Greetings,

Currently I am trying to install Slackware 9.0 on my HP Pavilion ze4115 laptop. Everything seems to be going fine until it comes to the prompt asking whether I want to use the US keyboard mapping or a different one. Then, the CD dies down, and the keyboard does not work. I can't press enter, or 1, or ctrl+c, or any key and have it do something. It's an IDE hard drive, so bare.i should work as a kernel. Has anyone else out there had this problem, and if so, how'd you fix it?

Did you check the checksum for the ISO when you downloaded it??

I had some weird problems a while back, and it all turned out to be a bad ISO image i had burned, i allways check em now.

yeah checking md5 is so important. I produce 4 coaster in a row because of not checking that.

I downloaded my copy of Slack9 on a 56k. I shutter to think about getting a bad iso.

well I tried checking md5 and it seemed to be all right, so right now I'm burning it again and going to give it another try. thanks for the help

Edit: Well I reburned and retried, but it froze at the same spot. So I'm going to go ahead and download the ISO again and see if I somehow got a bad one that checksum didn't figure out.

I had this exact same problem, but on a desktop pc. My problem was the usb keyboard. I plugged in a ps/2 keyboard and moved on.

However, since you are on a laptop, possibly there is some BIOS setting that you need to modify.

regards...

Do you have a keyboard you can plug in to the ps2 port? I haven't tried slack on a lappy so just a thought.

yeah, I thought of just pluggin in a keyboard while at work and tried it just now. Still, freezes at the same part. I'm sure it does have something to do with the BIOS, but unfortunately the BIOS setup utility is pithy--about the only thing I can change is whether to allow both the touchpad and another mouse to be in use at the same time. I've tried both Mandrake and SuSE already with no success (Mandrake froze while detecting my PMCIA cards and SuSE couldn't figure out the network for an ftp install) so I figured I'd give Slackware a try. Maybe my laptop just can't have Linux on it.

bingo on the usb keyboard, had that problem today, and YES IT WAS THE USB KB

I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that if you know the right parameters/options to pass in at the initial slackware installation process, that you can get the system to recognize the usb keyboard (Edit: ... or the laptop keyboard.).

I just don't know what those details would be.

okay, i've passed through all of this while trying to install 9.0 on my notebook "HP Pavillion xt155" a couple weeks ago... two words: forget it.

For some insane reason Slack9.0 *wont* install ( ISO's checksum's were OK, and i've played *a lot* with kernel parameters, nothing helped, and i was neither used nor willing to spend more than 30minutes installing a Slack box ) and *will* hang on the "keyboard selection" part.

What i did was to boot an old Slack 8.1, copy a Slack-current ISO into my HD ( via my LAN ) and install from the mounted partition; after i had a working install, i wiped it all and retried installing using a Slack-current ISO ( from www.slackware.no )... and... it worked smoothly too.

My best bet is that something fishy has happened to the Slack-9.0 installer when it comes to the keyboard on HP laptops.

Right now i'm running Slack-current ( with some extra packages i've compiled myself ) and am quite happy, despite the fact the /etc/fstab never had a "swap" mount ( just figured that after some pain ).

hope it helps.

You may want to try using the kernel for USB keyboards. At the install prompt, hit F1 and view the list of kernels. Then type the name of the kernel that best suits your system.

Thanks slipwalker. I'll try that out when I get home from work today.

i had the same problem while installing slackware 9.0. usb kb isnt supported while installation, there is no kernel,that you can chose while installing, containing usb hid support.