Installing Slackware is not difficult - Surprise!

I was pleasantly surprised when I installed Slackware 9.1 on my new computer. I first added a partition to my drive, but you get the chance to do that with the installation. Here are my notes:

1. Insert Disk 1 (there were 4 in the package I got from cheapbytes) and reboot computer. You get a prompt after the boot and are now root. At this point you can run fdisk or cfdisk to partition the drive if you need to. After the partitioning is done, type setup and the install begins.
2. There is a list of things to be done set before you:

• Keyboard - Accept default or select another.
• Swap - it found my swap partition and I said “yes” to accept it. I imagine that if there was no swap already in place, there would be a request for you to choose a partition for that.
• Select the root partition - All the linux partitions are listed. Choose the one you plan to use. It will then ask if you want another. I did not, because I am using just one big / partition and knew that later I would add in my /home and /boot partitions from a previous install of Linux.
• Format the partition - I selected ext2 (ext3 and Reiserfs were also offered) and 4096 (you can choose other block sizes)
• Select other partitions - no I didn’t, but you can and you may want to be sure not to format them if they have data. I am a little paranoid and choose to add them in later rather than to risk formatting /home.
• FAT partitions found - it found the FAT32 partition that I have in place in order to share with Windows XP. I chose to include that in fstab and decided to user /win for the mountpoint.
• Install - choices here - I chose to install from the cdrom - seemed logical!
• Two choices - auto or something that meant to work hard - I picked auto.
• There was a list of types of things to install - I unselected EMacs by using the space bar when that part was highlighted. I also did not take the International KDE offering. I selected everything else - I was told that was about 2Gb - Then I hit OK or whatever it said to let it start. It went for a while showing me what was being installed and then asked for the second cd. I put it in and hit Enter and then it continued.
• Create Bootdisk - I put in a new floppy and said “yes”
• It asked where my modem was - I selected no link, but you could select a variety of /dev/ttyS or USB offerings. This seems to make the link /dev/modem going to where you want it.
• Enable hotplug - yes, please do that.
• Run lilo.conf setup - now this was very nice. It gives an expert offering where you can select where (including /dev/fd0, my personal favorite) and what - taking you through your many Linux installed partitions. I did this expert thing and chose only Slackware and Windows (XP is on /dev/hda1) I put in another floppy for this and it wrote LILO to the floppy just like I wanted it.
• Mouse - I took PS2 and asked for gpm.
• Config network - hostname, domain, Static IP, nameserver of my ISP
• Start up Services - I took the default which I think was inetd, sendmail, sshd. I went back later to get samba, but found out the easy way to select/deselect these things later.
• Custom screen fonts - No
• Time - Said No to UTC - I like local time
• Choose my window manager - Highlighted xinitrc.gnome and hit space bar to select it.
• Select root password - type it in twice
• Remove cd. Reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Del. It reboots - the lilo-floppy is in the drive. It does a filesytem check saying that it was uncleanly unmounted - that is what should happen.

Doesn’t sound hard, does it? How about configuration?