Slackware

[Tsurusennin]

First, a whine.

I've tried to install Mandrake. couldn't find my mouse. FreeBSD crashed early in the install, in the same spot each time. Only RedHat installed.

Now I want to look at Slack. I downloaded, checked md5, burned to CD, and rebooted. Selected media, selected target partition, selected a full install, and then told it to go ahead and install.

It waits for two seconds, and boom - says I'm done.

Would be great if it was true, no?

I already have both RH9 and Winxp. Is that a problem?

[scott_R]

No, you could have twenty OS's on your system if you wanted. Try the documentation, or startup program to see if there are alternate ways to install. (I.e., textmode.) Also, make sure PnP is turned off in your bios. (PnP is for old, old computers, like 486's and pentium I's and II's.)

[Tsurusennin]

I can't find anything about alternative installation methods.

PnP? Plug and play? Why would I disable that, unless I don't really need anything to work properly?

[Tsurusennin]

You know, this is the last chance Linux gets. If I can't install slack, I'll go back to Windows. Installing and using an operating system shouuldn't be harder than learning a programming language.

[gleather]

Installing and using an operating system properly and to its fullest potential will be as difficult as learning a programming language. Playing video games, which is the only thing I've ever been able to do with Windows, shouldn't be as hard.

[Tireseas]

Hello
You don't provide too much in the way of info, so giving help is like venturing into a dark alleyway - not quite sure of what'ss been going down here!!

Anyway: I have recently installed Slack 8.1 on a Mitac clone laptop and aside from some difficulties initially with getting X configured, the only outstanding difficulty to resolve is to get my printer working. This laptop has - in its short life-time - already hosted Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0 (as well as WinXP which came as a birth defect and was surgically removed once the machine was brought home ... poor thing). All have been reasonably pain free installs, altho' Slack did take more hacking than the other 2. You realise, I presume, that you are attempting to install a distro that (altho' the propaganda tells you it is also for n00bs) really seems geared toward those who have had some measure of *Nix experience under their belts. For example: as mentioned, this installation required that I play around with the XConfig file (which required lots of web-research), as well as changing some of the config files for services and setting up a basic rough and dirty firewall script. Now if only I could figure out the printer ... and I guess also OpenOffice. Anyway - please provide some more details as to what you are attempting to do, what you have done, and what is going wrong - then maybe we can offer some constructive input.

Bottom line: don't give up yet!!