Slackware's installation is a bit more simplistic than that of most other Linux distributions, and is very reminiscent of installing one of the varieties of BSD operating systems. If you're familiar with those, you should feel right at home. If you've never installed Slackware or used a distribution that makes use of a non-graphical installer, you may feel a bit overwhelmed at first. Don't panic! The installation is very easy once you understand it, and it works on just about any x86 platform. The latest versions of Slackware Linux are distributed on DVD or CD media, but Slackware can be installed in a variety of other ways. We're only going to focus on the most common method - booting from a DVD - in this book. If you don't have a CD or DVD drive, you might wish to take a look at the various README files inside the usb-and-pxe-installers directory at your favorite Slackware mirror. This directory includes the necessary files and instructions for booting the Slackware installer from a USB flash drive or from a network card that support PXE. The files there are the best source of information available for such boot methods.

Booting the installer is simply a process of inserting the Slackware install disk into your CD or DVD drive and rebooting. You may have to enter your computer's BIOS and alter the boot order to place the optical drive at a higher boot priority than your hard drives. Some computers allow you to change the boot order on the fly by pressing a specific function key during system boot-up. Since every computer is different, we can't offer instructions on how to do this, but the method is simple on nearly all machines. Once your computer boots from the CD you'll be taken to a screen that allows you to enter any special kernel parameters. This is here primarily to allow you to use the installer as a sort of rescue disk. Some systems may need special kernel parameters in order to boot, but these are very rare exceptions to the norm. Most users can simply press enter to let the kernel boot. Welcome to Slackware version 13.37 (Linux kernel 2.6.37.6)! If you need to pass extra parameters to the kernel, enter them at the prompt below after the name of the kernel to boot (huge.s etc). In a pinch, you can boot your system from here with a command like: boot: huge.s root=/dev/sda1 rdinit= ro In the example above, /dev/sda1 is the / Linux partition. This prompt is just for entering extra parameters. If you don't need to enter any parameters, hit ENTER to boot the default kernel "huge.s" or press [F2] for a listing of more kernel choices. You should see a lot of text go flying across your screen. Don't be alarmed, this is all perfectly normal. The text you see is generated by the kernel during boot-up as it discovers your hardware and prepares to load the operating system (in this case, the installer). You can later read these messages with the dmesg(1) command if you're interested. Often these messages are very important for troubleshooting any hardware problems you may have. Once the kernel has completed its hardware discovery, the messages should stop and you'll be given an option to load support for non-us keyboards. <OPTION TO LOAD SUPPORT FOR NON-US KEYBOARD> If you are not using a US keyboard, you may not load a different keyboard map. To select a different keyboard map, please enter 1 now. To continue using the US map, just hit enter. Enter 1 to select a keyboard map: _ Entering 1 and pressing ENTER will give you a list of keyboard mappings. Simply select the mapping that matches your keyboard type and continue on. Welcome to the Slackware Linux installation disk! (version 13.37) ###### IMPORTANT! READ THE INFORMATION BELOW CAREFULLY. ###### - You will need one or more partitions of type 'Linux' prepared. It is also recommended that you create a swap partition (type 'Linux swap') prior to installation. For more information, run 'setup' and read the help file. - If you're having problems that you think might be related to low memory, you can try activating a swap partition before you run setup. After making a swap partition (type 82) with cfdisk or fdisk, activate it like this: mkswap /dev/<partition> ; swapon /dev/<partition> - Once you have prepared the disk partitions for Linux, type 'setup' to begin the installation process. - If you do not have a color monitor, type: TERM=vt100 before you start 'setup'. You may now login as 'root'. slackware login: root Unlike other Linux distributions which boot you directly into a dedicated installer program, Slackware's installer gives you a limited Linux distribution contained in your system's RAM from the word go. This limited distribution is then used to run all the installation programs manually, or can be used in emergencies to fix a broken system that fails to boot. Now that you're logged in as root (there is no password within the installer) it's time to start setting up your disks. At this point, you may setup software RAID or LVM support if you wish, but those topics are outside of the scope of this book. I encourage you to refer to the excellent README_RAID.TXT and README_LVM.TXT files on your CD if you desire to setup your system with these advanced tools. Most users won't have any need to do so and should proceed directly to partitioning.

Unlike many other Linux distributions, Slackware does not make use of a graphical disk partitioning tool in its installer; rather, Slackware makes use of fdisk(8) and cfdisk(8), both of which are console tools. cfdisk is a curses-based partitioning tool while fdisk is not. Which one you decide to use should only rarely matter. In this book, we'll only discuss fdisk. In order to partition your hard drive, you'll first need to know how to identify it. In Linux, all hardware is identified by a special file called a device file. These are all (typically) located in the /dev directory. Hard drives, both the older IDE (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA) disks are identified as SCSI devices by the kernel, and as such, they'll be assigned a device node such as /dev/sda. If you don't know which device node is assigned to your hard drive, fdisk can help you find out. root@slackware:/# fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 72.7 GB, 72725037056 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8841 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Here, you can see that my system has a hard drive located at /dev/sda that is 72.7 GB in size. You can also see some additional information about this hard drive (in my case, this is actually three SCSI hard drives on a hardware RAID controller that makes them appear as a single drive). The -l argument to fdisk tells it to display the hard drives and all the partitions it finds on those drives, but it won't make any changes to the disks. In order to actually partition our drives, we'll have to tell fdisk the drive on which to operate. root@slackware:/# fdisk /dev/sda The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 8841. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): Now we've told fdisk what disk we wish to partition, and it has dropped us into command mode after printing an annoying warning message. The 1024 cylinder limit has not been a problem for quite some time, and Slackware's boot loader will have no trouble booting disks larger than this. Typing m and pressing ENTER will print out a helpful message telling you what to do with fdisk. Command (m for help): m Command action a toggle a bootable flag b edit bsd disklabel c toggle the dos compatibility flag d delete a partition l list known partition types m print this menu n add a new partition o create a new empty DOS partition table p print the partition table q quit without saving changes s create a new empty Sun disklabel t change a partition's system id u change display/entry units v verify the partition table w write table to disk and exit x extra functionality (experts only) Now that we know what commands will do what, it's time to begin partitioning our drive. At a minimum, you will need a single / partition, and you should also create a swap partition. You might also want to make a separate /home partition for storing user files (this will make it easier to upgrade later or to install a different Linux operating system by keeping all of your users' files on a separate partition). Therefore, let's go ahead and make three partitions. The command to create a new partition is n (which you noticed when you read the help). Command: (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-8841, default 1): 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-8841, default 8841): +8G Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 2 First cylinder (975-8841, default 975): 975 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (975-8841, default 8841): +1G Here we have created two partitions. The first is 8GB in size, and the second is only 1GB. We can view our existing partitions with the p command. Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 72.7 GB, 72725037056 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8841 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 974 7823623+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 975 1097 987997+ 83 Linux Both of these partitions are of type "83" which is the standard Linux filesystem. We will need to change /dev/sda2 to type "82" in order to make this a swap partition. We will do this with the t argument to fdisk. Command (m for help): t Partition number (1-4): 2 Hex code (type L to list codes): 82 Command (me for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 72.7 GB, 72725037056 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8841 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 974 7823623+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 975 1097 987997+ 82 Linux swap The swap partition is a special partition that is used for virtual memory by the Linux kernel. If for some reason you run out of RAM, the kernel will move the contents of some of the RAM to swap in order to prevent a crash. The size of your swap partition is up to you. A great many people have participated in a great many flamewars on the size of swap partitions, but a good rule of thumb is to make your swap partition about twice the size of your system's RAM. Since my machine has only 512MB of RAM, I decided to make my swap partition 1GB. You may wish to experiment with your swap partition's size and see what works best for you, but generally there is no harm in having "too much" swap. That being said, there's generally no good reason to follow this "rule of thumb" if you have a *lot* of RAM (e.g. more than 2 GB). If you plan to use hibernation (suspend to disk), you will need to have at least as much swap space as you have physical memory (RAM), so keep that in mind. At this point we can stop, write these changes to the disk, and continue on, but I'm going to go ahead and make a third partition which will be mounted at /home. Command: (me for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 3 First cylinder (1098-8841, default 1098): 1098 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1098-8841, default 8841): 8841 Now it's time to finish up and write these changes to disk. Command: (me for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. Syncing disks. root@slackware:/# At this point, we are done partitioning our disks and are ready to begin the setup program. However, if you have created any extended partitions, you may wish to reboot once to ensure that they are properly read by the kernel.