My notes about installing Slackware -current

Some things I wanted out as a quick reference; more will be added here soon I guess:

When presented with the kernel selection (either the huge or the generic kernel) you will see the warning about choosing the generic kernel.
You need to create an initrd before exiting the install and rebooting or else your new Slackware installation will panic on boot because the generic kernel lacks drivers for ext3 and reiser (and other) filesystems. This is what you do when deciding to use the generic kernel (you should wait with this until after you reached the end of the Slackware installation but before rebooting):

• Open a second terminal by pressing Alt+F2 and pressing Enter
• Chroot into your new installation:

  chroot /mnt
  mount -t proc proc /proc

• Create an intitial RAM disk (initrd) that contains the filesystem drivers that the generic kernel needs to be able to mount your root filesystem - in this example there is an ext3 filesystem on the root partition:

  cd /boot
  mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.18.8-smp -m jbd:ext3 -r ext3

  You may want to read the README.initrd present in the /boot directory if you did not select ext3 for your root filesystem.

• Make LILO aware of this initrd file by adding the following line to /etc/lilo.conf:

    initrd = /boot/initrd.gz

  The section for the kernel will now look somewhat like this (the disk device name /dev/hda1 and the label linux in my example may be different for you):

  # Linux bootable partition config begins
  image = /boot/vmlinuz
    root = /dev/hda1
    initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
    label = linux
    read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking

  Then run the lilo command:

  lilo

  All of this while being “chrooted”.

• now you can exit the chroot by typing exit and return to the Slackware installer by pressing Alt+F1
  Finish off the installation and reboot - your computer should boot straight into your new Slackware