Installation notes for Slackware Linux 1.1.2. Note: If you are installing from a 5.25" boot drive, you will need to read the file "README_5_25_Install" as well as this one. First off all, you will need the installation disks. Slackware Linux 1.1.2 offers a new system that I recommend you use. The traditional tty-based installation disk is still availiable if the new one doesn't work for some reason. The traditional Slackware bootdisk is now called "tty144" and is found in bootdisk/1_44meg. It boots and loads inself into the ramdisk, allowing you to install from there. Sounds good - but the problem was that space was running out. Not only could I not fit any kind of editor on "tty144", but some of the keymaps were in serious danger of filling the disk upon decompression. The solution: A new installation disk containing a kernel, which is used to boot the second disk, a root disk. The root disk is like the old bootdisk, but it doesn't contain a kernel and must be booted with a boot kernel. It's like older distributions which used a boot/root system where the second drive was mounted in the floppy, but a small kernel patch was used to allow the second disk to be loaded into the ramdisk instead. This has at least these benefits: --- more space on the rootdisk than the "tty144" disk has. I was able to include 'elvis' on it now. --- You can use different bootkernels to boot the same root disk. The boot kernels can offer different driver support. For instance, the boot kernels that are being offered initially are: bareboot: IDE only. cd_boot: supports IDE, all supported SCSI devices, and Mitsumi, CDU31A, and Panasonic (Sound Blaster Pro) CD-ROMs. net_boot: To avoid possible driver collisions, this boot kernel has drivers for all supported network cards, but no SCSI or CD-ROM drivers. scsiboot: This is the fully packed kernel, with all SCSI and network drivers, but without CDU31A and Panasonic support. To make your bootkernel/rootdisk combination, you'll have to get a boot kernel and root disk from underneath /bootdisk. Use 'dd' or RAWWRITE.EXE to write them to floppies. NOTE: When using dd to create the boot kernel disk or root disk on Suns and possibly some other Unix workstations you must provide an appropriate block size. This probably wouldn't hurt on other systems, either. Here's an example: dd if=bootdisk of=/dev/(rdf0, rdf0c, fd0, or whatever) obs=18k NOTE: There is a script (/pub/linux/slackware/bootdisk/scripts/makeflop) that automates the process of making a set of floppies. You must have some or all of the distribution set up on the drive similar to the way you see it in /pub/linux/slackware. The script works on Suns and Linux machines. Thanks to David Niemi for sending this script to me just as I needed to crank out a set of disks. :^) [ NOTE: This script has some known bugs, and they're mostly my fault :^) I'll try to fix it completely(?) in the near future ] These are the disk sets that are available to install: A - Base Linux system AP - Various applications that do not need X D - Program Development (C, C++, Kernel source, Lisp, Perl, etc.) E - GNU Emacs (19.22, with and without X11 support. Your choice.) F - FAQ lists (last updated, December 12, 1993.) I - Info pages. IV - Interviews: libraries, include files, Doc and Idraw apps for X N - Networking (TCP/IP, UUCP, Mail) OI - ObjectBuilder for X OOP - Object Oriented Programming (GNU Smalltalk 1.1.1) Also includes the Smalltalk Interface to X11. T - TeX TCL - Tcl/Tk/TclX, Tcl language, and Tk toolkit for developing X apps More development packages to work with Tcl have also been added, as well as David Engel's Linux port with shared libraries. X - XFree-86 2.0 Base X Windows System XAP - X Windows Applications XD - XFree-86 2.0 X Windows program/server development system XV - XView 3.2 release 5. (OpenLook [virtual] Window Manager, apps) Y - Games (that do not require X) There is a rescue disk that contains an editor, lilo, several useful file system utilities, and man pages for all these things. This disk (rescue) and a compressed version of the same thing (rescue.gz) are written to a floppy with dd or rawrite.exe just like the bootdisk. It uses a cheap on-the-fly compression system to pack quite a few useful things onto a single disk. I think you'll find it useful. [NOTE: The rescue disk needs to be upgraded to the new libraries and utilities] SLS disk sets can be installed right along with Slackware ones, if you really think you want to. Now that Slackware is starting to conform to the recommendations of the File System Standard committee, most of the SLS sets probably will not work. Because TeX was requested, I've converted over the SLS TeX disks, making changes to the filesystem structure and fixing permissions. Although I'm not 'supporting' those disks, I do provide them in the /pub/linux/slackware/t? directories now. If time allows, I hope to do a complete re-porting of TeX sometime fairly soon. Offers of help will probably be accepted, since I don't know much about TeX yet. The OI ObjectBuilder disks are also now available. The bootdisk is no longer the first disk of set A -- instead it has been made a seperate item. I suppose the official name of this disk would be the "Slackware boot/install disk." Disk A1 is now an MS-DOS format disk containing packages like all the other A series disks. For each disk, make an MS-DOS format disk and copy the proper files to it. The "00index.txt" files are added by the FTP server. You don't need those. If you're using NFS or hard drive installation, just set up a directory with the disk subdirectories for the disk sets you want. You'll only have to make the boot floppy, in that case. Make sure you have a blank, formatted floppy ready to make your Linux boot disk at the end of the installation. [NOTE]: You may install most software packages by typing "setup" on a running system. If you reinstall the A series, or the Q series (which replaces your kernel), be sure to run LILO or make a new boot disk using the rescue disk. Also, if you reinstall some of the base packages you might need to reconfigure files in /etc or other places. Your packages are listed in /var/adm/packages. Any of these packages may be removed or reinstalled using "pkgtool". Enjoy! Patrick Volkerding volkerdi@ftp.cdrom.com volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu