I downloaded the latest version of SLackware 14 yesterday, last night put it onto a USB flash drive, and went to install Slackware. The USB boots, gives you all your choices, formats partitions, recognise fat drives (the usb itself), etc.

The problem starts when it wants to start installation, it asks for the path to the packages. They are on the USB with everythign else but it doesn't recognise it even though I tell it to use /fat-d.

Is there a simple way to get the installer to use the packages on the usb that are with everything else or is it just easier to get a dvd-rw and install from that?

The previous post looks similar to yours. Perhaps something has changed recently in -current to cause the problem. But if not, you might want to check out this post where I used the wrong path....

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...urrent-942002/

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Thanks Tracy Tiger. So do I just need to sit down and work out the full path that Slackware will see even though I am booting from the device already anyway?

That would be my suggestion. It's worth a try anyway.

EDIT: Note that booting from a device does not necessarily mean that that device is mounted. Something to check.

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The Slackware installer boots into an intrd, not a system that is directly available on the USB device. You have to manually mount the device and give the correct path to the installer. For example, if you have copied the complete Slackware tree for a 64 bit installation to a partition mounted as /fat-d then the correct path should be /fat-d/slackware64.

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Thanks Tracy Tiger.

/fat-d is the usb flash drive so by what you are saying I just need to add /slackware64 (yes I am using 64bit). Thank you, I'll give that a go.

You need to create a new directory and mount the usb on the newly created directory. The path will be through the new directory. Do not use /mnt, that is what the installer uses.

I have it installed, I copied the tree over to what was to become the /home directory and pointed the path to that.

It has been a while since I installed using a USB stick and I'm at work right now so cannot carefully check things, but I seem to recall that if you use Alien Bob's script:

http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackwa...usbimg2disk.sh

to create a full installation medium, one of the things it does when you boot from it is automatically mount the slackware tree. At the appropriate point in setup, when asked where the installer should look to find the slackware packages, if you chose ``a pre-mounted directory'', you will find the installation medium already mounted under something like ``/usb-install/slackware''. You might need to open another terminal using Alt-F2 and cd into it to get the path exactly right. The directory you give should be the one with the folders /a, /ap, d/, etc in it, so you might need to supply the directory as ``/usb-install/slackware/slackware64'' -- I'm not sure.

Let me know if this doesn't work and I'll check it at home later. Also check the README:

http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackwa...README_USB.TXT

and note that the script also prints very informative help messages.

I hope this helps.

Michael

I had forgotten about doing it that way. I have Mds(memory disorder syndrome) that seems to be getting worst every month.

I would have prefered not to do it that way but I wanted it installed so I could play with it and learn about it so I took the easy way out. Not wanting to start a flame war but it surprises me that such a well established distro doesn't install easily from a usb flash drive.

I am surprised myself about that, I never have done it that way, since I have a local mirror of the Slackware repositories, I always use the network as source for the packages.

I did that for Ubuntu and do it still, and always will, for Debian but I find usb installs quick and painless when working on other peoples machines at their homes etc. Anyway I'm just trying it out to see if it is a viable working alternative for me.