Also I would just like to add that you can *NEVER* screw up a linux install short of wiping the partition with "rm -rf /". If you can boot the install disk then you can recover a slackware system. Its very easy and this will save you every single time.

If you no longer have a working lilo or the system won't login or something just went screwy. Just boot the cd and make a directory to mount the partition to. Then do "chroot /mnt/hd" and you are now root user and can modify and change everything on the partition to get it working again. I have to do this sometimes when I screw up lilo. This alone will save you unneeded reinstalls.

A mistake I make was making all of my partitions reiserfs. They seem to be much faster but the 2.6 kernels maynot support properly yet? Anyway I am back to ext3.

No, the 2.6 kernels support reiserfs perfectly fine. I prefer reiserfs personally. It's Reiser4 that isn't supported by the default 2.6 kernel yet. It is in the cko patchset and Andrew mortons pachset -mm. I would say unless you have some problems with it or just don't like it use reiserfs.

Speaking as a newbie, I can say that Slackware installed easily. It found my hardware. It set up as dual boot automatically, it was the only distro I've installed that asked if I wanted the Windows partition to be bootable, all the others assumed this. I definately would recommend Slack to any newbie that actually wants to learn about linux. Granted, you won't be up and productive right away, but that's the reason I'm dual booting.

I still have to get sound and modem working, then I can check everything else out. But this past weekend I went dual boot and so far it's great.

F_M

Hi everyone, I apologize for the urgent nature of my last message, I was just frustrated, but I found that my HDs were merely hde and hdg because they were on a secondary IDE (the PCI card).

Now I have stuff working, X Windows is up (using KDE for now), I have to investigate getting on the internet and making my sound work... but I'll search first before posting a question

My continued thanks for being so helpful

alsaconf

Thanks Namaseit... I should have thought of that...

Thats fine. If everybody knew everything to start with life would be alot more boring.

hello zaerlyn
True. Slack is one of the very good distros with minimal fuss.

I have a 'small' Pentium - I 200 machine, and struggled to install Debian 3.1. (I got sound to work using OSS I think). I installed alsa packages and lost the sound. Mandrake 10.1 was impossible to install.

You are much better off with Slackware Linux. Or you can give FreeBSD a try too.

For internet connection using dialup: remember internal modems are not supported. You'll have to use an external modem. Actually internal modems do work, but getting them to work is a PITA. Better to change your linux distro to something like SimplyMEPIS.

Keep posting...

bye

I don't understand, it's just not working... it was working fine yesterday. I did some research and tried some things, but to no avail. Here goes:

What seemed to work yesterday was "modprobe CDCEther". I loaded that module and BAM I was on the Internet.

Today, I boot up and no internet connection. When I type "ifconfig", I find that my eth0 has no IP address. My ethernet card is a Linksys LNE100TX v5.1. I could find almost no information on the Internet about this card, which suggests that almost nobody is having trouble with it, and this makes me guess that it's something small that I'm not noticing. I run netconfig and all it does is ask me for my hostname and domain name, and since I don't own a domain name (it seems to think that every Slackware user in the free world owns one) I supply it with "host" and "domain". It absolutely refuses to let me leave them blank. Oh, netconfig also asks if I use DHCP, which I assume is true because I have cable internet.

Further research revealed to me the fact that my card uses the tulip.o module, so I've also done "modprobe tulip".

I've looked at my resolv.conf file, and all it says is "search domain", another reference to this thing's obsession with my nonexistent domain name. I want to add a nameserver line to the resolv.conf file, but I can't find the IP address of a nameserver. I suspect though, that the nameserver is not the issue because it was working yesterday without any modifications to the resolv.conf file.

I'm fresh out of ideas

Oh, it may also be relevant that I'm on an SMC router. It's my grandpa's router, but looking at the markings on the front of the thing, I'm guessing it's called "Barricade", and this may be it's model number: SMC7004VWBR

After loading the module, configure using netconfig (put anything at hostname and domainname). When asked for DHCP just hit enter it will use it.
It's likely that your router assings you a IP using DHCP, if not, you've to use a static IP (I assume it doesn't because you never assigned one and it worked).
netconfig and DHCP will populate your resolv.conf file with the correct values.

FreeBSD runs really light. I think that it is alot more of a pain to get going compared to Linux. But, I have not put in nearly the time with FreeBSD that I have with Linux.

I tried what you suggested gbonvehi:

I rebooted my machine by issuing "telinit 6"

When it finished booting, I ran issued "telinit 1"

After that finished, I ran "lsmod", it indicated that neither CDCEther nor tulip were loaded, so I issued "modprobe CDCEther" and it said something to the effect that three new drivers were registered... darn, but I forgot what the drivers were, I'm fairly sure that they were CDCEther, usb, and tulip.

I tried to ping www.linuxquestions.org and got "unknown host". I suspected that the problem was that switching to runlevel 1 kills all daemons, so I went to runlevel 3 and I am now online.

I'm going to reboot and do it again, just to be sure.

Now, I'd like to ask if you guys think going to runlevel 1 is smart. I just assumed that you always bring the system down to 1 to do any kind of configuring, maintaining, sort of stuff.

Thanks again guys, looking over my post I noticed the terminology I'm suddenly using. It seems I'm learning Linux a heck of a lot faster than I learned Windhose, but then again, I started using DOS and Windhose as a kid. The point I'm making is that I've come a long way in the past few days, and I guess I'm not such a newbie anymore... for which I have mostly you guys to thank.

You have my thanks.

P.S. Any resources you could recommend about sound and multimedia in Slack would be greatly appreciated. alsaconf worked, kinda. My sound works, but the only program it works consistently in is GAIM. I also cannot play movie files with Kaboodle and the other one... I forget it's name. I have some form of SoundBlaster card... I'll try to find out it's model name/number.

Nice to hear that it worked and you're getting knowledge, I think that's the most important point of Linux, you start seeing stuff that other OS try to hide.
Now that you know which module you need add
to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules so it's loaded on boot before network starts so the network configuration is applied after your card is recognized.

Going to runlevel 1 is usually necessary when updating critical stuff, there's usually no need to do it.
Also, to shutdown, you can use the shutdown command

I would suggest you to search about multimedia stuff and then come with the questions, it's not difficult to get them working right. You may also want to start a new thread, this has become wide open in q&a