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January 31, 2008

Howto: Install Slackware 12

This howto is partly to remind myself if ever I need to re-install Slackware 12 again, but it's also provided here in the hopes that it may be useful. It doesn't go into detail in areas covered else-where but instead is more a checklist.

  1. Get the disks, the Slackware home site provides information on where you can download or purchase the disks.
  2. Backup all your data. (So you've still got it when you install Slackware)
  3. Edit the partition table for your hard disk, one way to do this is to boot the Slackware CD and use fdisk (or cfdisk). My current partition setup (yours will probably be at least slightly different): 
    bash-3.1# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1            1         742     5960083+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4          743        9729    72188077+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5          743        1107     2931831   83  Linux
/dev/hda6         1108        1715     4883728+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7         1716        2080     2931831   83  Linux
/dev/hda8         2081        9631    60653376   83  Linux
/dev/hda9         9632        9729      787153+  82  Linux swap
    These partitions are used as follows:
    • /dev/hda1 is an ~6GB partition for the root directory, /.
    • /dev/hda4 is an extended partition, ie real or primary partition that holds the logical partitions.
    • /dev/hda5 is intended to hold a vanilla install of Slackware for testing SlackBuilds.
    • /dev/hda6 is for testing other distros.
    • /dev/hda7 holds the temporary directory, /tmp.
    • /dev/hda8 holds the users' home directories, /home.
    • And finally, /dev/hda9 is the swap partition.
  4. Boot the Slackware CD and run setup, then follow the prompts to install Slackware 12. I install everything but KDE and Emacs. If your using the CDs you will need to change to the second (and maybe the third) part way through. Once the setup program has finished installing all the packages it will ask you to configure the system. The setup program will guide you through this process, but if you need any help you may want to print out the Slackware-HOWTO from disk one for reference.
  5. Once you've finished the install reboot into your fresh Slackware install, and use the adduser command to add a user for yourself.
  6. Go check the Slackware Security Advisories for any security updates and install any you find, you can either use lynx to do this now or wait until you have setup X so you can use a graphical web browser (e.g. Firefox), but definitely don't forget to do it.
  7. Next you will probably want to modify /etc/fstab to suite the removable drives on your computer.
  8. Now you may want to install some more programs from the extras directory on CD 3, I like bash-completion, bittorrent, some more aspell-word-lists, and the newer, 0.7.1, version of Blackbox, but you could easy find some more you might be interested in.
  9. Install any extra drivers you need, I need the drivers from Brother for my printer/scanner. I'll do a write-up on setting up my printer/scanner over the next couple of weeks.
  10. Install any other software you would like, a good source of SlackBuilds is SlackBuilds.org. Some highlights of the packages available are MPlayer, Claws-Mail, Kazehakase* and OpenOffice.org, but there are plenty of others.
  11. Now you need to configure X, xorgconfig works reasonably well, but on my computer I still need to hand modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf, though no major changes are required (I had a little trouble with my video card).
  12. Now you should have a nice functional Slackware 12 desktop.

* See yesterday's write-up on installing Kazehakase

Posted by Timothy Pollard in on January 31, 2008
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