and vice versa.

yea, I know... I'm no n00b, just new to slackware... I had 9.1 up for a time, but went for the ease of use with SuSE instead... I have partitionmagic 8.01, yay... go me

Really Frustrated
 

ok... I got Slackware 10 up for the most part... the only things I am looking to do yet are install the Radeon Mobility drivers... I know 9.1 had XFree86 on it and there was a simple to use graphical tool (and easy to find xfree86-config file too, just sometimes I prefer using graphical as opposed to all txt editing hootenanny) does anyone have any info or would anyone be able to help me out on installing ATI drivers for X.org (personally I prefer XFree86, I tried installing that but I kinda got in over my head, compiling an x-server from source and all...:rolleyes: )

Also the one other thing I really want is GRUB (the GNU Grand Unified Boot-Loader) but it now comes in to forms, grub legacy and grub2. Grub 2 is only available via CVS and any pertinent information I found on installing grub had the instructions for downloading and compiling the tarballs, which I can do... I think. Anyone that might be able to help me out there, it would be greatly appreciated. :D

I use grub and works great, Can put on any partition, even > 1024 cyl. Get the package here;
http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub...nt/extra/grub/

lilo works on any partition; the MBR is where lilo resides on my laptop, and I have the following:

hda1: Win XP (20Gb)
hda2: Peanut Linux (5Gb)
hda3: Arch Linux (5Gb)
hda5: Suse Linux (5Gb)
hda6: Storage (5Gb)
hda7: Swap (94Mb)

All boot fine, and Slack 9.0/9.1/10.0 have all been installed on the hda5 partition at one time or another.

Only trouble I had with Slack on this laptop was Firewire/ieee1394 would hang the bootup; turned off hotplug using the install cd (chmod 444 /mnt/linux/etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug), rebooted and edited the hotplug BLACKLIST file.
Some reason if you add the ieee1394 modules to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules they load at boot without hitch :scratch: ah well.

HTH
Sam

[Edited for spelling.]

I had that problem too with the firewire, I disabled hotplug, upgraded the kernel and hey presto working system. The problem was to do with the kernel, until 2.4.24 (I think) hotplug and firewire caused problems.

Sorry for butting in, but how is support for wireless cards?

I'm having a terrible time with that.
Ndiswrapper sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.
Are the new kernels wifi friendly?

Interesting Problem
 

Ok, I'm an idiot... I got the ATI drivers installed and x.org configured and I got grub installed and working nicely, but I ran into a rather interesting problem. I upgraded the included kernel (2.4.26) to the 2.6.9 kernel and afterward lilo started back up and I was able to boot slackware with the 2.4.26 kernel... is there anything that I might have done wrong while making my 2.6 kernel?