ok so given the success with the recent update of slackware current, i will update/finish the guide to get slackware installed on this tablet. you will need a usb otg cable, a usb hub, and a usb keyboard, and a couple of usb flash drives. a quirk of the hub i have is that the keyboard has to be in the last plug in order to be seen by the linux system. don't know why, that is just how it is.
I am sure some of you may read this and have a better way to do certain parts of this, feel free to correct my mistakes, i am far from a guru, just a user trying to use a cool piece of hardware.
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/sl...4-current-iso/ has iso images for slackware64-current. i then mount the image with the command mount -o loop slackware64-current-install-dvd.iso /mnt/dvd
from here i just used thunar to select all and copy the files to a brand new straight out of the package flash drive. since it is a vfat file system, it complains about the filesystem not supporting symlinks, do i want to skip? yes to all gets the job done. I never looked into what the symlinks were because i never had a problem that i could attribute to them. there is probably a better way to do it but i do not know what that is. dd will copy everything over, but it will be a read only file system and we need to add a couple files to the drive before we use it to install. this would be a good time to dl and copy a file to the flash drive that will be needed to enable wifi.
https://raw.github.com/jfwells/linux...241b4-sdio.txt. once the system is installed it will be copied to /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt and in theory, wifi should work.
bootia32.efi is the next step, it is available as a dl from links in the first post of this thread, but those are made for ubuntu and look for the grub.cfg in /boot/grub. slackware already has the grub.cfg in /EFI/boot so we need to follow the directions here
https://github.com/jfwells/linux-asu...ee/master/boot
and make one that works with slack. it is really as simple as follow the instructions up to the last step, then in the last command given you just need to change -p /boot/grub to -p /EFI/boot and after it compiles you should have a bootia32.efi file that can be dropped into the /EFI/boot folder of the flash drive created earlier. as long as you are using a recent version of slackware64 current then it should get you all the way through setup with no errors. i am assuming that you know how slackware setup goes, and what choices to make. if keeping windows then you should have done everything possible to shrink the c drive as small as it will let you. installing to an sd card is an option. it will be seen as mmcblk1 and you can partition it just as you would an internal drive.
unfortunately, getting through setup without errors does not mean getting through without problems. the elilo installation script will not run so no boot loader is installed and the boot stick you may have made will not boot because it does not have bootia32.efi
i attached the .config files i most recently used to build linux kernel 4.5.0-rc3 i will not claim it is perfect, but it is one that i have been using since the 3.18 or so kernels and keep moving it along to the newer version and make oldconfig with my best guesses as to what new things to include, if in doubt i usually chose m, so i am fairly sure it is making things that are not needed, but not an awful lot.
our next step is to get a working boot loader. i guess this step will be different whether or not you decided to dual boot windows or deleted it. either way, we need to get our bootia32.efi file, grub.cfg, a bzImage and an initrd.gz on to the 100mb efi system partition. in theory we should be able to get away with just bootia32.efi and a vmlinuz, but for whatever reason, it doesnt work and the kernel hangs because it cannot find init or cannot mount root
so now we are at a chicken or egg scenario. we cannot boot the system without an initrd.gz and we need to boot the system to make it. if you have another pc that can make a kernel and initrd then it can be done much simpler, the best way to do it,(that i can think of) is to use a usb flash drive on the other pc, with an ext4 file system and compile the kernel there. it may seem strange to compile on a flash drive, but by making the kernel and initrd on a different pc the modules will still need to be installed to the tablet. once the tablet boots with the kernel and initrd about to be made, you can mount the flash drive, cd to the kernel source directory, and make modules_install, reboot and be happy. once the bzImage and initrd are made, copy them to the root of the setup flash drive made earlier and boot off it, instead of running setup though we will fix up the efi partition.
the way i have done it is after fake root login, instead of running setup make a couple directories.
mkdir /efi
mkdir /sda
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /efi
mount /dev/sda1 /sda
cp /sda/EFI/boot/bootia32.efi /efi/EFI/Boot/
cp /sda/EFI/boot/grub.cfg /efi/EFI/Boot/
now since i have left windows8.1 on the tablet, i decided to mkdir /efi/EFI/slack and put the slackware specific boot files, bzImage-4.5-rc3 and initrd-4.5-rc3.gz there. if you erased windows then you should delete the /efi/EFI/Microsoft folder. if you did not erase windows then the ms bootloader still is in charge. there are probably better ways to do it, but i simply renamed the bootmgr.efi file in /efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot to something else.
now we really just need to edit the grub.cfg file to point to the correct kernel and initrd file. mine looks like this
set default="0"
set timeout="3"
set hidden_timeout_quiet=false
menuentry "slacktab "{
echo "loading..... knock on wood"
linux /EFI/slack/bzImage-4.5-rc3 root=/dev/mmcblk0p5 video=VGA-1:800x1280Me
initrd /EFI/slack/initrd-4.5-rc3.gz
}
the mmcblk0p5 is the linux ext4 partition because windows is on partitions 2-4, not sure what is in partitions 2 and 3 but the main c drive is partition 4. you may have deleted windows and set things up differently.
as far as i can tell, there is no reason that the efi partition steps could not be done before package installation.
after installation, fixing the efi partition and finally booting the system and logging in you will find that you have no modules loaded and you cannot start x, the first things to do are.
put the /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43241b4-sdio.txt file in place, and then you can either make an initrd.gz for the installed 4.4.1 slackware kernel and copy it to the efi partition with the huge kernel, or mount the ext4 flash drive with the 4.5-rc source, cd to the folder and make modules_install. when you reboot you should have lots of modules loaded and be able to startx and have working wifi.
from here i would go and get sbopkg, then use it to dl, build, and install xvkbd so that we can use it to login to the system. once that is completed edit the file /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0 and add the line exec /usr/bin/xvkbd -geometry 800x200+0+1080 -nokeypad &
to the bottom of the file. after that edit the inittab to have the system boot to runlevel 4. the system will look for kdm before xdm so we need to get rid of kdm, i simply renamed it to kdm.old. i couldn't get xvkbd to show up with kdm, maybe you know the trick?
after all that you should be able to boot up the system and have the xdm login screen come up with the xvkbd virtual keyboard at the bottom of the screen, logging in you should have wifi available. unfortunately audio, and bluetooth are things i have yet to get working. maybe you can figure them out.
all right, so it is really not that great of a guide, but it should get you a working slackware64 installation. when time permits i should probably make a nice boot image that will take many of the tedious steps out of this process and clean up the guide a little bit.
good luck
