Well, I decided to cheat... Just a little bit, though. Have a look http://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a2...inuxplx001.jpg

Im sure this will make your day... hehehe. I didn't really 'tear anything apart'... the side of the gateway has been off for a while now, and the compaq (bottom) computer had 3 screws and the hole thing slides out the back of the casing. Disconnected the cd rom from the gateway, ran the cable down to the compaq's cd rom... used a power splitter to reach the power connector. I will install using this cd rom drive, then I will hook the other one back up after installation is done.

I got slackware working on the gateway. Its very slow, however. Going to try it on my fast computer. I think its xfree86 for your info.

So, you have to install Slack by booting from a floppy and doing a network or disk installation. First thing is to boot the Slack installation:

http://www.slackbook.org/html/instal...LATION-METHODS

Later, in section 3.4.5 you can select a source for the installation material. If you cannot read the silly CD, you have to either set up a NFS server on another Linux box that can read the CD, or move the hard drive to another PC and download or copy to a partition on the drive. Yet another possibility is a directory that you mount during the Slack install. This could get you to a USB drive or a partition you set up manually and download to during the installation. You can execute commands manually during the installation to fiddle a download. see http://www.slackbook.org/html/installation-setup.html

You can download an image of the Slack bootdisk at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...otdisks/bare.i, the rootdisks at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...isks/install.1 and http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...isks/install.2

I will be on the road tomorrow and for a few days so I may not be able to help after today...

If the installation rootdisks happen not to include wget, you can download what you need for the installation, you can boot the rescue.dsk instead of install1 and 2. It has wget and allows you to download to a partition the installation materials to point the installer towards.

1. Partition leaving a couple of spare partitions for data
2. Download Slack into the partitions set aside
3. Install Slack pointing the installer to the partitions containing the Slack distro
   
   
   

I am not sure what you need to download, either the .iso or the distribution tree. Download the .iso to be sure. We can mount it with loopback if necessary to get the tree.

mount pathtoiso somedirectory -o loop,ro

Then somedirectory/slackware or just somedirectory will do the trick as a source for installation materials.

You can execute any necessary commands after the floppies boot and before you run the installation setup programme. Good luck.

Well, I did manage to get slack working on the gateway, however it was very slow. During KDE setup, I pulled the slider all the way down to slow computer and there was still a bit of lagg. Its only a 400Mhz CPU with a 66mhz FSB... LoL. I hooked the drive up to my other computer and it was very fast... I did reinstall just to be sure no configuration files were messed up and it worked on this computer using the startx command. I put the slider all the way up on this computer. I did not use a swapfile on this computer, I have 1GB ram and thought that would be sufficient. Now, the question is, would there be some way to get linux to speed up on the gateway?

Also, see the slackware forums for my thread on setting up video card // network. I tried finding the file you mentioned but I had some trouble finding it. I did manage to find another hd (out of a broken xbox). I'm going to hook it up and nuke it and put it in the gateway for now.

400 MHz is fine for a gateway but it is a drag on a GUI. If you have a second box that is faster running Linux, you could try to make an X connection to the second box.

On the faster machine edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and enable XDMCP and listen to TCP. Restart X on the fast machine. Then from your slow machine, instead of startx, use
X -query ipaddressoffasthost

The X server on your slow machine will ask the fast machine for an X session and you should get a login screen. Login and run the GUI on the fast machine. This is what LTSP does after booting the client over the net. When you have a hard drive on the slow machine, you can just connect this way.

X is not very secure, so it is suggested to use this method only on a private LAN, not on the web...

Im using a linksys befsx41 router with built in firewall. What you said would work except for the fact that I don't want to have 2 machines running linux. I want the gateway to run linux by itself. I want to use this computer with windows. I have all my games, applications, music, and personal files on this computer (windows).

Also note that I can't get the network to work on either machine. During network setup in the installation, it asked me for a domain but I'm not using one. I ran netconfig from konsole, put in a name for computer and put none for domain and selected dhcp, but its still not working. Is it something to do with the tty1 tty2 stuff ?

I kindof gave up on the gateway. I moved to the compaq from the pictures. Its a 566Mhz processor and has 192MB of ram. It only has a 10gig hard drive, however. I tried using the 40gig, but I don't think the bios supports that big and what is it, LBA? I think. I installed slackware on the compaq, it has an older network card in it and it works. The problem with it now is the video. I cant get any higher resolution than 640x480. Its onboard video.

Since the compaq has a cd drive that works, i might test out Kubuntu live.

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