Slackware on Inspiron 24 3000 series
 

Does anyone have experience with the Dell Inspiron 24 3000 series, model i3455-1004 dual booting Slackware and Windows? I am thinking of buying one, but the last pc I bought new gave me endless headaches dual-booting, and I was never able to install a working bootloader. I ended up having to use a usb bootstick every time. See this thread if you are interested:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ghlight=mscole
Thanks, Mike.

Hi,

Well, the dual boot can certainly work if you know UEFI. But if you want wireless keyboard/mouse and touchscreen, then it might take some time to make them work.

Anyway, if you are every buying something these days which have Windows 10 on it, the first things to do are:

- Shrink the Windows partition (C:),
- Remove Fastboot, i.e. let Windows do proper shutdowns instead of hibernating so that it boots faster,
- Remove Secure boot,
- Change boot orders so that you can boot USB/DVD first.

Then, you're good to go dual booting.

Thank you for the reply aragorn2101. I think the problem with the last pc I bought was in the UEFI firmware, which seemed to not allow any bootloader to be put on the hard disk (except for Windows bootloader). That's why I was hoping to hear from anyone who has actually done an install on the Dell model I was looking at, because I don't want to deal with such a problem again.
Mike.

According to Dell's page for this product, it can be preinstalled with Windows 10 or Ubuntu 14.04, so it seems likely that Slackware should work just fine.

http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/produ...on-24-3455-aio

Thanks bassmadrigal. I had not seen that. Fine print, very easy to miss, and the dropdown for choosing the operating system only lists Windows 10. If I end up buying one I will post again with the results of my installation of Slack.
Mike.

mscole, i have a dell inspiron 15 5000 series. i only have slackware 14.2 64 bit on it but i don't see any issue dual booting windows 10. i have disabled uefi and am using lagacy boot mode.

Well, I finally had time to get back to this. I am now dual booting Slack 64 and Windows 10, no problems so far. The install was easy, but I use slackpkg to do upgrades, which caused some problems. One of the upgrades was a newer version of the kernel, which slackpkg does not handle well at all in combination with elilo. After a fair amount of poking around on the web, I figured out that after you upgrade the kernel, you have to copy the new kernel to the efi system directory, and rename it to vmlinuz (without the version number). Apparently elilo only likes to load kernels that are in its own directory.

Yeah, Pat actually doesn't recommend upgrading kernels using slackpkg, even though it is enabled by default. If you look in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist, it actually says:

As you saw in your case, for systems not running lilo, it's even more difficult to use slackpkg to upgrade the kernels since there's no prompt to update elilo.