I've decided to take the plunge and move my Pi's over to Slackware-ARM. I've used Slack on my x86/64 machines for many years and I don't like Debian (after giving it an honest try for a few years).
I've downloaded the ARM installer image (from -current), but everything I see says to just flash my card with the image (something like xzcat bcm2711_rpi4.sdimg_latest.img.xz > /dev/sdd)
I already have established partitions on my SD card from my Raspbian install that I don't want to lose if I don't have to, and I assume the above command will overwrite those partitions.
So instead, I deleted the contents of my 'boot' partition (/dev/sdd1 in this case), and deleted what I didn't need to keep from my 'root' partition (/dev/sdd2) on my SD card.
I then extracted and locally mounted the ARM installer image and
copied the contents of each partition on the installer image to my SD card for the appropriate partitions.
When I booted the Pi (RPi3), it showed the Slackware logo in the corner and tried to find the network. It gives me some notices which seems to suggest failure, before looking on the network for various files.
These notices include things like:
Code:
- libfdt fdt_check_header(): FDT_ERR_BADMAGIC
- Scanning disk mmc@7e300000.blk...
Disk mmc@7e300000.blk not ready
- Missing RNG device for EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL
- No EFI system partition
- BootOrder not defined
- EFI boot manager: Cannot load any image
- *** Warning: no boot file name; using 'C0A8001.img'
...then it seems to try and download files from 192.168.0.1, which obv don't exist, and it continues trying until it brings me to a U-boot prompt, which I have no experience with (thus far).
I'll note that I do *not* have an additional USB drive with the Slackware installation media inserted. I'm actually hoping to figure out how to install via the network, but it seems I need to figure out how to get the installer running first. The documentation seems to suggest that I need to get to a point where I can login as root before I can do that.
Am I missing something? Do I need to format sdd1 or sdd2 a certain way? I've tried looking online but can't make much of what I'm seeing out there. Figured I should ask here for some clarity
I'd appreciate some insight.
Thanks!