Slack 11 boots up -- some first impressions

[Paul King]

It turns out that my BIOS wasn't set up to boot from DVD (I changed a lot of 
stuff when I added a HD and upgraded my power supply). 

Here now are my first impressions after booting once with Slack 11.

This time, it would seem that in order to install slackware, I have to log in 
as root, and manually mount my filesystem under a virtual /mnt directory. 
Otherwise, pkgtool won't work. But you see, in order to install stuff, I would 
have to also manually format the install partitions (there being apparently no 
install script to streamline this process for me). To be fair, I only booted 
once with the DVD, and I could have missed something, but I don't recall being 
given any other choice other than logging on as root.

Once logged in as root, there is no escape. "logout" doesn't work, and 
Control+D doesn't log out (I just get another prompt). I do a "ps ax" to find 
out what shell I am running. It reports "sh". It also reports two init 
processes. Hmph. I powered down manually, but I may have missed a "reboot" 
command and didn't try CTRL+ALT+DEL. 

Slackware was one of the first Linux distros I've tried, back in '95 (when it 
was part of a TransAmeritech distro). I do not recall it being this difficult 
to use, even going by 1995 standards.

Paul King

On 8 Mar 2007 at 6:15, Paul King wrote:

> Hello, all
> 
> Looks like I found some clues. From the README file in the /isolinux subdir of 
> the DVD, I likely need to issue an extra command to make it bootable:
> 
> mkisofs -o /tmp/slackware-dvd.iso \
>   -R -J -A "Slackware Install" \
>   -hide-rr-moved \
>   -v -d -N \
>   -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 32 -boot-info-table \
>   -sort isolinux/iso.sort \
>   -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
>   -c isolinux/isolinux.boot \
>   -V "SlackDVD" .
> 
> Leave it to Slackware to add that extra wrinkle :-)
> 
> Paul King
> 
> On 7 Mar 2007 at 22:35, Paul King wrote:
> 
> > On 7 Mar 2007 at 17:49, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > 
> > > On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 09:23:52PM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> > > > I downloaded a DVD ISO (bittorrent) of Slack 11, and I can't seem to boot from 
> > > > it. Anyone else have the same problem?
> > > 
> > > How did you burn it?
> > > 
> > 
> > LG DVD Burner using Nero ("create DVD from ISO image" option).
> > 
> > Paul King
> > 
> > > --
> > > Len Sorensen
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