Slackware installation and VPS
 

Okay, I was just wondering if this was possible.

I have a VPS that doesn't offer Slackware. Is there any way to convert the current distribution that's installed to Slackware or could anybody point me in the right direction please?

Sorry for the newb question...

Usually the point of a VPS is you do not have sufficient access to replace the Operating System. You certainly cannot do an in-place upgrade to another OS.

I personally use co-location for hosting as it allows me to be the owner and maintainer of my entire system.

If you cannot afford co-location as a solution and still want a Slackware VPS service then:

http://www.google.com/search?q=slackware+vps

Copy Slackware-13.37/isolinux/initrd.img and Slackware-13.37/kernels/huge.s/bzImage to your VPS's /boot directory.
Add them to the boot manager and reboot into the Slackware install environment.

Make sure you have a way to access the packages in the Slackware directory tree (by either copying them to the vps beforehand or using a network install) and somewhere to install them to (such as as a second virtual disk configured on your VPS) and Bob's your Alien.

I thought about that but I wasn't quite sure if it would work, I've never heard of anybody doing that before. I've worked with the bare minimum install for one of the slackware templates(which didn't even have wget) and pretty much all you had to work with was bash and I was able to get a full system from just that. As long as I get the network working.. I'll let you know how it turns out then post...

EDIT: So yeah, I researched it some more and wanted to try it, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was pretty much impossible on OpenVZ, yeah I'm a fool, sorry for wasting anybodies' time.

Okay, so I took your advice and used initrd and bzImage and everything worked like a charm. Of course, I went and got a KVM vps, and since the company only offered CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu, I thought I'd give it a try. And it worked, and now I have Slackware on my vps. Thank you.

Well shut my mouth(!)