Saturday, May 09, 2015

Installing Slackware 14.1

Awhile back, I bought a bunch of 500GB SATA drives so that I could experiment with Linux and RAID.  The plan was to use the drives as one gigantic drive.  The setup was somewhat easy to do, but I could never finish the configuration because I kept getting errors when trying to use lilo and grub, so I stopped.

Today, I picked up again, giving up on RAID and just using a conventional setup.  I'm trying to install Slackware 14.1, but for some reason, the machine won't boot up after installation.  I created a USB boot drive and for some weird reason, it's not readable, although I didn't get any errors when creating it.  I also opted to boot from the MBR, and initially had issues getting the system booted up, until I looked in the BIOS settings and saw that the system was trying to boot from one of the other unused disks.  Once I fixed that, it booted up without issue.  I still may try to recreate the USB boot disk, but I'll do that later.

So far I've done the standard things:  created a regular user (immediately), added the regular user to the wheel group and edited the sudoers file to accept root commands from the wheel group.  The system also has two NICs and when installing Slackware, the install used the motherboard's NIC and not the extra NIC I installed (this wasn't a huge issue, but had me wondering why I couldn't get an internet connection).

I'm currently using XFCE as a desktop environment.  I wanted to use KDE but for some reason, it's not working.  It's something to look into later.

I've been without Slackware for quite awhile (the last 4-5 years).  I'm also not so Slackware-savvy, but I'm so familiar with installing Slack that I had no issues getting it up and running.  I know that Slack has many new and enhanced features.  The challenge is to get familiar again.  I'll do this without relying on IRC (the days of IRCing are over for me).

I did apply some of the tips listed here, though.